* authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation.*
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
I was in a jury pool for a case where the DA was attempting to prosecute petty vandalism to pressure a young adult over a minor crime ($500 worth of graffiti) because they wanted cooperation on another larger crime.
It wasn't going anywhere. When I finally got called up to voir dir I explained that I thought the real crime was sequestering 300 people for a day over $500. I suggested we collect $2 from each person in the jury pool (far less than we paid for parking that day) and cover the alleged damages and not only be done for the day, but have achieved some real measure of justice.
Lets just say the judge didn't agree and I got let out of voir dir.
My experience has been the same. I was on a grand jury, so pre-indictment and no voir dire, and there were many BS cases like this. We returned "no true bill" on all of them, which made me really proud of my randomly-selected neighbors. Cops were trying to railroad so many people over subway fare evasion, upgrading stealing $2.50 from the MTA to felony drug charges. We didn't bite. I did remark that I would just give them the $2.50 rather than ruining some high school student's life. (Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.)
>This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
Is this actually true? The way the techspot article was laid out certainly implies that prosecutors knew about all the contradicting evidence, but they offered a plea deal. However, if you read the article carefully it doesn't mention any interaction with the prosecutors or that the contradicting evidence was presented to them.
They could have sent her a letter? More importantly it's unclear what the timeline of the events were. All the contradictions could have been discovered after the plea deal was offered.
It's not that hard to imagine that the legal system is set up to protect the comfort and careers of the people who have to be in court every day, and not necessarily the 99% of people who are in there for a handful of days - total, across a lifetime - because they had a bad day or two, or were unlucky, or need help that society is as-yet unequipped to give them. It does not surprise me that the letter and spirit of the law have a tough time surviving the practical realities of being administered, day-in-and-day-out, by fallible and self-interested human beings.
Absolutely. I actually went to trial many years ago because a DA wouldn't back down, he thought I'd bend. I didn't. We literally had video footage of the culprit, it clearly wasn't me and clearly WAS someone else. The DA waited until the day before we were to pick a jury to drop the charges, just a few days before trial. After, the DA even said to me, "I'm a dangerous man to make an enemy of." I think I was 20, so obviously I was cocky and snapped back "So am I," and stormed off. I not live a thousand miles away from that crappy little town.
Seriously. And what kind of moron did the D.A. he think was that he would take a criminal conviction on his record by pleading guilty, when he had video evidence of his innocence!! Just to avoid embarrassing the D.A., a stranger to him?
I'd like to see a three way verdict: guilty/not guilty/innocent.
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
Serious question.. when you do get picked up for something like that and you invoke your rights for silence. How do you get council? Do you already have a number, do you already have a relationship with a defense attorney? How do you navigate that?
This is partially fixed by making The People of the State of __________ pay for the lawyer of the defendant's choosing. It imposes real costs to the state in these cases.
There's an argument that the cost of prosecution is one reason for the proliferation of offenses and increase in sentence lengths.
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses broke this community link; people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh than they would be if judging their actual neighbors. Not because of favoritism, but because it's easier for them to appreciate the repercussions of an overly punitive system (broken families, destroyed career prospects, etc).
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.
> If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges.
I'm not quite understanding this. What is there to be gained by raising the stakes? Doesn't it make defendants even more determined to seek justice?
I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).
It's not the lawyers but the KPAs. If a prosecutor's promotion is judged based on the number of successful prosecutions, then there's every incentive to prosecute and zero incentive to dismiss charges.
Fixing the system requires changing the incentives. Individuals would adjust accordingly.
Edit: It won't get fixed because ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime. Lawyers had to fight popular sentiment to get rid of the death penalty in most states. Even today, between death and life imprisonment, the former is preferred by the general public.
> ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime
This behaviour, by Joe Public, is a serious problem, in that it's an emotional response, not a logical one, and absolutely never based on informed debate
It will not be fixed. The lawyers have control of our legal system. They are the politicians and judges. The system is theirs; if we want to change the status quo, it will take nothing less than a bloody revolution.
Or a flood of new lawyers with a basis of Beneficence and ethics, and a knowing willingness to act against maximal short-term self interest. (Though still self profitable, just not maximally)
Politicians being trained lawyers is a good thing - they (supposedly) know the nightmare that is the legal system
To put it into a software developers context - which hopefully makes it easier to understand for some.
The law is legacy code that stretches back a few centuries (literally) that has been written by many many people with little in common, and has active users who must be consulted upon change.
> This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
I iamgine bullshit easy plea deals also get you nice numbers for a "tough of crime" image for political clout even if some of the most vile crimes get some of the lightest sentences imaginable
> I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering.
I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.
And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.
It sort of makes sense, why would you bring a case to trial that is not complete? A complete case will always win. The trial is the final check if the case is complete.
Huh? This is a wild misstatement. Even your link doesn’t support this, and says that the "most likely reason" for the high rate is that prosecutors have broad discretion over whether to prosecute at all, and credits low prosecution rates and a different way of calculating the rate.
The new system has been in place for less than ten years, only covers a very limited set of crimes and is much more modeled on cooperation than coercion. The Ramseyer and Rasmusen paper reported 99.9% convictions in 1994 (49,598 of 49,643), when the law did not allow plea bargains. The rate was already above 99% long before plea deals existed.
nasty that 'statistics' are hauled out as 'proof', fuck me Japan has an unbelievable low crime rate, and some ridiculous number of criminals turn them selves in. There is something like a 90%+ rate of lost wallets just droped in a mail box and returned, and american soldiers are responsible for the bulk of violent crime in a large radius around each base.
It goes on and on, not that I think that highly of the Japanese, but due credit is theres and the US is the crime, jail, more crime and corruption leader of the planet and there is nowhere worse except where the US (cia) is running some through the worst sadistic perverts they can find and support, which makes almost all of the worst crime on the planet the direct fault of america, but
as we see in this case under discusion, america is now having trouble EXPORTING it's contradictions and is just eating the coolaid powder dry.
See also: settlement in lieu of judgment in civil cases. There is an entire industry (debt collection) built around using the courts as a cudgel to coerce people into settlements for debts that they might not have a legal obligation to pay (because of the debt collectors' poor record-keeping, running afoul of procedural issues or consumer protection laws, etc.). Particularly for smaller amounts, attorneys will not represent consumers for defense, and (no matter what anyone tells you) judges defer to fellow lawyers if the issue goes to trial and a defendant is self-represented. Perversely, it's sometimes in a person's best interests to rack up larger debts, so that their case is worthwhile for an attorney to pick up, at which point they will likely try to negotiate a settlement rather than go to trial.
> Meanwhile, authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation. She has refused, saying she is innocent.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
If only a reverse plea deal gambit were realistic. Counter with an offer to accept $10k and an apology for malpractice in exchange for her not going after those involved. Unfortunately a decent chunk of the justice system here doesn't appear to have any real accountability for poor conduct.
>The DA (District Attorney) is elected, so they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics.
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
You're not entirely wrong but I think that description of the situation is rather heavily colored by partisanship. Being lenient about a very limited subset of crime that "the system" is particularly ineffective at dealing with (to the point that it is arguably racist/classist/etc) is viewed favorably by certain (primarily urban) demographics. When you have broad support for an elected official who is exercising a great deal of discretion to not enforce the law that should trigger fundamental changes to the system as opposed to impeachment.
Don't they also hate to lose though? This seems an unlikely case for a prosecutor to win. If it were a civil case, sure, the standard is much lower there, but for a criminal case the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Which is why there's a push to accept a plea deal. Innocent people can easily end up accepting a plea deal after a day in jail, and pushy investigators trying to get out a confession.
Sometimes the public defenders actions are indistinguishable from collusion with the prosecution. The window to appeal can close before your sentence is over.
Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.
>> I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
>Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
I'd note that many (most?) state jurisdictions (the Federal judiciary has the Federal Defender's Service[0]) require a defendant to be "indigent"[1] before a lawyer is appointed, rather than requiring the defendant to hire a lawyer.
Also, in many jurisdictions, private lawyers are appointed by judges to take on the cases of "indigent" defendants. Often there's little in the way of vetting such lawyers, and the fees paid generally aren't very high -- resulting in subpar lawyers and representation.
Even in places (like NYC[2]) with a more robust public defender system, these lawyers are generally handling dozens of cases at once and don't have the resources of the prosecutor's office (investigators, budgets for forensic testing/analysis, etc.), leaving the defendants' side at a considerable disadvantage.
As such, it's not just saying "I can't afford a lawyer," and Perry Mason rushes to your rescue.
[1] Different jurisdictions have different standards for determining if a defendant is "indigent." But many of those won't appoint a lawyer unless you're flat broke. Own a home? Take out a second mortgage. Have a job? You're not indigent. Etc, etc, etc.
You need evidence from Cash App and likely other third parties like ISPs. You ideally would have an expert to testify about the limitations of the prosecution evidence.
You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.
It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)
A corollary of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is that there’s just no way to compute such statistics. It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven without looking into the details of their case.
There’s a functional difference if you’re trying to compute “tough-on-innocence statistics”, because it means that the target for the only possible metric is much higher than zero. A healthy criminal justice system should routinely rule people innocent; if nearly everyone who’s prosecuted is found guilty, that doesn’t mean prosecutors are being really picky about filing charges, it means the system doesn’t treat innocence as an acceptable outcome.
You'd be better off assessing that via analysis of laws and policies. That would show what could be abused and to what degree, even if it's abused by the people in power now. That's really the whole point of the analysis - to create laws and policies with better protections, so we should measure what we're looking to change.
I've never understood that. There's a claim you are guilty of robbery. You get charged and go to court. You plead not guilty. The da insists and you go to trial. During trial, you manage to provide cctv showing that you were 1000 miles away. The jury says "not guilty".
Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?
A jury I was on came to that exact conclusion. Some crimes require state of mind to be proven. In my case, a guy was at a bar and got kicked out. He went to his car and grabbed a gun and fired two shots. Ultimately the decision hanged on "did he fear for his life" when two bouncers rushed him in the parking lot.
He was probably guilty of the two counts of aggravated assault, but the prosecution never showed that it wasn't self defense, which is what Arizona required.
Not in the US. In Scotland, until this year, there was a "not proven" verdict, which was more or less what you just said.
The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.
Well the point of the trial is to make a binary decision, so it has to be guilty or not guilty to a certain standard of evidence.
Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.
CCTV shows you were in the general area of the crime, but your shady friend says you were hanging out with him at the exact time the robbery happened, and the guy who says he saw you do the robbery is also kinda shady. I think it’d be reasonable for a juror to think you probably did it (because your friend is untrustworthy and has obvious incentives to lie) but didn’t do it beyond a reasonable doubt (because the witness just isn’t credible enough).
"Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?"
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
Unfortunately the court system is such that it would collapse under the load if everyone actually exercised their right to a trial which heavily incentivizes plea deals
That is a different problem. In this case it should be clear that the prosecutors have messed up and won't admit it, maybe to save their carriers. They are going after someone innocent because it is the easy target while the real criminal is at large.
Partially. The prosecutors and DAs are motivated by conviction rates. The delays in the court system are a bludgeon to encourage that end. Just like identity theft in itself, no-one is motivated to fix the system but the ones being fucked by it, who are the least able to do so.
We like convictions because there's a hell of a lot of actual crime that is never punished. Just my circle of friends has suffered car break-ins, burglaries (no suspects), grand theft auto (never recovered the car), and devastatingly, a rape on school property. Most of these crimes weren't investigated, despite real damages, and the couple that were never saw a conviction.
In theory, if crimes exceed prosecutions, then number of convictions being closest to the number of prosecutions should indicate an effective use of resources. The real problem is that thorough investigations are rare for most crimes and it's just and industrial-scale process to show the elements of an offense were met by a preponderance of the evidence.
Sure, but it feels like you're doing something helpful. It's like self-help books, or new years resolutions. The emotional fulfillment of feeling like you've done something is vastly more popular and marketable than doing the actual work.
In recent years we have also witnessed the outcomes from DAs who refuse to prosecute -- having someone more hard nosed in office seems vastly preferable to losing the local Walgreens and still not having my burglaries prosecuted.
So then is your need for "justice" satisfied by rounding up a bunch of unlucky people and convicting them? To me it seems like you're just describing the other side of the exact same coin where the justice system isn't doing its job, but in a way that absolves it for not doing its job.
It's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right? The goal isn't some scalar "number of people convicted" but rather justice in every case. If cases aren't being investigated, that's a specific problem with a specific part of the system, which needs to be addressed specifically. It can't be fixed by tweaking the numbers further down the line, rather that just creates further corruption.
The way I see it, every time the public demands the justice system (prosecutors, police, etc) do their jobs better, the people in the system respond by doing anything but focusing on their jobs. Either raising the false positive rate ("hard on crime"), going on [possibly silent] strike (raising false negative rate), or even rioting to create disorder from whole cloth (then blaming it on the protestors). What is really needed is accountability in general, so that specific wrongs (either way) can be rectified.
Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
> This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
Not in a criminal court, or really anything where the government is the counterparty. Philosophically it’s because those things are part of your “civic duty” as a citizen like taxes. Realistically it’s because the demographics of people getting the money would be unpalatable to the public. Recidivism is high, some large portion of it would go to people with prior convictions.
The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.
I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.
The "civic duty" rationalization is bunk, due to how unevenly it ends up applying. Someone having their house destroyed is not a "civic duty". Everyone's taxes going up a few dollars to compensate for the damage the police caused (to a house or otherwise) would be a civic duty, and municipalities paying the full cost of policing would place responsibility where responsibility belongs.
I completely agree about the realpolitik reasons though. Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well. The real difficulty is trying to make people respect numerically low odds without falling for feel-good nonsense about "those people".
Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...
Not only does the US not care about justice, they favor the government, always. In a federal conviction you used to have forever to file an appeal, but that was determined too expensive (because people could utilize it) so they made it 10 days. But that was too short. So they made the fair compromise between 'an appeal should always be allowed' and 10 days, and made it 14 days for defendants (but 30 days for government because you know, the government has more limited resources than someone sentenced and being moved across country in prison transports between detention centers to their assigned prison).
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
Check out Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate. The writing is poor and it’s one of the only sources that dares suggest that the Enron executives were victims but regardless, there are points relevant to exactly what you’re asking about.
At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
>All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse
You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.
I agree, but the "tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction" is actually a "tough conversation about taxing the sh*t out of everyone who makes more than $150k a year". Most of our problems are downstream of our extreme inequality and the way it incentivizes dysfunctional and antisocial behavior across the board. So it's going to be an even harder conversation to have than you think.
And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)
"If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems."
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
We are all ears if you'd like to start that conversation. Make a page/blog post and submit it here, and accept ahead of time whatever fallout may arise from doing so. If the benefits outweigh the risks, or if you simply are at a point where the risks do not matter.
You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
The French are just exercising their second amendment rights as originally envisioned by the founding fathers. They're doing America better than Americans!
Decades of reckless deregulation and -er- corporatism, the inevitable corporate consolidation that that behavior encourged, and "Stranger Danger!"-type fearmongering... I reckon.
The previously-super-illegal pervasive domestic surveillance programs sure don't help things, either. No cost is too high to stop "terror" at home and abroad, amirite? :(
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Nobody did a correlational study between electability and judge or prosecutor competence either.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
It's hard to craft an exam that isn't mostly testing how good the examinee is at writing exams. Things like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, etc... are good predictors of near-future academic success but not very useful beyond that.
So, I think an exam is a bad idea unless it's a pass/fail exam (ie no grades, you either understand the law or you do not) and there should be no meaningful time constraint when completing the exam. That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
There are state and federal oversight mechanisms with the power to remove bad judges.
> That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
If you believe this is preferable to a system where knowledge is established before appointing the person, then we're not going to have much common ground.
IMO a law degree is the absolute bare minimum for any kind of judicial or prosecutorial role. It's bad enough cops aren't expected to know the law. How can anyone justify a judge with fewer qualifications than a bootcamp grad in a software role?
I might vote for the 26 year old who just passed the bar but can't find work because I believe they know the law. My neighbor might vote for the retired high school principle because she believes the person has accumulated wisdom and experience dealing with people. Either person could be a great or terrible JP.
Also, don't forget JPs mostly handle basic disputes, misdemeanors, and administrative tasks. You probably don't need a law degree to conduct a wedding ceremony or hear a shoplifting case.
Would it surprise you to find out in lots of places the coroner is an elected position open to high school grads?
Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
Ok. So we just need enlightened legislatures to enact these processes into law and fund them. I actually agree with what you propose, but am having a hard time seeing how to get such a system in place.
Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
The highest level public offices should always be either directly elected, or appointed by an elected person for only the duration of their office. This way voters can get rid of them if necessary. Otherwise they become an unelected deep state.
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
Usually when fraud is involved, people don't care about justice, they care about getting their money back, which means often the less legally competent party (who are often victims themselves) have to pay up, and good luck getting your money back.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like you should consult one. If you have the legal information of this person and they have possession of your activation locked phone, sounds like you could at least sue him civilly or in small claims court for the value of it, if the DA won't do anything
They give a shit about their conviction rate. And maintaining a comfortable relationship with their local police department(s). Very little else.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
It's not stated in the article, but quite often when you look into these extraordinary miscarriage of justice stories in the US you find out what race the victim is, and then it becomes clear what's happening.
Being extradited to Arkansas for a crime one didn't commit, one which is impossible to refute because there is no evidence to begin with, seems like a weirdly American spin on Kafka.
If it does go to court, would explaining to the jury how half the nation's personal data is leaked twice a month be allowed? Or is this one of those truths that society is not allowed to acknowledge?
I would imagine it would be probative for the defense to bring in evidence of every data breach containing her name and ssn. I don’t think pointing out how common these data leaks are generally would be of direct evidentiary value to the case, though.
Time for CashApp founders and C-levels to be held personally liable for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
Then you sue all the law enforcement officers and local officials who are attempting to lay the blame for this on someone they should know is likely innocent. Make all of the financial liability for this lazy investigation come directly from the pockets of the cops and prosecutors until they have nothing left to their names and then extract every thin dime that you can from the city that hired or elected these clods so that the whole city is bankrupted.
Money is obviously the only thing that talks in this society. Make all these assholes pay with everything that they have managed to accumulate in their lives and kick their asses to the curbs after pointing at a dumpster and telling them that they can likely find some cardboard suitable for beggar signage. They'll need to supply their own writing tools though.
>for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
I'm too lazy to create and verify a cashapp account, but so far as what I can find online they do SSN/name check + id check + selfie (liveliness) check. What more do you want?
Someone made a fake account -> we need "Whatever is needed" to make creating fake accounts harder is exactly the wrong way of thinking about it. It's the same kneejerk reaction that got us PATRIOT act and TSA after 9/11.
Or if you're more swayed by social justice, all these onerous checks also makes it harder for "unbanked"/"underbanked" people access to the financial system, which has real harms for them.
Apathy is the main thing allowing this to be a fantasy result. Maybe if enough people are caught up in bullshit like this where their lives and reputations are tarnished due to fraud perpetrated by someone else then we can energize some societal changes that pin the reputational damage and financial penalties on the correct donkey.
Police never thought to subpoena the ISP for the IP address associated with the cashapp login? This seems like an egregious omission in the investigation. Even if it were a VPN, you could subpoena her email to find payment receipts to the provider, etc. Even that may not necessarily prove guilt if there are no logs. That's all an enormous leap of evidence to assume the account is genuinely hers, especially given how endemic identity theft is.
> According to 404 Media's review, the address on the account was one where neither Smith nor her husband had ever lived. The account had also been accessed through Verizon connections, while Smith says she uses AT&T and has never had a Verizon plan.
> There was also a discrepancy involving the phone used to create the account. Cash App's records showed an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system dating back to 2022. Smith, however, provided evidence that her iPhone 13 mini was running the much newer iOS 26.5.2.
That's even crazier. You have to question if they even understand what they're investigating. I expect this to be thrown out in court, although I also have declining faith in our court system.
I think you have to understand that they care more about whether or not they can get a conviction than whatever actually happened. Then the rest of it makes perfect sense.
So beyond the prosecutor, we have to start questioning judges and juries. If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction, then what's really wrong here: the prosecutor or the judge/jury part of the system? Prosecutors are famous for only bring cases to trial they feel they can win. That sense normally comes from their experience directly or reading of previous trials.
The prosecutor is trying to scare this woman into accepting a plea deal. Couple thousand dollars and 6 months probation. Maybe they eventually drop the case, but she’s going to face much more than that in travel and legal costs. No matter what happens here, this woman is, on some level, fucked with no recourse. And the people responsible for it are the ones who should be protecting her from the effects of the identity theft in the first place.
> If the prosecutor so strongly feels that a weak case has a chance of getting a conviction
Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.
Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.
Having had the opportunity to participate and observe the jury system, there is no way I'd ever take a jury trial for a criminal matter. The judge started off the trial by informing the jury pool that despite the state lacking any evidence, we'd need to attest we could find the defendant guilty. Jurors follow the instructions given to them by judges, that is all.
I have heard from random lawyers that if the facts are in your favor, get a bench trial, if you are actually guilty, you can maybe sway a jury.
We don't have juries because they are smarter or more fair or more just on average than a judge. We have juries entirely due to the concept of jury nullification. It's a formalization of the concept the founders sometimes expressed where "Yes I did it, but that doesn't mean I should go to jail" is an intended outcome. It's explicitly that Justice isn't the same as "follow the letter of the law".
They don't care at all. For her it's potentially six years in prison, for the cops, and the prosecutor it's a small potatoes case on a random Thursday.
The plea deal offer kind of says it all, if this reaches the court it will either very quickly be thrown out or they may drop it because it's not worth the time.
Many other countries have proper multi-year colleges specifically for the field of policing, and rigorous physical and mental health tests required to get the job. In those countries the police is more educated and more competent than the vast majority of the population.
Most people don't have the power to strip me of my freedom and legally shoot me. If anything the police should be held to a higher standard than the average person.
Meanwhile, Cash App who facilitated the scam and actually cost the buyer actual money... walks away with no repercussions. There is something horribly broken when tech companies who are ruining people's lives have zero responsibility but are making money in the process.
So how exactly does Cash App verify users that signup for new accounts? If the process is so lax, shouldn't they be forced to temporary block it? To say nothing about money laundering charges, that would be raised against any bank in such situation.
This is more general issue in the USA. How do you prove who you are? Your driver license / identity card doesn't have a chip, so given enough information about someone else you can sign up as them.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
This happens to me frequently, I have an OG gmail account which a bunch of people have associated with their own accounts. The problem is the provider will verify a phone number, and once that's validated, will accept an email address, even if it's wrong. Two financial entities have accepted my email address tied to other people's account: Chime, and Venmo. There's no way to fix this since they all presume I am a customer of theirs, so the path to fix is to do it in their app. It is incredibly frustrating, more so when it's people who handles money do it. They should know better! The "We are not a bank (therefore not covered by banking regulations)" does so much work to cover their shoddy practices.
Same story with Gmail here, and unfortunately over the years it has simply become my primary. I'm still undecided on how I want to handle my own domain+email.
Someone opened a Venmo account using my gmail and immediately started moving thousands of dollars in small transactions, and my only options were to a) take ownership of the thousands of dollars of small transactions that were now associated with my unverified email or b) get my email banned???? Eventually I got an email saying the Venmo was disabled due to suspicious activity, hope that doesn't bite me in the ass in the future.
What if I wanted to sign up for Venmo in the future? Why do I need to create another email address to use their product in the future when they didn't even verify it in the first place? How are they allowed to run their billon dollar business like this?
Want to hear a fun one? You can get realtors to spam any (US) phone number you want by entering it into Zillow for like a rental or something. They do no verification whatsoever.
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
If they don't do any verification, and I'm not sure how they would in countries like the US, then any fraud case or attempt to claw in money from random people should be thrown out of court by any reasonable judge.
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
SSN should just be considered public information at this point. It’s not secret so it cannot be treated as a password and it’s not even suitable as an identifier. It’s purpose is for tracking earnings, not identifying a person.
A national id number should have never been considered any more privileged or authoritative than a name in the first place, any business that does so is being criminally negligent.
I mean, that is why they exist, to replace names, or perhaps more accurately act as a surrogate key for names. The government specifically said don't use the SSN as a secret, and businesses did so anyway.
In Poland you can block your PESEL (SSN equivalent) to prevent this kind of fraud. One click in our government app or website. If PESEL is needed to confirm identify with a corporation you can unlock it temporarily.
I think it is slightly different in Poland. PESEL has status blocked or unblocked. Certain operations like taking loan or opening bank account requires PESEL to be unblocked at time of operation. But not everything requires unblocked PESEL. If it is not required to be unblocked by law, companies can still verify identity with PESEL even if status is blocked. Correct me if I am wrong. Anyway it is still big improvement.
Well, now you get to the absolute travesty that is:
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
The good thing is that you can keep the free credit monitoring services running until you die, because inevitably a new security breach will offer you free credit monitoring before the previous one expires. /s
I think I currently have two overlapping ones going.
I've signed up for a few bank accounts purely online. And if you give them your SSN and enough other information, they're able to pull all your credit reports, in real time, and then do verification based on them, that tends to be quite effective.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
All of the associated information tied to your SSN has also been leaked multiple times. Just having it should not be considered any kind of "proof" of identity in 2026. This should be an easy argument for "reasonable doubt" by any defense attorney.
Cash App is owned by Block, and Block has an existing banking license (an Industrial Loan Company chartered in Utah in 2021), and has a new license application is progress (a National Trust Bank Charter filed just last month). I happen to know that internally Jack was saying things like "we are a bank", and "we can use this license to do all sorts of banking things."
Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.
The problem is, if you have a SSN and enough other information, you can pull a credit report and answer all the rest of the questions for opening an account.
Before you form a strong opinion on the matter, I recommend you take the time to investigate who the source of the claims is in this article and whether the counterparty has had sufficient opportunity to state their case.
I don't understand why ID cards with digital features aren't really a thing in the U.S. In many countries, such as Germany, there are ID cards that you can scan with an app to prove your identity. That makes it much harder for fraudsters to simply open bank accounts in other people's names.
In Germany every adult has to have an ID card. You cannot not have one. As a consequence requiring one for voting is practically unproblematic.
In the US the situation is fundamentally different plus there is a history of heinous racial targeted disenfranchisement of voters to consider that is in the extremely recent past and alive and well.
Lots of mouths are getting fed when someone goes through the legal system. Police, bail bondsman, various clerks, attorneys, …
I can see their motivation in maximizing the interaction.
Still waiting for industry fans to comment. But let's get the ball rolling:
"I would never defend <company/common practice>. But this article is such egregious ragebait that I must speak out. It's a very sad outcome. But it's also clearly <her fault/impossible to legislate a fix/evidence that the system is working>."
It's good this is seen as big news, but to anyone paying attention this is an everyday occurrence.
All you need to charge someone is to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the elements of the offense were committed. Account being in your name and used in the crime meets that criteria. The problem is that many times a "thorough investigation" was not performed. There's nothing in law requiring a thorough investigation, but it's usually included in department regulations. You can file a complaint, but they won't do anything about it. There is no accountability anywhere in the system. The judges who are supposed to be neutral are severely biased due to the structure of the system and lack of training.
Would the EFF get involved in a case like this? Feels like it could set an important principle about how weak the link can be between “PII” and the actual person, given the preponderance of data leaks.
Identify theft/identity fraud is a bullshit risk-shifting move by the banking class.
The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.
With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.
Meanwhile in our inboxes: “We take the security and privacy of our users very seriously” and “We have no reason to believe that social security numbers in our user database were accessed.”
Playing devil's advocate here, how should this actually be handled? If the police show up (not saying they did all the due diligence they should have) to arrest you for a crime and the person says "Nope, wasn't me."...is that sufficient for police to drop everything and walk away?
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
> the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person (may have) committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
It's not just an accusation. Her identifying information is basically found at a crime scene.
Every part of this would be fine if the companies allowing fraudulent parties to use their platforms were prosecuted for mail fraud, or interstate commerce fraud. Put the executive in jail. It's really this simple. The moment executives have repercussions they change their actions. Make cashapp prove they did their due diligence.
Typically an investigation involving a digital crime lab that understands what they are doing. For example tying the digital traces to the actual suspect. If there are no ties to IP addresses or devices then it gets really tricky.
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
For starters in this case, extradition shouldn't really work like that. There is no reason a suspect cannot be jailed somewhere close to their home (ie near their family), with police from the distant jurisdiction doing the traveling to question her etc. Doubly so if she's able to post bail. It's the police's day job versus the suspect's life, right?
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really a way around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should always be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head while being threatened with years in prison.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. While this isn't a long time as far as the legal system goes (remember, day job), it's an eternity for someone on the receiving end of it. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for expenses, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (a daily rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still under attack).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.
In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
I know that the CPS could seize and shutdown a politically sensitive case but as far as I know that has never happened. And I hope that if it did people would make a fuss.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
I don't know what you mean by "politically sensitive"
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
I mean cases where the state might decline to prosecute the politically powerful.
You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?
If you have a specific case you can just (well, I can't easily but a lawyer will know how without having to go re-read documentation they didn't look at for years) get the court records for that case and see what happened to it. The CPS claims they can't answer a FOIA "what happened to these cases?" type query because once the CPS owns the case it's just another case, but if you had a particular case in mind that's not a FOIA situation you just look at the court records.
From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.
Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.
Don't forget (and not just in LA) that you can only exercise your right to remain silent not by remaining silent, but by saying those words, ideally in response to each individual question.
Otherwise the prosecutor can stand up in court and say you were "uncooperative" and resisted, even obstructed attempts to investigate the crime, and if your lawyer tries to frame this as you exercising your right, the judge will not permit this because you didn't utter the magical incantations.
Sad that Block Inc get to profit from frictionless signups, and outsource any costs of failings to innocent people in the form of jailtime.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
This is so backwards that it doesn't even compute in my brain.
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
From what I can tell, the best she can possibly hope for is to be set free after a few hundred thousand dollars in legal fees. I see this as a consequence of increasingly out of control automation.
I'm disgusted. How would one go about ensuring that their social couldn't be used to create an account with this much liability? Would freezing a credit line be enough?
Prosecutors have no interest in "justice." They are measured solely on conviction rates. If she's convicted, she will go through needless life-destroying suffering because of this. But at the end, it will be overturned after the prosecutors in question have been elected to Congress or a governorship. And then lawsuits will ensue. And that's why BS like this will never stop.
I'm just wondering where the EFF and the ACLU are at the moment. This seems like a perfect opportunity to point out the dangers in current cyber crime laws and do some genuine good in the world.
And with internet crimes like this the legal attack could come from anywhere. I trust that Arkansas does not have a competent digital crimes task force, as they are idiotic in almost everything else in the legal world.
Someone opened up a PayPal account in my name a few weeks ago using an old address. I canceled my PayPal account years ago because I was afraid of it being linked to my bank.
It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
I'm feeling paranoid now and wondering if the best defense is to proactively open accounts with Cash App, Venmo, whatever other stupid peer-to-peer wallet apps exist, just to lock down my identity and be in control of it. I'm not sure if locked credit and monitoring would work here because these services probably don't do credit checks or show up on reports anyway.
That is one defense for having an open system, but that only affects services who use these systems. The article doesn't mention if CashApp actually used her social to check credit, or just took the attackers' word by checking if the SS was valid and provided credit.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
Only SSN is not public information. They are not published, but the records are public if you go to the right place in person and ask the right questions. (sometimes you have a "need to know" before they will tell you, but it isn't hard to find one)
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.
It actually depends on which credit bureau CashApp is contracted to use. If they use TransUnion, then you'd need a TransUnion account and freeze your credit report there.
How I would like this to go so wrong for Cash App and the Prosecution. 10's of millions in fines but we all know the system protects these Corporations and shitty prosecutors. In the end she will have lost years of her life, her savings, etc with no restitution.
Nah people routinely sue local governments and police and win hefty settlements when it's determined that those organizations negligently damaged them in this sort of way. There was a lady in New York a while back who was held on armed robbery charges for like 18 months and it ended up she was set up by her PI ex-boyfriend who was friends with the cops. She lost her business, her job and all that time with her daughter as well. She sued afterwards and won some mid-single-digit-millions sum that I would argue is low (because honestly while that's probably life changing for her, it's not punitive enough for the police department), but it's not nothing.
Some legislators - perhaps honest idealists, perhaps those being paid more by lawyers specializing in such lawsuits - do work at getting such laws passed.
1) No, and 2) Irrelevant. State laws are made by state legislators.
Considering the endless vistas of billboards advertising lawyers for personal injury lawsuits and such in my part of Michigan - I feel pretty sure that >50% of our legislators are enrolled in those lawyers' "gratitude programs".
There's 330 million people here. You, being not from here, only find out about what's exceptional, not what's normal. This case made the news because of how bad it is. It this was common, it wouldn't have made the news.
You're glossing over the part where this approach brought their message into mainstream culture. If they took the money and dropped the message, sure. The history doesn't really support the narrative, though.
Let's not pretend this is an every day occurrence that happens to everyone. It's a one-off oddball situation. I'm not even sure we have all the details considering the sources.
What a complete and total non sequitur. Go ahead, name drop a folk hero from last decade who HN happens to love, even though his case has nothing in common with the one described in TFA. This is absolutely peak HN.
Go read up on literally any subject outside your narrow bubble of tech culture.
Stuff like this feels like some kind of society-wide humiliation ritual
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/
Consider the story a PSA, for folks who still believe that Trust and Justice are somehow part of the American Way. Maybe use it as a teaching tool with your kids, too.
Admitting to guilt, even when innocent, is not normal behavior among a normal population. As evidence, the topic of this thread, and probably you and me, and not some unknown elements in a story by NPR.
> Aside from the paltry number of trials in the federal system, states including Pennsylvania, Texas and New York have trial rates of less than 3%. In Santa Cruz County, Ariz., there were no trials from 2010 to 2012, the report said.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
These are felony charges, are there no grand juries in AZ. The defense needs to absolutely unseal the grand jury testimony, there could have been nothing but lies told in that room. Not a single shred of evidence the defendant was ever in Arizona.
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
>Smith later discovered why she had been arrested: a scammer had tricked someone into sending $1,000 to a Cash App account, one that was in her name but controlled by a criminal.
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
> she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
> If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Did you read the quote you quoted? Your quote says the account was created with her social and date of birth.
Did you read what I wrote? Did I say it wasn't created with her SSN? I'm saying "if it was created with her SSN, then the service should have given her access.
We use the "if X" in my parts to mean "since X was the case, then....". And it seems it's valid in US English too:
Even if the speaker has just read a report explicitly stating that X did Y, using "if" is perfectly possible. The important distinction is that "if" does not necessarily indicate doubt about whether the Y occurred. In this context, it can have two interpretations:
Conditional justification: "If X did Y, then so and so is justified" The speaker is explaining what makes some reaction justifiable, without necessarily questioning the report.
Uncertainty about the facts: "Assuming X really did Y, then so and so was justified." Here, the speaker is reserving judgment about whether the report is accurate.
Both interpretations are available to a native English speaker.
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
It wasn't going anywhere. When I finally got called up to voir dir I explained that I thought the real crime was sequestering 300 people for a day over $500. I suggested we collect $2 from each person in the jury pool (far less than we paid for parking that day) and cover the alleged damages and not only be done for the day, but have achieved some real measure of justice.
Lets just say the judge didn't agree and I got let out of voir dir.
let's start with the ones above $1,000 first, hm?
Is this actually true? The way the techspot article was laid out certainly implies that prosecutors knew about all the contradicting evidence, but they offered a plea deal. However, if you read the article carefully it doesn't mention any interaction with the prosecutors or that the contradicting evidence was presented to them.
Yes.
It's not that hard to imagine that the legal system is set up to protect the comfort and careers of the people who have to be in court every day, and not necessarily the 99% of people who are in there for a handful of days - total, across a lifetime - because they had a bad day or two, or were unlucky, or need help that society is as-yet unequipped to give them. It does not surprise me that the letter and spirit of the law have a tough time surviving the practical realities of being administered, day-in-and-day-out, by fallible and self-interested human beings.
Source: I work with a top defense lawyer in Chicago
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses broke this community link; people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh than they would be if judging their actual neighbors. Not because of favoritism, but because it's easier for them to appreciate the repercussions of an overly punitive system (broken families, destroyed career prospects, etc).
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.
I'm not quite understanding this. What is there to be gained by raising the stakes? Doesn't it make defendants even more determined to seek justice?
Of course, "of the defendant's choosing" causes all sorts of moral hazard.
Fixing the system requires changing the incentives. Individuals would adjust accordingly.
Edit: It won't get fixed because ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime. Lawyers had to fight popular sentiment to get rid of the death penalty in most states. Even today, between death and life imprisonment, the former is preferred by the general public.
Source?
This behaviour, by Joe Public, is a serious problem, in that it's an emotional response, not a logical one, and absolutely never based on informed debate
As in, just as unlikely.
To put it into a software developers context - which hopefully makes it easier to understand for some.
The law is legacy code that stretches back a few centuries (literally) that has been written by many many people with little in common, and has active users who must be consulted upon change.
I iamgine bullshit easy plea deals also get you nice numbers for a "tough of crime" image for political clout even if some of the most vile crimes get some of the lightest sentences imaginable
I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.
And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.
That is incorrect. Japan has a 99% criminal justice conviction rate because of so many plea deals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...
The new system has been in place for less than ten years, only covers a very limited set of crimes and is much more modeled on cooperation than coercion. The Ramseyer and Rasmusen paper reported 99.9% convictions in 1994 (49,598 of 49,643), when the law did not allow plea bargains. The rate was already above 99% long before plea deals existed.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
I'll applaud ignoring the open air drug market. It's a symptom, not a cause. The drug *war* is the biggest crime problem in the country.
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/right-assistance...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_counsel
>Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
I'd note that many (most?) state jurisdictions (the Federal judiciary has the Federal Defender's Service[0]) require a defendant to be "indigent"[1] before a lawyer is appointed, rather than requiring the defendant to hire a lawyer.
Also, in many jurisdictions, private lawyers are appointed by judges to take on the cases of "indigent" defendants. Often there's little in the way of vetting such lawyers, and the fees paid generally aren't very high -- resulting in subpar lawyers and representation.
Even in places (like NYC[2]) with a more robust public defender system, these lawyers are generally handling dozens of cases at once and don't have the resources of the prosecutor's office (investigators, budgets for forensic testing/analysis, etc.), leaving the defendants' side at a considerable disadvantage.
As such, it's not just saying "I can't afford a lawyer," and Perry Mason rushes to your rescue.
[0] https://www.uscourts.gov/topics/defender-services
[1] Different jurisdictions have different standards for determining if a defendant is "indigent." But many of those won't appoint a lawyer unless you're flat broke. Own a home? Take out a second mortgage. Have a job? You're not indigent. Etc, etc, etc.
[2] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2024/04/08/how-public-defend...
You need evidence from Cash App and likely other third parties like ISPs. You ideally would have an expert to testify about the limitations of the prosecution evidence.
Where can we see their tough-on-innocence statistics?
You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.
It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)
Oh, you mean another innocent person? (Emphais mine)
Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?
He was probably guilty of the two counts of aggravated assault, but the prosecution never showed that it wasn't self defense, which is what Arizona required.
The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.
Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
My guess is that it does not.
If "these problems" is the criminals getting away with their crimes? No.
Unfortunately, human nature is such that many peoples' actual priority is venting the intense angry they feel about the real-world crimes.
And for far too many people, harsh punishments inflicted on expendable whipping boys are an all-too-satisfying way of doing that.
It's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right? The goal isn't some scalar "number of people convicted" but rather justice in every case. If cases aren't being investigated, that's a specific problem with a specific part of the system, which needs to be addressed specifically. It can't be fixed by tweaking the numbers further down the line, rather that just creates further corruption.
The way I see it, every time the public demands the justice system (prosecutors, police, etc) do their jobs better, the people in the system respond by doing anything but focusing on their jobs. Either raising the false positive rate ("hard on crime"), going on [possibly silent] strike (raising false negative rate), or even rioting to create disorder from whole cloth (then blaming it on the protestors). What is really needed is accountability in general, so that specific wrongs (either way) can be rectified.
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.
I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.
I completely agree about the realpolitik reasons though. Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well. The real difficulty is trying to make people respect numerically low odds without falling for feel-good nonsense about "those people".
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.
And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
Blue state systems are not better run.
Most definitely are.
I think we would need to quantify "better", but there aren't any states that are good.
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
The previously-super-illegal pervasive domestic surveillance programs sure don't help things, either. No cost is too high to stop "terror" at home and abroad, amirite? :(
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
So, I think an exam is a bad idea unless it's a pass/fail exam (ie no grades, you either understand the law or you do not) and there should be no meaningful time constraint when completing the exam. That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
There are state and federal oversight mechanisms with the power to remove bad judges.
If you believe this is preferable to a system where knowledge is established before appointing the person, then we're not going to have much common ground.
I'd invite you to read https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/... for a look at Louisiana's justice of the peace system, whose justices only need a high-school diploma.
IMO a law degree is the absolute bare minimum for any kind of judicial or prosecutorial role. It's bad enough cops aren't expected to know the law. How can anyone justify a judge with fewer qualifications than a bootcamp grad in a software role?
Also, don't forget JPs mostly handle basic disputes, misdemeanors, and administrative tasks. You probably don't need a law degree to conduct a wedding ceremony or hear a shoplifting case.
Would it surprise you to find out in lots of places the coroner is an elected position open to high school grads?
Of what?
> Who approves the applications?
What's to "approve"?
> Who ensures the process is open?
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_entrance_examina...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
That's fine but a different argument from "it can't be done".
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
Then you sue all the law enforcement officers and local officials who are attempting to lay the blame for this on someone they should know is likely innocent. Make all of the financial liability for this lazy investigation come directly from the pockets of the cops and prosecutors until they have nothing left to their names and then extract every thin dime that you can from the city that hired or elected these clods so that the whole city is bankrupted.
Money is obviously the only thing that talks in this society. Make all these assholes pay with everything that they have managed to accumulate in their lives and kick their asses to the curbs after pointing at a dumpster and telling them that they can likely find some cardboard suitable for beggar signage. They'll need to supply their own writing tools though.
I'm too lazy to create and verify a cashapp account, but so far as what I can find online they do SSN/name check + id check + selfie (liveliness) check. What more do you want?
Someone made a fake account -> we need "Whatever is needed" to make creating fake accounts harder is exactly the wrong way of thinking about it. It's the same kneejerk reaction that got us PATRIOT act and TSA after 9/11.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Or if you're more swayed by social justice, all these onerous checks also makes it harder for "unbanked"/"underbanked" people access to the financial system, which has real harms for them.
> There was also a discrepancy involving the phone used to create the account. Cash App's records showed an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system dating back to 2022. Smith, however, provided evidence that her iPhone 13 mini was running the much newer iOS 26.5.2.
Arkansas is one of the least educated states in the US and one of the poorest. So, yea, there are a lot of systemic issues there.
Who says that's the case? US courts are overloaded and public defenders are massively overloaded.
Most people can't afford to hire a good lawyer, and a (let's say) 10% chance of years in prison isn't worth gambling versus a plea deal to them. Prosecutors know this, file massive scary charges, and motivate people to settle regardless of innocence or guilt.
We don't have juries because they are smarter or more fair or more just on average than a judge. We have juries entirely due to the concept of jury nullification. It's a formalization of the concept the founders sometimes expressed where "Yes I did it, but that doesn't mean I should go to jail" is an intended outcome. It's explicitly that Justice isn't the same as "follow the letter of the law".
The plea deal offer kind of says it all, if this reaches the court it will either very quickly be thrown out or they may drop it because it's not worth the time.
Many other countries have proper multi-year colleges specifically for the field of policing, and rigorous physical and mental health tests required to get the job. In those countries the police is more educated and more competent than the vast majority of the population.
Compare that to say a large part of the EU where people have an identity card with a chip, which has a PIN. It allows institutions to read the chip, and that chip cannot be easily faked (PKI). The photo is on the card and on the chip, so they have to match.
Also, more importantly, all of these financial apps popping up is because the normal banking system is too slow moving for the modern requirements, something the EU has also solved with the SWIFT system.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
Someone opened a Venmo account using my gmail and immediately started moving thousands of dollars in small transactions, and my only options were to a) take ownership of the thousands of dollars of small transactions that were now associated with my unverified email or b) get my email banned???? Eventually I got an email saying the Venmo was disabled due to suspicious activity, hope that doesn't bite me in the ass in the future.
What if I wanted to sign up for Venmo in the future? Why do I need to create another email address to use their product in the future when they didn't even verify it in the first place? How are they allowed to run their billon dollar business like this?
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
Requiring only public information and a SSN that has probably leaked hundreds of times and can be accessed by any number of random people in public and private administration just shouldn't count as even an attempt to verify identity.
I mean, that is why they exist, to replace names, or perhaps more accurately act as a surrogate key for names. The government specifically said don't use the SSN as a secret, and businesses did so anyway.
Identity theft is a failing of other people that is your problem to solve.
This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.
Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".
I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".
We constantly face the consequences of businesses failing to secure the information which they (and in some cases legislation) requires us to give them. And when it (inevitably) is lost, then you're offered "free credit monitoring"...
The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:
If you've ever signed up for one of these "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?
When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".
There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.
I think I currently have two overlapping ones going.
If Cash App had run some sort of bank-level verification, I doubt a garden-variety scammer could've "stolen her identity" like this. But, since Cash App is not a bank... they don't need all those pesky safeguards, do they?
Clearly this is evidence that they can't be trusted as a bank, and should have those licenses revoked.
As mentioned in other comments, plea deals are basically unconstitutional.
In Germany every adult has to have an ID card. You cannot not have one. As a consequence requiring one for voting is practically unproblematic.
In the US the situation is fundamentally different plus there is a history of heinous racial targeted disenfranchisement of voters to consider that is in the extremely recent past and alive and well.
https://caseinfo.arcourts.gov/opad/case/46CR-26-292
https://caseinfo.arcourts.gov/opad/case/46AW-26-272
"I would never defend <company/common practice>. But this article is such egregious ragebait that I must speak out. It's a very sad outcome. But it's also clearly <her fault/impossible to legislate a fix/evidence that the system is working>."
Irony notice. This comment contains irony.
All you need to charge someone is to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the elements of the offense were committed. Account being in your name and used in the crime meets that criteria. The problem is that many times a "thorough investigation" was not performed. There's nothing in law requiring a thorough investigation, but it's usually included in department regulations. You can file a complaint, but they won't do anything about it. There is no accountability anywhere in the system. The judges who are supposed to be neutral are severely biased due to the structure of the system and lack of training.
The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.
With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.
Few millions should be fine so they really think through their procedures.
This is equivalent of swatting her. They should pay and at least few people who did actual crime of negligence should go to jail.
She's been accused of a crime. Yes, she was arrested and had to bail out. This is normal process. How else does anyone propose this work?
This may be enough to open an investigation and start gathering more evidence, but doesn't satisfy probable cause. The cops and court screwed up.
A database match is not enough to confirm that this specific person (may have) committed the crime.
It would be like sending a ransom note asking the money be sent to Joe Smith, 123 Fake St. That doesn't really tell you anything about Joe Smith's connection to the crime. It's completely incidental.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/xnJUmJArCeaDmKem9
Every part of this would be fine if the companies allowing fraudulent parties to use their platforms were prosecuted for mail fraud, or interstate commerce fraud. Put the executive in jail. It's really this simple. The moment executives have repercussions they change their actions. Make cashapp prove they did their due diligence.
Again in the article the defense is saying the prosecution is demanding the lady prove her innocence, which is something cops love to do.
And because this is a technical crime the fact there is almost no evidence isn't going to save you in a court of law, especially in the 4th least educated state. It's not about the law any longer, but the stories the lawyers weave.
But as to basic situation, the fundamental problem is that there is no expectation of justice at the end of this.
There isn't really a way around the police (and judges who approve warrants etc) just doing their thing and you having to comply. But if it turns out they were wrong, then they should always be on the hook for all the damage they've caused - the same as every other member of society. In this case, every day the victim was held in jail, her costs of having to hire attorneys and private investigators to represent her, plus simply the distress of having this hanging over her head while being threatened with years in prison.
The article implies this has already been going on for six months. While this isn't a long time as far as the legal system goes (remember, day job), it's an eternity for someone on the receiving end of it. That should be well north of a million dollars for disrupting someone's life that long (especially over a frivolity!) - putting aside any abuse suffered in jail, direct reimbursement for expenses, etc. I want to say it should be more, but $5500/day seems in the correct neighborhood (a daily rate should be much higher for days you're actually in jail, but lower on days you're "free" but are still under attack).
This would create a strong disincentive for incompetent (or in this case, constructively malicious) action by police/prosecutors, as well as demonstrating to all citizens that the justice system actually tries to get correct answers rather than harming innocent people and then merely wiping their hands of it.
Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
Relatedly, after Peter Tatchell failed to arrest Robert Mugabe the government changed the law so that prosecutions for breaches of international law could only be brought by the government.
Anyway, I agree that I'd rather face a criminal charge here than in America.
The CPS does not track what happens to prosecutions it has taken control of. Conveniently they're just CPS cases once that happens, and so the question "What happened to them?" is magically a manual discernment and not amenable to FOIA.
We can ask, and so we have, how many they took control of. The answer is typically in the range of few dozen but not a hundred per year. Since these then disappear into their normal case system they could be prosecuted exactly like any other CPS case, they could be dismissed immediately as erroneous, or any of the usual dispositions for a criminal case, and the CPS won't tell us (if we're to believe them, it doesn't know)
We know a lot of private prosecutions are by the RSPCA, since they have funding to prosecute animal abuse and money is always tight. But presumably in the typical case the CPS is either never told or if it is explicitly told by either party it chooses to do nothing and allow the prosecution to happen. So those cases would not be on the list where the CPS took control.
You may not be able to find out what happens to taken-over cases in general, but are you aware of any case where the CPS took over a prosecution and the original prosecutor simply doesn't know what happened in the end?
From the sound of the things you're thinking about what I'd expect is that the defendant tells the CPS, the CPS seize this case and then they have it dismissed. If you weren't looking for evidence it will be pretty easy in almost any case to decide you do not have sufficient evidence for reasonable prospect of conviction, but in such cases you can probably also make out a position that there is no public interest in such a prosecution - for example because it would be embarrassing.
I'm not a lawyer, but I always associated (perhaps wrongly) common law with common sense. I don't see much of the latter here.
Otherwise the prosecutor can stand up in court and say you were "uncooperative" and resisted, even obstructed attempts to investigate the crime, and if your lawyer tries to frame this as you exercising your right, the judge will not permit this because you didn't utter the magical incantations.
Computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device, and (identity) theft describe what Cash App helped facilitate rather than anything she did.
I wonder what happens if I start allowing people to send me personal information, auto-accept everything as the truth, and start sending their money around the world...
This basically says I can act in bad faith to incriminate anyone if I have access to a somewhat "reputable" SaaS.
I hope some black hat group targets these prosecutors identities and create accounts for them so they experience that firsthand to understand how ridiculous this is.
It took an hour to get past the AI who kept hanging up on me. I’m more concerned after reading the article.
The other problem is that there isn't just one credit system, there are 3 major ones for general consumer credit, and other specialty ones (Innovis, etc; I had a list somewhere but can't seem to find it; AI might be a friend here).
Because then nobody could keep using them like they're a password, and would have to find actually secure ways of identifying people.
Even SSN is not private - you need to share it with enough people that it is safe to assume bad people have it.
Connecting an ID to a individual person is very hard. It is even harder when that person is not physically there.
I don't know enough about it to say if it would prevent the opening of a CashApp account.
IANAL - might any such care to comment?
A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future.
Who is going to sponsor such a law? The same representatives that are paid by the lobbyists of the corporations the laws are targeting?
Considering the endless vistas of billboards advertising lawyers for personal injury lawsuits and such in my part of Michigan - I feel pretty sure that >50% of our legislators are enrolled in those lawyers' "gratitude programs".
For the land of the free and home of the brave ... it's incredible what you let happen.
And don't me wrong, I'm certain there are millions of good people in the USA. But the assholes are in the ascendancy. Obviously.
Stand up, or get flushed down the shitter.
Again, you're being presented with this article because it is an exceptional occurrence. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be discussing it.
And don't me wrong, I'm certain there are millions of good people in the USA. But the assholes are in the ascendancy. Obviously.
Stand up, or get flushed down the shitter.
Go read up on literally any subject outside your narrow bubble of tech culture.
Occasionally the system just ruins someone's life even though they're innocent, and the rest of us have to watch it so we learn just how thin ice we're all on. This woman didn't do anything and she's still getting wrung through the system, the rest of you better watch out
Gotta feed a sheep to the wolves every now and then so the other sheep learn to behave :/
Accepting plea bargains, even when innocent, to avoid the huge expense of defending yourself is the norm.
The numbers are damning. It's simply not possible that police & district attorneys are good enough at their jobs to identify the correct perpetrator with >97% accuracy. Or 100% accuracy in Santa Cruz County.
Fortunately, this stuff will never change because we're too busy fighting amongst ourselves how much foreign labor we should import to keep people too poor to fight these cases in the first place.
And that brings $50,000 bail and days spend in jail before trial? Should just be a civic matter at worst.
>It turned out that the account had been created using Smith's Social Security number and date of birth. But Smith, who describes herself as not tech-savvy, said she had never used Cash App. The situation sounds like one that should have been resolved quickly. But Smith says she is still being asked to prove her innocence in an ongoing criminal case. One stumbling block was that Cash App refused to hand over details of the account to Smith because she couldn't prove she was the owner. She eventually received the data through discovery in her case.
Surely some details about her are the same as in the account profile, and not just the name, else they wouldn't prosecute her for an app account that bears no relation to her. Do they prosecute people just for something happening on the same name and surname as them?
If the account had others details about here to fool people, like her photo or SSN or address, she should have got access to the account, without having to demand it via discovery.
Even if she can (which is probably the case), she wants to go through discovery so there is a paper trail of going through a process. If she does this by any other means she depends on them to have the records of that process to prove she didn't have access to the account at the time. By going through discovery there is a trail of when she transferred access to her name and so it is on them to prove she had access to the account before that date.
The case, as per TFA, was the opposite: she wanted to get access and couldn't, and she finally managed through discovery.
You describe what she "should have preferred" (in order to have the trail), I was talking about the actual case.
Did you read the quote you quoted? Your quote says the account was created with her social and date of birth.
Did you read what I wrote? Did I say it wasn't created with her SSN? I'm saying "if it was created with her SSN, then the service should have given her access.
We use the "if X" in my parts to mean "since X was the case, then....". And it seems it's valid in US English too:
Even if the speaker has just read a report explicitly stating that X did Y, using "if" is perfectly possible. The important distinction is that "if" does not necessarily indicate doubt about whether the Y occurred. In this context, it can have two interpretations:
Conditional justification: "If X did Y, then so and so is justified" The speaker is explaining what makes some reaction justifiable, without necessarily questioning the report.
Uncertainty about the facts: "Assuming X really did Y, then so and so was justified." Here, the speaker is reserving judgment about whether the report is accurate.
Both interpretations are available to a native English speaker.