[fortran77]

I suspect at least half the people exonerated by the Innocence Project are in fact guilty. However, I think that sloppy police work should never be rewarded with a guilty verdict, even if it's likely the defendant is guilty.

[plank_time]

I have a friend who works for ICE. She has literally deported assassins for the Mexican cartels. She said the hardest part of her job is that cities like San Francisco give millions of dollars to activist lawyers to help keep these criminals in the US. The activist lawyers and even SF know that these are real criminals but they don’t care. That money could be going to help the cases of real illegal immigrants who are making life better in the US but it’s instead going to defend these criminals. She says it’s really disheartening that they don’t care, they are blinded by trying to beat ICE.

[jacobolus]

The ICE of the past few years is one of the cruelest and most out-of-control institutions in the USA which has regularly operated like a fascist secret police agency. Maybe your friend should try to exert some internal pressure to cut back on the institutional depravity, lawbreaking, coverups, and stream of lies, so that ICE can fix its ruined reputation and start building a bit of trust and support from the society.

[mikeyouse]

Yeah that damn due process. Always getting in the way of extrajudicial punishment.

[zo1]

Yeah, and that damn visa application process! Always getting in the way of crossing the border.

[pjc50]

If one of these "assassins" has an actual conviction in the US before they were deported, I'm sure you can name one and find some proof of this, otherwise it's just accusing people without evidence. ICE have no right to declare someone an assassin.

[spoonjim]

Yes, that’s the difference between an assassin and an “assassin.” With no conviction, a guy could be Mr. Rogers on paper — still doesn’t change the fact that he’s killed 20 people.

[pjc50]

Yes, but how do you know that? And why should we believe it?

We're literally in a thread about wrongful conviction. Evidence. It matters.

[vagrantJin]

Thats certainly in the realm of possibility but the evidence of that needs to be clear. Accusations like that are one step removed from complete paranoia.

[spoonjim]

Well the evidence would have to be clear to deport a single person. But a general trend could be enough justification to shut down immigration from certain countries. That is not a personal punishment like a deportation, so it does not need conclusive proof (which of course doesn’t exist, there is no country which sends exclusively or predominantly bad immigrants to the US).

[TheCoelacanth]

The only difference between an "assassin" and the actual Mr. Rogers is the word of the gestapo-lite thugs in ICE.

[DubiousPusher]

> cities like San Francisco give millions of dollars to activist lawyers to help keep these criminals in the US.

This is HN. Please provide evidence of such a claim.

> The activist lawyers and even SF know that these are real criminals but they don’t care.

This is highly speculative. What possible motivation could they have for this?

[spoonjim]

The people know the difference between Filipina nurses and MS-13 gangbangers, and if there is no constitutional policy that distinguishes them, they’ll crack down on all immigration. If there’s no politically correct way to advocate for this, they will use anonymous forums: Reddit and the voting booth.

[29athrowaway]

If you want to work anywhere as a nurse, the first things they will ask you are:

- To fill USCIS Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification.

- To provide a valid nursing license.

USCIS Form I-9 is also required by most jobs. So the remaining jobs that are targeted by undocumented people are informal jobs in agriculture, construction, landscaping, food processing, etc.

From the international news I've seen from El Salvador, it is my impression that Mara Salvatrucha/MS-13 gang members are easy to identify since they use MS-13 tatoos.

[CaptainZapp]

Not that she would be biased in any way, shape or form. Right?

[open0]

Legalize drugs.

[booleandilemma]

Why do cities like San Francisco want to keep assassins in the US?

[kmeisthax]

They don't.

What they do want is for immigrants to not fear deportation, so they want to make a stand that they'll fight immigration enforcement every step of the way. Hence why they'll get involved with these kinds of lawsuits. Even if ICE purely deported only people who committed crimes other than illegal entry or overstaying a visa; you'd still have plenty of immigrants afraid of all law enforcement. Yes, even the legal ones; nobody wants to have to show their papers on pain of having their life uprooted, even if they have those papers.

I don't know exactly what lawsuits SF is filing, but I'm going to assume the actual legal argumentation is less "let the assassains go free" and more "assassains should serve time in American prisons rather than being deported to Mexico where they'll likely escape and reoffend".

[haram_masala]

If someone is legally in the US, why would they fear having their life uprooted by having to show their papers?

[lostcolony]

Given that ICE has deported US citizens before, pretty sure it's a reasonable concern for immigrants to be concerned about ICE agents.

[zo1]

My opinionated and probably-biased answer to your question:

1. Due to their being no real central database, it's hard for physical persons in the US to prove their identity and consequently their citizenship status.

2. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US.

3. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US that have lived here for a long time so the "legality" of their status is muddied. This then makes the whole debate around this more about "what is right" and the emotions involved, instead of what the laws say.

[cygx]

Allegedly, in the timespan 2003 to 2010, the US detained (in some cases for months) or even deported over 20k US citizen:

https://jacquelinestevens.org/US-Unlawfully-Detaining.Steven...

[maccard]

Not in the US but the UK. [0] a large group of people who moved here legally between 50 and 70 years ago have been deported, detained and refused legal rights. This does happen.

[0] https://www.jcwi.org.uk/windrush-scandal-explained

[kmeisthax]

If someone is honestly paying their taxes, why would they fear having their finances uprooted by being audited by the IRS?

[sjburt]

There's no "papers" in the US. You're not required to have a birth certificate or a Social Security card or a drivers license or a passport. There's no list of who is and isn't a citizen.

[lazyasciiart]

Perhaps ICE should focus their resources on these criminals instead of attempting to deport every person who ever crossed the border. Has she ever considered that this change might even be within their own power?

[plank_time]

They don’t. That’s the problem. All you read about is the propaganda. My friend genuinely cares about making sure that there is justice but the media paints her like she’s some immigrant-hating Trump MAGA warrior. She has worked under Obama and Trump, and her job hasn’t changed.

[lazyasciiart]

No, I read first hand experiences. Your friend can be whatever she wants, but if she is trying to argue that ICE doesn't pursue non-criminals, she is untrustworthy.

[hervature]

Technically, crossing the border is a crime. You should clarify you mean violent criminals.

[mikeyouse]

Most "illegal immigrants" are here on visa overstays, which is decidedly non-criminal. So you should refrain from correcting people about things you yourself aren't fully versed in.

Source for most: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecu...

More context: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/24/politics/undocumented-immigra...

[akiselev]

No, it's not a crime - it's a civil offense by deliberate design. If it were a crime, it'd have to be judged in a criminal court with juries and a whole lot of inconvenient rights instead of the farce that is immigration courts.

[29athrowaway]

And some of the people being brutally punished by ICE and CBP do not even know what a country border is, because they don't know what a country is, because they're not even 1 year old.

Feel free to jump to pages 7, 8 and 9 of this report. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20190712/109772/HHRG...

[nwiswell]

So are at least half the people acquitted by juries. That's the whole point of the reasonable doubt standard. We believe as a society that it is far more intolerable to imprison innocents than to let the guilty occasionally escape justice.

[macintux]

> We believe as a society that it is far more intolerable to imprison innocents than to let the guilty occasionally escape justice.

That's quite debatable. Our founding fathers believed that, but today's justice and penal systems (and political system that buttresses them) do not reflect that belief.

[ddingus]

That may be more money than people speaking to some of those ideas.

While I agree with you on that core idea being debatable, I also see a lot more support for it than not. Clearly, my experiences are anecdotal, but they do come from a wide swath of the nation.

One of my tasty pleasures on business travel is to strike up some conversations with people. I have done it with all walks of life from homeless to rando joe and jane bag of doughnuts to people of serious means.

For profit prison is growing unpopular. I think it should. And that profit motive does drive a lot of policy aimed at keeping cells full, often justified in dubious ways.

One point in your favor is our trend toward aggressive punishment. People want to see the big, sexy verdicts and game over sentencing and often equate that to a greater measure of their own safety and security.

There is also very low support for better answers to what people do when they have paid, are out again and unable to build a life for ongoing punishment as an ex con. Fewer than I would prefer to see equate that to a lesser measure of security and safety in their lives.

All that said, I am definitely on the err on the side of guilt, meaning some guilty people are not convicted.

I am also on the side of corrections. The goal should be for people to pay their debt to society for wrong doing, AND while paying it, arrive at some plan, skills, resources to try again where it makes sense.

Not doing those things means releasing people who are extremely likely to fail and our results reflect that reality. Sadly, very large numbers of people respond to those facts with even more aggressive sentences, often openly saying we just do not need those people.

Rough topic, IMHO. There is work to do here. Not sure the will exists to do it.

[jmcgough]

They don't have a lot of resources so they only take on cases that are clear injustices.

Usually this means that there's good evidence that the person is actually innocent and the trial was completely botched. There are plenty of rural areas where the court decides that someone "seems" guilty and then suppresses any evidence that doesn't support that.

[ALittleLight]

I disagree with this. The police aren't made any better off by getting a guilty verdict. They take their salaries home either way. As it should be.

Society benefits when the guilty are in prison and suffers when they go free. If a person is guilty and the police made a mistake, we should correct the mistake the police made, including by firing people responsible or pressing criminal charges if appropriate, but malpractice by the police should not exonerate a guilty person.

[curryst]

> If a person is guilty and the police made a mistake, we should correct the mistake the police made, including by firing people responsible or pressing criminal charges if appropriate, but malpractice by the police should not exonerate a guilty person.

The purpose of that is to disincentivize malpractice. That's why we have the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine for improperly obtained evidence. There's no point in illegally breaking into someone's house to get evidence because that evidence is inadmissable.

The alternative solution is to allow the evidence and prosecute the people who gathered it illegally. The problem there is that there's a clear conflict of interest: they were gathering that evidence for the prosecutor. The same prosecutor who will try to convict them for gathering that evidence. That prosecutor is incentivized to let them walk so they can keep getting illegal evidence. The second issue is that it's not always clear whether it's actually legal to gather some evidence in a particular way. We either have to prosecute negligence the same as malice, which seems unfair, or we leave a gaping loophole where we have to prove malice. All you have to do to get away with is shrug and go "I had no idea that it was illegal for me to just walk into the house if the door was already unlocked, and no, no one can verify the door was unlocked before I got there".

[mbg721]

I agree with your second sentence. By the time the Innocence Project gets a result, the moral standard of "letting a hundred guilty people go free to avoid convicting one innocent one" is far gone in any case.

[MomoXenosaga]

"Beyond a reasonable doubt"

The defendant doesn't have to prove his innocence the DA has to prove his guilt. I hope you never do jury duty.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

[peteretep]

Do you know what indict means?

[emmelaich]

It's a reference to this quote:

> New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler was famously quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities that "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich

[peteretep]

Yes, I'm well aware. Indictment is in no way being found guilty by a jury of your peers though and has wildly different standards of evidence.

[MertsA]

It's still a valid point, a prosecutor is the one presenting a case to a grand jury and has ample opportunity to tip the scales towards indictment or not. It's not like the accused have any similar opportunity to present their case to the grand jury, it's completely one-sided. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, but it's important to note that an indictment is not comparable to a case that's been tried in court.