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Comment Re:San Francisco District Attorney Jenkins (Score 1) 87

But if Brooke Jenkins is really your best option, that's kinda sad.

Why, because somebody threw some mud on the internet, and when you upvoted it you felt Virtuous?

As somebody just explained, you were full of shit when you were claiming the bar diversion was because of corruption or incompetence; rather, it was the whistleblower activity described above!

As for "prosecutorial misconduct," every prosecutor who has been at the job for a few years has a few cases with such a ruling. In that case, she successfully prosecuted Daniel Gudino for the murder of his own mother. In the second phase of the trial, the jury was split on the question of "not guilty by reason of insanity" and instead of a mistrial the judge stepped in and ruled Not Guilty by Insanity. The appeals court did ding her for "misconduct" for her closing argument, but did not reverse the conviction or free the convicted killer. Note that she accused the former DA of having reached a deal in that case, and it's what led to her resignation, the recall, and eventually her replacing him.

What was it that she did wrong in her closing statement? She said the defense didn't "seek justice or to tell the truth about what happened," and instead that their "obligation is to their client; and by any means necessary they seek to have him acquitted of these charges." Which is all true. The appeals court said she's not allowed to "imply that counsel is free to deceive the jury." And yet it is true; the defense council not only is allowed to try to deceive the jury, it's required! If it is found that they could have deceived the jury but didn't, the accused will get a re-trial because of insufficient defense. The appeals court dinged her for excess honesty.

You right wingers always pretend to want "law and order," but you never do.

Comment Re:How about the false positives? (Score 1) 87

Plates can have variable number of characters, which makes it nonsensical to define OCR accuracy per plate

That's absurd, not even 1% of the population has such brittle thinking as you.
In other contexts there are OCR stats at all levels, per character, per word, per page. No, you can't define "page" satisfactorily, but that doesn't stop it from being included in statistics.
Did you know that printers are even rated on "pages per minute?" Everybody knows it depends on the page, but it doesn't stop them from using the metric.

Are you sure you're really this stupid? I think you're trying to pull a fast one.

Comment Re:who watches the watcher? (Score 1) 87

That's not as big a deal because when there's a warrant your lawyer can challenge the warrant, and if you later win your appeal then they usually have to throw out all the evidence acquired after that, unless it was 100% independent. Usually everything else would follow from the result of that search. So it's the interests of the smart cops, court clerks, judges, prosecutors, etc., to make sure the dumb cop doesn't screw it up. Notice how that is independent of if they all would prefer to support the cop doing whatever he wants! Asking cops to be good doesn't help, but throwing out the case because they didn't dot the i's has real value. That's the power of a warrant.

Without a warrant, even if you prove he shouldn't have done it, if they just say, "Gosh, it was an honest mistake" then no evidence gets thrown out, because it's almost entirely up to the discretion of the trial judge.

You're not going to get a nationwide ban or anything, so your proposed question is absurd. It doesn't provide any meaningful avenue to add checks and balances to this power that the police will have in many locations, including locations you may travel through. And as more and more vehicle-based cameras get added to the network, even local prohibitions on the police might not help since all you can really do at the local level is prevent the police from paying for service contracts, and sometimes to control what gets installed on utility poles. (Though in many cases only the State can actually prevent those installations)

It's very difficult/unlikely to get State-level prohibitions, and federal prohibitions? Not in this era. Maybe in 50 years, if we still have a functioning democratic republic.

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