正义之殇
最新书摘：
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Geo2024-04-13Good government is about honest democracy. It is about the will of the people, not the self-aggrandizement of politicians. Ultimately, it is about the social contract itself and what its terms should be.
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Geo2024-04-13Did Rubio get a free pass? Well, he didn’t get off scot-free; he helped permanently lock up an even worse guy; and that relatively light sentence—in the overall scheme of things—furthered an important incentive structure for cooperation generally. Our system has decided it wants murderers to flip on other murderers, and as in all things you don’t expect people to give something for nothing. It is transactional. It is utilitarian. It is also justice.
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Geo2024-04-13It is the human factor that makes every attempt to deliver justice uncertain.
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Geo2024-04-13My favorite question to ask often yielded the worst possible answer I could get; the question was, why do we do it this way? This may be an ignorant and basic question, but an even more ignorant and shameful answer was this: “We’ve always done it that way.” That is literally the only answer to any question that would actually make me angry. One might think it strange that I would be offended at this justification of tradition in the conservative task of law enforcement, but that answer is a barrier to innovation, a barrier to efficiency,and a potential barrier to justice.
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Geo2024-04-13It is okay not to know things, so long as you want to know things, care to know things, and when those are the things you actually need to know.
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Geo2024-04-13Self-doubt in moderation is animating and motivating, not paralyzing. Leaders who have purged themselves of all self-doubt will not be leaders for long and, in my view, are dangerous while in command. I learned, over time, that self-doubt is my friend, and arrogance my enemy.So back to my start as U.S. Attorney. I felt in some ways a deeper ignorance than I felt years before as a fledgling prosecutor. This phenomenon is surely familiar to every leader. The most expert CEO, college dean, or cabinet secretary who must head a large organization cannot possibly know and understand in a deep, granular way everything about every aspect of what that institution does and produces. It is an impossibility. In fact, I have come to believe that if you meet a leader who knows a super-impressive amount...
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Geo2024-04-13Second, once Josh did become schooled in securities laws, did become expert and seasoned as a senior member of the unit, guess how he conducted similar interview sessions on complex matters with potential trial witnesses? He found himself resorting to the same conceit—tell it to me like I’m your nine-year-old nephew. It was no longer a face-saving gambit. It was a smart method to get educated, a clever and even disarming way to put his witness at ease and in the frame of mind to speak simply and understandably.
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Geo2024-04-13This is what she said: “Even though these walls can restrict our physical movement, they cannot restrict our imagination nor our connection to the outside world.”This is what else she said: “One person can make a difference. Let that difference start with you.”
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Geo2024-04-13People will naturally focus on the crooked cop and the bungling constable. But there is arguably greater danger posed by the small imperfections of decent men and women who fail to maintain excellence, who drift from best practices, who forget to be utterly terrified of getting it wrong. Especially where many people are responsible for the work, accountability is spread as thin as morning frost.
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Geo2024-04-13That is worth repeating. An innocent man was accused and forever injured because of a failure to sufficiently reconsider. It was not the first error that wrought the injustice. First errors seldom do. It wasn’t the second or third error either. Rather, it was the continuing and lazy persistence in the first blunder—the mismatch of similar fingerprints by mistake but not with malice—followed by discoveries concerning Mayfield’s wife, work, and religion quickly accepted as corroboration instead of coincidence that greased a slow-motion miscarriage of justice through a fog of latent bias and stereotype.
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Geo2024-04-13But reconsideration is difficult, isn’t it? An opinion once formed is hard to abandon. A conclusion once broadcast is hard to withdraw. Witnesses, studies show, stick to their first identification, doctors to their first diagnosis, and lawyers to their first assessment of the merits of a case. But the open mind has to persist beyond the first call in decisions of law and order, of life and death. Every conclusion must be subject to challenge and revision. This is hard because human beings have egos. We are stubborn. That stubbornness can cause tremendous injustice, especially when the stakes are highest—when public safety is at risk.One of the most difficult—but most crucial—things to achieve, in the early stages of pursuing justice, is objectivity. Or as close as we can get to objectivity...
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Geo2024-04-13You want to make sure that you’re holding everyone accountable for crimes they have committed, but you don’t want to embarrass yourself and your office—especially on your tenth day in the job. As much as anybody wants to say that you’re not supposed to worry about what other people will think, it is a hard feeling to avoid altogether. If you think what you’re doing is right and others either don’t understand it or have a political or ideological agenda, then it’s much easier to tell them—in your mind—to go to hell.Having a spine means that you can’t be afraid to hesitate because you want to get it right, but it’s also wrong not to take any action because you are afraid of external consequences. The key is to make sure that prudent hesitation does not turn into paralysis and that responsibl...
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Geo2024-04-13When people talk about bias, it is generally negative bias. It’s a concern—a righteous concern—that people might have bias against someone of a certain race, ethnicity, or gender that might cause them to unduly suspect a particular person of committing a crime.But the Menendez brothers case, like so many other cases, reminds us of the need for wariness of positive bias too: the belief that an outwardly upstanding citizen or externally successful and wealthy person could not engage in deceit, fraud, assault—or parricide.Positive bias not only causes law enforcement to overlook suspects but, perhaps even more important, causes otherwise thoughtful people to become victims.
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IronSimon2022-08-13生活中过于宽容会减弱人们对规则和礼仪的尊重，这在法律中也是一样，但沙威式过于苛刻的执法方式同样会造成潜在的恶果。
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IronSimon2022-08-11...相比于其他专业人士，出庭律师可能更需要了解他人的内心和想法。你不能逃避现实，不能使用诡辩术，不能运用错误的逻辑，不能对人进行侮辱和讥讽，也不能做不合理的推论。你还不得不担心你在非己方团队成员心中的可信度，比如法官和陪审团等。这听起来都是基本的，也很明显，不是吗？但仔细想一想，这与现代社交，特别是当下的辩论相比，还是存在极大不同的。在日常生活中，你可以把与你相反的观点拒之门外。你可以一直畅游在没有争议的泳道里。你可以避开那些与你所持观点不同、与你背景不同或与你经历不同的人。你没有必要去听他们讲，也没有必要去了解他们、观察他们或接触他们。你只需更换频道。我想太多的人都利用了这种自我隔绝的权利，生活在自己小小的回声室里，习惯于待在与自己志趣相投的小圈子里；他们从不花时间搜寻查证、进行激烈辩论、展开公开对话，以测试和强化其所持信念的正确性。
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IronSimon2022-08-11人们越来越追逐志同道合的声音，追逐令人舒适的观点，只看立场。愿意改变想法的开放性思维不仅越来越罕见，有时还会被视为软弱和不忠的表现。坚守 "克伦威尔式警告" ——反思自己是不是错了——的人越来越少。在辩论中，无论是在有线电视网络上还是在互联网上，谩骂、影射和人身攻击成为比逻辑和推理更受欢迎的策略。
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IronSimon2022-08-10有时候，法官的行为方式看起来更像是自我保护而不是追求正义......有一些法官认为，判决结果被上述法庭推翻是他们职业上的失败；如此一来，他们可能就会做些什么来避免这种情况的发生。
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韧勉2022-07-20再完美的法律也有不完善的地方；同理，即便是万无一失的科学，也有其自身的局限性，因为负责解读科学的人是会犯错误的。重要的一点在于：最糟糕的错误往往是因充满善意的目的犯下的。聪明的、有能力的良善之人也可能会犯下改变一个人生命的重大错误。就执法责任而言，我认为这是最让人恐惧的方面之一。D盖人们很自然地会把重点放到那些贪赃枉法和不称职的警察身上。但是，正直的人也会犯一些小错，而这些错误带来的危险可能更大；他们之所以犯错，是因为他们未能保持一贯的卓越水平，是因为他们偏离了最佳实践，是因为他们忘记了害怕犯错所带来的严重后果。特别是当很多人负责同一项工作时，责任就会变得和晨霜一样稀薄。
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胡小猴2022-04-18“如果你在审议之前就宣布了自己的决定，如果你对所有的辩论视而不见、充耳不闻，如果你拒绝参与讨论活动，那么你就不配做一个决策者。”
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胡小猴2022-04-18“在法庭上，重要的是什么？准备工作、主动权、雄辩才能。是的，所有这些都很重要，但最关键的是可信性。只有建立起这种可信性，你讲的故事才会有人信。让步是力量的象征，而不是软弱的表现，因为它会提升你的可信性。坦承自己的弱点总比被对手指出你的弱点要好。我的建议一直是这样的：如果你有被告的谈话罪证，却没有录音，照实说；如果你证人的证词与事实存在出入，照实说；如果你的污点证人可能表现得像个浑蛋，照实说。”