[dragonwriter]

The Constitution restricts what government may do against individuals. Perhaps the agents that break the rules should be held individually accountable in more cases than they currently are (though, as with most cases of using law to provide accountability for executive agents, there are agency problems that make that unlikely to be effective in many important cases), but that should not be an excuse to void the purpose of the restrictions, which is to limit the power of government, not just its agents individually. The government cannot be allowed to benefit from the it's unconstitutional acts while certain agents are punished as scapegoats.

[fluidcruft]

Sometimes it's not only about the government. Sometimes victims of crime deserve justice, too.

[dragonwriter]

> Sometimes it's not only about the government. Sometimes victims of crime deserve justice, too.

When the power of the executive branch of government is being used as the means seek something, its always about the Constitutional limits on government. No matter what you feel you deserve, the Constitution is the deal by which the outer bounds of the scope of your privilege to have the coercive power of government deployed to get you what you deserve is limited.

Government shouldn't get to escape the Constitutional limits on its application of power against those subject to it because "think of the victims of crime", or "think of the children", or "think of..." whatever else.

Otherwise, we're tossing out the concept of limited government in favor of arbitrary power.

[fluidcruft]

You can view government as an imperfect tool that attempts to achieve the impossible goal of justice, or your can view government as the definition of justice.

It's a question of whether to judge an imperfect tool based on details of how its mechanism works or whether to judge it based on how well it performs the tasks we ask of it.

I'm just saying that within this focus on microtransactions above all else the overall goals are lost and the balance of penalties is wrong. When the government goofs, we let the criminal go and deny the victims justice. The purpose of the justice system is justice. The focus on these microtransactions elevates government as the definition of justice which seems much more expansive than the alternative, IMHO.

[dragonwriter]

> You can view government as an imperfect tool that attempts to achieve the goal of justice, or your can view government as the definition of justice.

You could also view "justice" in such a way that the claim that a victim of crime "deserves justices" is, to the extent that it is meaningful, completely inapplicable to the concept of criminal punishment.

> It's a question of whether to judge an imperfect tool based on its mechanism or whether to judge it based on how well it achieves the tasks we use it for.

No, even agreeing that government should be viewed as an imperfect tool for achieving justice, its a question of what "justice" means, and whether it can ever be consistent with violating the agreement by which persons are, under the guise of acting in the name of government, granted power over others.

Some would view such violations as, themselves, inherently and fundamentally unjust.

[fluidcruft]

In the situation where knowledge of guilt has been found by unjust means, how does ignoring that knowledge promote justice.

> Some would view such violations as, themselves, inherently and fundamentally unjust

Exactly. Which is why the government should be held accountable to the victims of that abuse, not accountable to itself.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>In the situation where knowledge of guilt has been found by unjust means, how does ignoring that knowledge promote justice.

By signalling to police that whatever sketchy things they did to obtain the knowledge won't be available to help them achieve their goal.

Example, police use defective probable cause to search a motorist's vehicle; and I don't just mean search, but really search, as in pull the carpets up, remove interior panels, remove all of the contents of the trunk, break down the tires and look inside; it is destructive. Although the car may be re-assembled, they never are returned to their pre-tossing state. The only thing preventing this from happening more often is the amount of labor involved in tearing the car up. Police (Feds sometimes do) don't have to pay for damaging someone's property when they do this. They don't even have to put it back together. Same goes for your home.

[dragonwriter]

> Which is why the government should be held accountable to the victims of that abuse

The exclusionary rule holds the government accountable to victims of abuse, by removing the value that the government sought to gain by the abuse and the expense of the victim (it is imperfect, of course, in that it fails where the abuse was targeted at some use other than criminal prosecution.)

Any mechanism that fails to prevent the government from getting what it seeks by the abuse fails to hold the government accountable to the victim of the abuse.

[cjslep]

> In the situation where knowledge of guilt has been found by unjust means, how does ignoring that knowledge promote justice.

Because not ignoring that knowledge enables the propagating of injustice. Fighting for justice is a futile effort if delivering justice also delivers one or more instances of injustice (it is a pyrrhic victory). This idea is the root of the biblical notion of "eye for an eye" (also part of a popular quote of Ghandi).

[Retric]

While I don't normally think in terms of slippery slope arguments, this would easily fall into such territory. After all how hard would it be to prosecute a cop whose illegal evidence goes a serial killer off the street? Give it a generation or two and we would end up with cops who only get convicted of the worst breaches, and effectively zero constitutional protection.

[BurningFrog]

If victimless crimes weren't so dominant in current US law, I would agree with that.

[facetube]

The best way for police to bring justice to victims of crime reliably is for them to obey the law during investigations, arrests, and trials.