> Good. Better criminals abuse the system than the system abuse people.

That's a trope. In reality, the justice system is about striking a balance between the need to preserve order and security and the need to protect peoples' rights. That's why the Constitution uses "balance-y" words like "reasonable" when talking about 4th amendment rights.

> I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but most people the police catch are "clearly guilty." Even my PD friends acknowledge that most of their clients are "clearly guilty" (they see their jobs as more watching out for the ones that aren't and making sure the ones that are get at least a proportionate punishment). The media likes to cover edge cases, but for every one of those, there are a dozens of people who rob a liquor store and leave video evidence of themselves doing it.

It is interesting to note that even most of the cases that are central to defining 4th amendment rights, ones where judges have come down in favor of the defendant, are nonetheless ones where the defendant did actually commit the crime he was accused of committing. Ernesto Miranda was convicted the second time around, for rape, even with his confession excluded, served time, and was ultimately killed in a bar fight.

Except that we are talking about 5th amendment rights, which are not about striking a balance. The 5th amendment does not use compromise words, it is very clear:

"No person shall be...compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."

Nothing in there about being "reasonable" or about being "clearly guilty." The 5th amendment makes exactly one exception, which applies only to the military, only during a time of war or danger to the public, and has nothing to do with self-incriminating.

First, I'm not talking about this case specifically, but rather responding to the top level poster's general comment about peoples' rights being protected.

Second, even in the absence of wiggle words, there is the issue of how broadly to interpret the protection. Read literally, the text only prohibits "compelling" a person "to be a witness against himself" (i.e. a compelled confession admissible into evidence). Extending the protection more broadly than that is an act of judicial balancing.

Why do your PD friends care so much about protecting the rights of their "clearly guilty" clients? It's because protecting the guilty's rights ensures the innocent's rights are protected too.

The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities. As you've illustrated with Miranda, even with the improperly-obtained evidence suppressed, he was still convicted. The government doesn't need to violate people's rights to keep criminals off the streets. And perhaps there would be fewer of those pesky appeals if the state did things right the first time.

Of course most 4th amendment decisions concern guilty people - the remedy for 4th amendment violations is suppression, so you never hear about the innocent people who are harassed by police with illegal searches - no evidence is found so there's no case with evidence to suppress! (Civil action is an uphill battle even for those who are able to bring it.)

> Why do your PD friends care so much about protecting the rights of their "clearly guilty" clients? It's because protecting the guilty's rights ensures the innocent's rights are protected too.

It's not a matter of protecting the rights of guilty people or not, but determining how much to protect them. Every procedural protection has a cost. If a procedural protection might be invoked by a person who has a 10% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's worth the cost. If it's more likely to be invoked by a person who has a 1% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's not. Looking only at media reports gives you a distorted picture of what those probabilities are.

> The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities.

I didn't say they were getting off on technicalities. I said they were trying to get off on technicalities.

"Better to let a 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to jail" makes for good rhetoric, but even such flowery language implies a point at which its better to let 1 innocent man go to jail than let a certain number of guilty men go free.

I guess the problem is there's no such a thing as a person having "a 10% chance of being innocent" Either he is or he is not. He might have certain probability of being declared guilty (which is entirely different), but I don't think there's a way to estimate that.

BTW 99% is a very low accuracy. If we accepted that for aircraft, 13 would crash weekly.

what a dangerous precedent you are setting, PD friends acting as judge and jury.

Laws change, and there are often subtleties to a law that make rash statements made by some PD friend with likely no more than a GED about "clear guilt" absurd. Even the simplest of laws aren't clear when looked at in detail.

This is why we have advocates with specific knowledge in these areas, and why judges hear briefs explaining the nuances of law, as it applies to a case. There just is no such thing as "clearly guilty"

> what a dangerous precedent you are setting, PD friends acting as judge and jury.

Nobody is acting as judge and jury. PD's are charged with zealously representing their clients just like any other lawyer, and the ones I know are extremely committed to their jobs (many turned down six figure jobs in private practice to work for state government salaries and defend poor people). They fight hard for their clients, even the "clearly guilty" ones. But that doesn't mean they're not allowed to make observations about the nature of the world.

> Laws change, and there are often subtleties to a law

We're not talking about subtleties here. We're talking about people who rob a liquor store, have people see them do it, have video evidence of them doing it... That's the bread and butter of the criminal justice system.

When you see edge cases in the news and rant about how broken the system is for not taking even more measures to protect the innocent, remember that the vast majority of people who go through the justice system really did do the crimes they're accused of committing, and that factual state of affairs influences how the system is structured. If a lot more of the people who come up before judges each day were innocent in fact, the system would be structured differently.

"PD friend with likely no more than a GED"

PD here means "public defender": a lawyer. Did you perhaps think it meant "police dept"?

He clearly did think that.

> I'm sorry to break it to you, but most people the police catch are "clearly guilty.

I'm sorry to break it to you, no they aren't; and I was a cop. Most cops don't give a rats ass if you're guilty or not, only if they get a bust, they're chasing numbers generally handed down unofficially through their supervisors and they have targets to hit. They care only that can bust you, not that they should or not and quite often ignore anything that might prevent them from getting a bust.

All cops; no, but a majority in my experience. I became a programmer because I couldn't stand being around them or socializing with them because they really are mostly dumb fucking pigs who don't give a shit about your rights.