Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, by Elizabeth Murray, covers a bunch of examples of wrongful conviction. Some of this is due to straightforward corruption, e.g., in New York where police officers had a financial relationship with the likely murderer (California also figures prominently among the corruption examples). More typically, however, the chain of erroneous conviction starts with a desire to solve a crime with as little effort as possible. The police and prosecutor therefore settle on an available suspect and ignore evidence that suggests innocence. In the cases that Professor Murray describes, it will be 10-20 years after the crime before a plainly wrong conviction is overturned. Most often this is due to DNA evidence because in fact the police, prosecutors, and judges involved never could admit error otherwise.

I’m wondering if this suggests a change to our procedures in prosecuting criminals. In Hawaii, the judge who hears motions in a divorce lawsuit cannot also hear the trial. The attorney that we interviewed said that this was partly to make the trial a real event, not simply the judge confirming previous decisions made after brief hearings.

Why not mix things up a little bit so that the people who work on the early phases of a criminal case are swapped out for detectives, prosecutors, and judges by the time of plea bargaining and trial? Then at least nobody involved in the actual conviction of a criminal has to swallow what is apparently the bitter pill of admitting “I was wrong.” There would be a little bit of extra spin-up time for the new team members to learn about the facts of the case, but it would be roughly the same workload of cases to detectives, prosecutors, and judges.

[Are there any risks for police, prosecutors, or judges who behave dishonestly? Professor Murray suggests that there are not. Across hundreds of cases that she reviewed she didn’t find any examples of police, prosecutors, or judges being criminally charged for wrongdoing. The wrongly convicted suffered, typically, 10+ years in prison. Taxpayers suffered by paying out millions of dollars per case in restitution, not to mention the costs of multiple legal proceedings. Citizens suffered by being victims of additional crimes (most wrongful convicts meant that the actual criminal was free for at least a period of years). But criminal justice system workers who broke rules in order to obtain wrongful convictions suffered at most the loss of a job (and that sanction was applied in a tiny percentage of cases).]

Related:

• “Should a Judge Rule on His Own Case?” (nytimes, February 29, 2016)

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I was at a Massachusetts business gathering recently and one of the criticisms leveled at Candidate Trump was that he wouldn’t lead the world out of the problems caused by CO2 emissions, i.e., “climate change.” Obama was a potential “leader” for the world to follow who met with this person’s approval, but he hadn’t been effective due to obstruction by Congress. Bernie Sanders was this Trumpophobe’s choice for President, partly due to the fact that he could be expected to become a leader in the climate change area.

Regardless of the merits of these various candidates and politicians, I’m wondering why anyone would expect the U.S. to be a leader in this area. If we consider atmospheric CO2 to be a technical problem that will require a technical solution, what is the basis for expecting the U.S. to lead? Suppose that a fully installed solar cell array cost one third as much as it does currently and produced twice as much electricity. That would be the end of demand for electricity from fossil fuel, right? (Wikipedia says that prices for cells have come down about 10 percent every year since 1980, so this is not an inconceivable scenario, though there is more in a solar array than just the cells.) But if China and Germany are the world leaders in solar cell production and also in producing electricity from solar cells, wouldn’t we expect leadership from China and Germany rather than from anyone in the U.S.?

Let’s look at our political leaders. Barack Obama has no technical education. King Bush II studied history at Yale. Bernie Sanders studied political science. Hillary Clinton studied also political science in college and then, like President Obama, went to law school. These people may have many virtues, but technical knowledge or a desire to acquire it, doesn’t seem to be one of them (see this chapter where a lawyer notes that “Judges went to law schools. They don’t want to be bothered learning new things.”).

What about other countries? Angela Merkel studied physics and then got a PhD in quantum chemistry. China’s Premier from 2003-2013 was Wen Jiabao, a geologist. Who is more likely to lead the world in a technical solution? The PhD in chemistry and the geologist or the lawyer with a briefcase?

We’ve got a lot of programmers so it seems plausible that we could lead the world in computer nerdism (we gave them Java, they should be grateful!). We’ve got a lot of farmland so we could certainly lead the world in large-scale agriculture (though perhaps not if water is a constraint). But where does the “we will lead the world in reversing climate change” assumption come from?

[In Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, lectures by Elizabeth Murray, I learned that most advances in forensic science or technology were accomplished in England, Germany, or Japan. The U.S. has a lot of crime, a lot of criminals, and a lot of prisoners, but we have been followers when it comes to analyzing blood, fingerprints, etc. It was a bit of a rude awakening, like I got a few years ago reading a book by a former U.S. Navy officer who explained that everything that makes a modern aircraft carrier work was invented by the British and initially rejected by the U.S. Navy. (angled deck, steam catapult for launching planes, ball with optical glideslope reference)]

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More precisely… why don’t I know any single men who could be fixed up with a well-educated woman in her late 30s? This seems to be a common situation among our friends. We know single women whom we believe would be wonderful companions and mothers, but none of the single men whom they are seeking as partners.

A friend in D.C. says “Single women nearing 40 have spent decades perfecting their adult selves. Men of the same age are still stuck in their teenage personality.”

What is the explanation for this phenomenon? Hillary Clinton and the New York Times keep reminding us how men have grabbed up all of the good stuff (education, high-paying jobs, prestigious positions, etc.) in the U.S., but finding an unpartnered adult male who is in possession of said good stuff seems to be impossible.

[Separately, I’m wondering if the large quantity of involuntarily single-and-childless women shows poor life-planning strategies. These women have advanced education, great job skills, and good careers compared to the American average. Yet they say that they are sad about not having children and also that their primary reason for working is to earn money. Evaluating against those stated objectives, we must observe that their after-tax income is in nearly every case lower than if they’d had sex with a dermatologist or dentist in Massachusetts and collected child support. (Most of these women want two children, which, if properly planned, could easily offer a tax-free cash yield of $200,000/year via child support (multiply by 23 years in Massachusetts).) See this from the Practical Tips chapter:

In most states, the potential child support profits from a one-night encounter are roughly the same as the profits from a short-term marriage. … “Women who want to make money from the system aren’t getting married anymore,” said one lawyer. “The key is recognizing that it is a lot easier to rent a rich guy for one night, especially if he has had a few drinks, than it is to get a rich guy to agree to marriage.” Another disadvantage of marriage, from a plaintiff’s perspective, is that it prevents what attorneys call “forum shopping.” A plaintiff who is married in Texas is stuck with Texas law and $20,000 per year in child support for a single child. A plaintiff who isn’t married and who has a good understanding of the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) may be able to sue a Texas defendant under California, Massachusetts, New York, or Wisconsin law and collect millions of dollars.

From the point of view of having the children that they want prior to the exhaustion of their fertility and from the point of view of financial security, these women would have been better off spending their 18-22-year-old years having sex with married men rather than attending college. That’s not to suggest that 18-year-old child support profiteer is the optimum lifestyle for every American woman, but the fact that it would yield a better outcome measured against their own goals than what the women we know have accomplished suggests that they pursued a pretty bad life strategy. Is it the case that the vast majority of women who set out on the high-education, high-achievement path end up with a desirable (to them) partner and children? So we’re just seeing a handful of outliers and therefore the strategy actually has a good expected outcome but with some risk?]

Readers: Looking at the 35-45 age group, and restricting to people who have a college degree, above-median earnings, agreeable personality, and responsible habits, what’s the ratio of single women to single men?

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Related:

• article on Laura Wasser, a successful California divorce litigator, that ends by explaining that Wasser herself has chosen to have children out of wedlock with multiple fathers and says “I don’t want to get married. I don’t like the idea of entering into that contract.” (Note that a successful divorce litigator in a high-stakes winner-take-all (all = house, kids, cash) jurisdiction such as California or Massachusetts can expect to earn over $1 million per year.)

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One lecture in Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, by Elizabeth Murray, concerns spies. I learned that FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied on behalf of the Soviets, then Russians, for about $1.4 million. Professor Murray noted that the Russian who stole a file that the FBI was able to use to identify Hanssen needed to be paid $7 million. This is confirmed by the Wikipedia article on Hanssen:

Having failed to either bring a case against Kelley or find another suspect, the FBI decided on a new tactic: buying the mole’s identity. They searched for possible candidates to buy off and found one – a Russian businessman and former KGB agent whose identity remains classified. A cooperative American company invited him to the U.S. for a business meeting. After his arrival in New York, the FBI offered him a large sum of money if he would divulge the name of the mole. The Russian responded that he did not know the name, but that he could get the mole’s KGB/SVR file. After the Russian stole the file from SVR headquarters, the FBI agreed to pay US$7 million for the file and set up the Russian and his family with new identities in the U.S. In November 2000, the FBI finally obtained the file, consisting of a package the size of “a medium-sized suitcase.”

So it seems that it costs 5X more to buy a Russian’s loyalty than it does to buy an American’s, at least in this case.

[I mentioned this lecture to a pilot at our local airport. He said “The FBI should hire only women because if they wanted an extra $1.4 million they would just have an extra baby.” Would that work? If we assume USDA-estimated child-rearing expenses of about $200,000, that would require collecting $1.6 million in child support (tax-free, but presumably Robert Hanssen didn’t pay tax on the cash and diamonds he received). In Massachusetts, that works out to $69,565 per year for 23 years. Assuming a judge who extrapolates from the top of the guidelines, this could be done by having sex with a man earning approximately $500,000 per year. Hanssen, however, lived in Virginia. Under Virginia family law, a woman would need to have sex with a man earning over $2 million per year to collect $69,565 per year in child support and, given that child support in Virginia is paid for only 18 years, would need to find a yet-richer sex partner to come up to a $1.4 million net profit.]

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“Why Therapists Should Talk Politics” is a NYT article by “a psychotherapist with a private practice in Manhattan”:

When people can’t live up to the increasingly taxing demands of the economy, they often blame themselves and then struggle to live with the guilt. … When an economic system or government is responsible for personal harm, those affected can feel profoundly helpless, and cover that helplessness with self-criticism. Today, if you can’t become what the market wants, it can feel as if you are flawed and have no recourse except to be depressed.

Too often, when the world is messed up for political reasons, therapists are silent. Instead, the therapist should acknowledge that fact, be supportive of the patient, and discuss the problem. It is inherently therapeutic to help a person understand the injustice of his predicament, reflect on the question of his own agency, and take whatever action he sees fit.

This page says that he charges $200 per session. Thus the victims of economic injustice that he deals with are living in Manhattan and have enough surplus cash to pay $200 for a 50-minute talk therapy session on a regular basis. I would have thought that these folks are the beneficiaries of economic injustice because the average American can neither afford to live in Manhattan nor see a $200/session therapist.

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Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi contains the Jihadist’s view of the Western asylum/refugee/immigration system.

Mr. Slahi managed to emigrate from Mauritania to Germany and live there for a decade, except for trips to Afghanistan to wage jihad. He then “followed a college friend’s recommendation and applied for landed immigrant status in Canada, and in November 1999 he moved to Montreal.”

How was Canada?

I didn’t like this life in Canada, I couldn’t enjoy my freedom and being watched is not very good. I hated Canada and I said the work is very hard here. I took off on Friday, 21 January 2000; I took a flight from Montreal to Brussels, then to Dakar.

[He had been watched due to his association with acquaintances of Ahmed Ressam. Instead of deporting suspected terrorists who aren’t citizens, Canada, like the U.S., invests tax dollars in surveillance to see what they will do next.]

During the stop in Brussels, Mr. Slahi ponders what it would be like to be Belgian:

The [Brussels] airport was small, neat, and clean, with restaurants, duty-free shops, phone booths, Internet PCs, a mosque, a church, a synagogue, and a psych consulting bureau for atheists. I checked out all the God’s houses, and was impressed. I thought, This country could be a place I’d want to live. Why don’t I just go and ask for asylum? I’d have no problem; I speak the language and have adequate qualifications to get a job in the heart of Europe. I had actually been in Brussels, and I liked the multicultural life and the multiple faces of the city.

Maybe Cyprus will be a good location? (during a fuel stop on the way to a Jordanian prison/interrogation center)

I am lucky because I’m breaking the law by transiting through a country without a transit visa, and I’ll be arrested and put in jail. In the prison, I’ll apply for asylum and stay in this paradise. The Jordanians can’t say anything because they are guilty of trying to smuggle me. The longer the plane waits, the better my chances are to be arrested.

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Not interesting: Kesha is suing a record company to get out of a contract signed when she was unknown.

Interesting: the “why I should win this contract dispute” argument features the kind of abuse allegations that are conventional in American’s divorce litigation system (see “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track” and the litigation chapter for an overview; see the Colorado chapter for example attorneys’ perspective on how commonly the abuse angle is worked). This Hollywood Reporter article gives some of the details of what a court is supposed to try to untangle.

Family law seemed like a bit of an outlier in American litigation. According to the older attorneys we interviewed, the pre-no-fault system featured lurid evidence regarding adultery and, now that most of the cash goes with winning custody of children, lurid testimony regarding child abuse has become standard in the no-fault age. But I’m wondering if, now that women are more commonly parties to contract, this is the future of contract law disputes as well. The dull-as-paint-drying discussions about legal fine print will be overshadowed by testimony about what happened in a dark bedroom.

According to this 2015 Billboard article, California law has recently been changed in this area:

If the two had contracted with each other more recently rather than a decade ago when Kesha was 18, the result might have been different. Kesha’s attorneys told the California judge that the state laws on sexual harassment and gender violence have been amended to include anti-waiver provisions, meaning that no contract can foreclose a grievance under the statutes, but Scheper responds that the provisions only apply to agreements made after January 1 of this year.

Fortune magazine covers the case more comprehensively but leaves out an analysis of the extent to which Kesha would profit financially from being free to sell her future recordings to the highest bidder.

Readers: What do you think? So far it doesn’t seem to have won the day for Kesha, but will this angle be used by more women involved in contract disputes?

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A minority of Americans are passionate about our country having world-class K-12 schools. Yet imposing Finnish-style academic standards for teachers to get to the performance levels described in Smartest Kids in the World is a non-starter politically. Our revealed preference is that the first and most important function of a public school system is a welfare system for employees.

I’m wondering if there isn’t a way to satisfy both sides of the debate, thereby enabling the next generation of children to grow up with a “Finnish-grade” education. What if we fully embrace the the concept that public schools are first and foremost a welfare system for employees? Tell teachers and administrators that if they don’t feel that they are doing a great job and/or aren’t engaged by their job, they can simply go home and still collect the same paycheck and pension. Kind of like New York City’s rubber room system except that the real estate and maintenance cost will be lower (since teachers will be at home instead of in a school-provided room).

At that point there can be a clean slate for hiring new teachers and, if so desired, we can be like Finland and require high academic achievement for those going into public school teaching. (The “stay home and get paid for the next 50 years” deal wouldn’t extend to new-hires.)

Won’t it be expensive to pay both at-home teachers and in-school teachers? Yes, but maybe not as bad as it looks. The teachers who stay home to be paid will be more senior and, due to the seniority-based payscale, their paychecks correspondingly much larger than anyone newly hired. Money currently being spent on administrative and legal efforts to fire bad teachers will be saved due to the fact that, for those teachers regarded as “bad” who haven’t already gone home, a school system can just ask them to switch over to the stay-at-home status.

Readers: What do you think? It sounds a little crazy to pay teachers not to work, but isn’t it even crazier to pay teachers to come in and impair our children’s future prospects through incompetence?

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A Facebook friend who lives in Cambridge posted a link to a story about Iowa considering changing its laws to allow children to shoot pistols under parental supervision (the change). This yielded a rich harvest of comments from Massachusetts Facebookers:

• Just reinforcing the following… IOWA – Idiots Out Wandering Around!!! And I thought “Floriduh” was the #1 state for stupidity!
• UnFUCKINGly deranged.
• Facebook missed out on the WTF emoticon for things like this
• Horrifying. I am getting so I just don’t want to know what shit this country can come up with next. We are ceaselessly horrifying. It’s depressing.
• Can t believe this is possible!
• Another side effect of Trumpification of America
• Unbelievable!
• They have truly gone insane.
• Omg! What the Hell is going on with this country!

I’m not a gun owner so I don’t have an informed opinion regarding the law. What was interesting to me is the psychology behind the discussion. It turns out that if the change were adopted in Iowa, the result would be the same as the prevailing law in Massachusetts and most other states, i.e., that children can shoot pistols when with their parents. All of these folks were so eager to feel superior to Iowans that they didn’t bother to check the status of the law in their own state.

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Elizabeth Holmes managed to convince investors in Theranos that being young and attractive was worth more than Siemens’s drawers full of experienced German chemistry PhDs. New Yorker has an article on a vaguely similar situation in Japan:

The revolutionary behind the work was Haruko Obokata, a thirty-year-old postdoctoral researcher who was the first author on both papers. With the publications, Obokata—a stylish, self-possessed beauty, uncommonly adept at maneuvering in the mostly male world of Japanese science—was hailed as a maverick. “A brilliant new star has emerged in the science world,” an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun read. “This is a major discovery that could rewrite science textbooks.” As an outsider—young, female, and not an established stem-cell biologist—Obokata, the newspapers argued, was unhindered by conventional notions of what cells can and cannot do. Her fresh perspective, coupled with dogged work and natural genius, had conspired to create one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.

… The papers created an international sensation, and in Japan Obokata became a celebrity—an icon of the country’s future preëminence in the sciences, and of the new Japanese woman. …

… Five months after publication, both STAP papers were retracted, under intense scrutiny and growing doubt about their validity.

The article notes that scientific papers should be approached with skepticism:

Reproducibility has been an essential step in the scientific process since the Enlightenment, and it is currently the subject of a great deal of angst in American science. In 2012, a former research director at the pharmaceutical company Amgen reported that he and his colleagues had attempted to reproduce the findings of fifty-three prominent papers. Only six panned out—a validation rate of eleven per cent.

But the author fails to reference the classic 2005 work “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” by John P. A. Ioannidis (not young and attractive enough for the Wikipedia contributors to have added a photo to his page).

As with most American writing about science (contrast to British), the explanations are confusing and little attempt is made to communicate scientific concepts. Nonetheless it is an interesting article.

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