teakettle42

I haven’t ignored any of that; I simply don’t believe that it is ethical to use the state’s monopoly on violence to punish individual actors (including said industry) without due process.

If you want the state to fund systematic investigation of systemic crimes, then fine.

> I’m also not claiming all of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.

None of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.

Is the prevailing goal of our justice system to convict this one particular defendant, or to ensure that trials are as fair as possible for all defendants?

> the balance of the evidence weighed against the alleged exculpatory evidence

Surely you see the fundamental problem, here. This shifts the burden of proof onto the defendant. Demonstrating the previous existence and, in particular, the exculpatory nature of destroyed evidence is practically impossible.

If the state directly conspires to an unfair trial, the state’s case must be forfeit.

> We’re referencing a case where a state senator was convicted despite a drive (of potentially exculpatory evidence) being wiped. So no.

This senator was not powerful enough (or was actually honest enough) to not leverage the illegal “get out of jail” cards that already exist.

> OP suggested automatic not guilty for the defendant. Not fruit of the poisoned tree, where evidence can’t be used. Automatic exoneration.

What else are you going to do when potentially exculpatory evidence has been summarily wiped by the people responsible for maintaining the chain of evidence?

Force the accused to prove the wiped evidence was exculpatory?

> Plenty of people in law enforcement would wipe a drive if their family and debts were taken care of, even in face of prison.

This is beyond ridiculous:

(1) Someone in law enforcement that is in a position to meddle with the chain of evidence can already wipe incriminating evidence, which is already illegal. That would imply that the powerful already have a “get out of jail” card.

(2) There are a myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place, and ending with who prosecutors decline to prosecute.

(3) Anyone in law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is, especially for someone previously in law-enforcement. Nobody is scrambling to wipe their debts to “take care of their family” while going to prison themselves.

I don’t think it would actually be nice if the burden of proof rested on the accused. This example isn’t a study of systemic bias, and is both individually and statistically meaningless.

It would be nice, however, if the paper of record didn’t call out a home appraiser, by name, in front of a national audience, with no evidence, as being a racist.

Home appraisal is arbitrary and subjective — ridiculously so.

All this particular stunt shows is that two appraisers can and will appraise a home wildly differently — which anyone who has their home appraised already knew.

Or, I could refer to what actually occurs in practice. My original point stands.

I apologize for the insult, but perhaps this means there’s still more for you to learn, and even deeper and more interesting problems to explore?

I’m about 25 years into my career, and I still have so much more I want to learn!

Switch teams to a different domain every six months?

In the domains I’ve worked in, it might take six months just to get the basic idea sketched out and working. The current project has a timeline of 8 years to full completion — two years just to get to the first minimal release for a subset of our problem domain and the hardware to run it on.

It sounds like you’ve been doing unchallenging work in unchallenging domains and have acquired a much too inflated opinion of yourself in the process.

> there is no learning after a certain amount of years of coding (I would argue at 4-5 years of good/varied experience mark).

If you stopped learning after 4-5 years in the field, the barrier you hit wasn’t the lack of new things to learn. It was your own ability to learn them.

> I would argue that the idea that the human brain can hold ten years of programming information to be absolutely absurd.

You’re demonstrating the ignorant hubris of youth quite successfully.