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French Police Unsure Which Twin To Charge In Sexual Assaults
An anonymous reader writes "In a real life Prisoner's Dilemma taking place in the French city of Marseille, twin brothers have been arrested for a string of sexual assaults. While say they are sure that one of them committed the crimes (corroborated by a standard DNA test), police were told that it would cost upwards of €1m euros (£850,000, $1.3m USD) to distinguish between them using DNA evidence."
97% of rapists never spend a day in jail. We can talk about the theory of justice, but the practicality of it is that there is never 100% certainty in punishment. You might set a standard that for every 100 people charged, 60 guilty are convicted, 1 innocent is convicted, 30 guilty are set free, and 9 innocent are set free. Or perhaps the ratio is 30/0.5/60/9? There is no way to design it so that innocent people aren't wrongly convicted. Some reasonable amount of injustice has to be accepted otherwise you can never imprison the guilty. Right now it is extraordinarily difficult to convict rapists. And this contributes to a culture where rape is ignored and the victims are blamed. It contributes to a culture where women feel unsafe in their communities. Our rape culture is incredible repressive towards women. Sorry, but I think it is better for a couple of unfortunate innocents to be punished than for an entire section of our population to feel like prisoners. I would use the same argument during the times of Jim Crow (where 'reasonable doubt' allowed the murder of thousands of black men).
You've got the whole culture of prison rape thing, and you have the highest prison population of any country because your increasingly insane "War on Drugs" means that people get long prison sentences for possessing the kind of amounts of cannabis that the police in other countries (the UK included) wouldn't even bother confiscating (although here depending on how arsey the police officers involved are, they might make you throw it in a bin, and pretend not to notice if you fish it out once they've gone up the street a bit).
You may not have "communal stoning" in the sense that you actually throw rocks at people, but you do have a strong mob mentality and the drive to ruin people's lives over minor infractions. For example, there are people right now in America who are on the sex offender register because they were naked in their own back garden. These people are denied the right to vote, and denied most jobs, simply because *someone* decided to call the police because of something they were doing in private. I think that's pretty close.
Honour killings you *probably* don't have, but you do have a culture where people subscribe to this Roy Rogers fantasy where if they carry a gun and someone tries to mug them, they can just shoot the bad guy's gun right out of his hand and everything will be okay. Police officers who carry guns have to spend a hell of a lot of time on the range practicing, and they probably can't do that. What's the bets that these "guns make us safer" nutcases couldn't even hit their assailant, and end up injuring someone else - or worse?