Erm well… “cough cough.” I um… “ergh herm…” I can see how maybe I didn’t exactly, how would you say, nail it?
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Evidence of the old glazzies. Nothing up their sleeves. No magic, little
doctorow. A job for two, who are now of job age. The police.
Fookin’ amateurs
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I’m not sure if this is better or worse than living in a place where you know none of your cops have been arrested.
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I find it especially discouraging that even when cops get arrested for breaking the law, at least a third still break the law anyway.
Nah, arrests are done on a (strong) suspicion, the breaking-the-law part is decided later. I don’t have any figures (and I’m too lazy to look for statistics), but 1/3 conviction rate feels not too way off for countries with a working legal system.
Edit, a little bit later: I’m more bored than lazy and played with the Eurostat databases.
No data for the UK, I randomly chose France and the Netherlands.
Suspected person - May include persons suspected, arrested or cautioned for a criminal offence at the national level.
Prosecuted person - Alleged offenders against whom prosecution commenced in the reporting year. Persons may be prosecuted by the public prosecutor or the law enforcement agency responsible for prosecution, at the national level, irrespective of the case-ending decision.
Convicted person - Persons found guilty by any legal body authorized to pronounce a conviction under national criminal law, whether or not the conviction was later upheld. The total number of persons convicted should also include persons convicted of serious special law offences but exclude persons convicted of minor road traffic offences and other petty offences.
France Netherlands
Suspected (2013) 1106023 317745
Prosecuted (2013) 677247 203702
Prosecuted/suspected 61 % 64 %
Convicted (2013) 679863 83149
Convicted/suspected 61 % 26 %
Convicted/prosecuted 100 % 40 %The conviction rate of 1/3 for UK police officers seems to be fine when the Netherlands’ legal system is comparable and too low in contrast to France.
It would be interesting to see more figures, but I’m not that bored - I used the table “Persons in the criminal justice system”, the data browser is listed here.
Note to self: Never visit France, something’s fishy there. More convictions than prosecutions…
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Their legal system is utterly alien and probably shouldn’t be used for comparison. Did you know in France there is no presumption of innocence?!? (P.S. I actually think their legal system is better than ours)
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I couldn’t believe this. But a Google-translated version of the fr.WP article (présomption? haha!) partly confirms this. In dubio pro reo was included in the 1789 declaration of human rights and part of the preamble of the French constitution, but not until 2000(!) part of the criminal code.
This is as gross as fascinating, I’m open for suggestions (links, articles, …) to learn more about this.
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I have the dim recollection that the Napoleonic Code (I think?) is an inquisitorial system where the magistrate’s job is to find out the truth by making a thorough investigation rather than an adversarial one where each side’s lawyer takes an innocent or guilty slant on the facts. There being no sides as such, the assumption of innocence is supposedly a less important factor. I don’t know whether to believe it or not, though.
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They just have a totally different model. Instead of you being presumed innocent and then the state trying desperately with all its power to prove you are guilty, you are not presumed to be anything, and the state tries to figure out the truth of what happened. That’s about as much as I know about it, so google is as good a friend for finding out more as I am.
These days I’m inclined to think that the assumption of innocence is actually a bad thing. As I implied above, it leads to a system where the state builds a huge apparatus with tremendous money and power to try to prove you guilty, while you hope you get a public defender who has more than 7 minutes to look at your case before recommending you plead out. The prosecutor’s job is to find you guilty, and their incentive structures reflect that.
Of course most countries aren’t as gung ho on this as the US is, but I’m not sure a system that puts the individual in opposition to the state is ever really going to be fair to the individual.
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Ah, I see - imo this is a working principle for most of the continental European prosecutors (maybe caused by Napoleon and the introduction of the code civil (code Napolean for some years) in his empire).
The German Staatsanwaltschaft is not only prosecuting body (the punishing function) but also the investigative body (find out the truth). In reality the second function is often minimized…
A huge part is the incentives. Even in France I’m sure no one is having their career made by demonstrating that a bunch of accused people didn’t do the thing they were accused of.
Then again, I remember when Strauss-Khan was arrested in New York, many french people were angry because of the perp-walk photo. The country where you are presumed innocent is the country where there are salacious photos of your arrest and the country where you are not presumed innocent is the one where people are angry about that treatment. I don’t think anyone takes the idea of “presumed innocence” very seriously in America (aside from a few people shaking their fists at the sky).
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The stir and incomprehension about Strauss-Kahn’s media exposure was more related to the different tradition in Europe regarding personal rights. Another example is the extended suicide of Andreas Lubitz, it was widely discussed if his full name should be published at all.
I agree, I’m just saying it’s interesting to me that you can put the two countries side by side. In one you’ve got a ‘presumed innocent’ individual who has his face on the cover of the papers with the words “sexual assault” printed nearby. In the other you, where that person would have no presumption of innocence, there is an outcry about him being publicly humiliated. It seems to me that presumption of innocence, while a legal reality, doesn’t actually affect the hearts and minds of the public very much (except in the limited case of popular famous people being accused of sexual assault by large numbers of women, where presumption of innocence becomes very important to a certain segment of fans).
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I see your points and agree that prejudgement in the media in spite of the legal principle of presumption of innocence is prevalent. But this is true everywhere and is not exclusive to the US.
Strauss-Kahn is a special case and (as my own bias explained me) mostly fueled by the France-US antagonism. If you look at the French media this is not the default modus operandi, a well known example are the banlieue riots in 2005: The conservative media and then minister of interior Nicolas Sarkozy used it to blame foreigners (of the convicted over 90 % were French citizens).
The presumption of innocence is an important legal rule, and even if it was not part of the French criminal law until recently it was included in the preamble of the constitution.
Maybe the division line is not this specific piece of law but countries using case law/common law as foundation in contrast to legal systems more based on the Roman law?
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