It's interesting to see the NY Times do a major investigation like this on the deficiencies of a part of the criminal justice system.
However, I think it's also interesting to think about this in the light of @greg_shill's writing on how the legal system subsidizes driving.
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Excited to finally publish on Sunday a project @jbsgreenberg & I have been working on for many many many months ...
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Drunk driving, as @SonjaTrauss pointed out in nitter.vloup.ch/SonjaTrauss/stat… is a crime where many of the offenders are middle or upper class, privileged people. It's one of the largest areas where the legal system, which largely targets the underprivileged, targets these folks.
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The biggest category of people not taking the plea deal offered by the DAs office is people fighting DUI convictions. OBVIOUSLY.
Of all the crimes that the DAs office sees, DUI is the one that is most likely to catch middle class people.
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It's also part of an area of law where we under-punish relative to the harms caused, although maybe less so than for other cases where people harm others through their driving.
(I don't immediately recall what nitter.vloup.ch/greg_shill/statu… had to say about drunk driving.)
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Nov 4, 2019 · 7:07 AM UTC
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So this makes me suspect the problems described with evidence in drunk driving cases are probably the norm for the legal system rather than the exception, since this is an area that's probably under more scrutiny than many other forms of evidence due to the people charged...
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... and given the things I've read about various other forms of evidence being entirely unscientific (such as an article about evidence suggesting whether house fires were intentional or not... although again, an area where the privileged are under more scrutiny).
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