Ah, by my nanny. I didn't understand this sentence at first.
Speaking of my SBS bookmarks, this is one of the latest:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/durh...
Christina Robinson (coincidence!) was found guilty of shaking her son to death and jailed for life. She admitted meting out corporal punishment, including caning and other instances of child abuse. It seems that after reading about a number of SBS cases my innate reflex of assuming that historic child abuse is evidence of murder has completely dissolved and I must look even at cases like this one with skepticism. What do you think?
Edit: to be perfectly clear: I grew up with constant corporeal punishment by parents and teachers and I consider the practice abhorrent. But the same people who beat me up for misbehaving, horribly misguided though they were in thinking that's a way to raise a child, were not murderers and would never have gone as far as to cause life-threatening injury. I think this experience also colours my perception of cases like Christina Robinson. There's a sliding slope reasoning in many of those accusations that is very dangerous.
Note that this is the problem that was solved by reference to a "jury of your peers". Your peers are familiar with you in specific and know how you behave. But the evolution of the US legal system has actually banned being tried by a jury of your peers; you're required to be judged by strangers who have never heard of you.
The kid was guilty in that movie though. The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother that no one ever mentions or interrogates with video game-like levels of precognition to know perfectly how to frame his brother.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
.. you mean.. in your opinion? I don't remember the narrator stating the kid was guilty. Heck, even a flashback about the kid murdering his father wouldn't make it canon, since it can have inworld refutation, such as robots, aliens, shapeshifters, FBI hypnosis program or such.
> The only other possible explanation is that he had a brother
No, there are several possible different explanations, with varying levels of likeliness. The murderer had an identical knife, the murderer stole or picked up the kids knife, the murderer wanted to frame the kid specifically, the murderer wanted to kill someone else and frame someone (for example, one of the eye witnesses, or both of them were the murderer), and the kid and his father were a good candidate, and so on.
> Let's start with the fact that there was no other known suspect.
That's not for a jury to decide. There was no other suspect presented.
> Yet there was no sign of a forced break-in and no indication of robbery or theft.
Is that actually mentioned in the movie? I'm rereading the screenplay [0], and the only mention of any motive is the fight between the dad and the kid, which seems to be undisputed. The prosecution isn't going to tell us about all the other pieces of evidence that don't fit the case they're trying to present. The defense could have done so, but let's be honest, it was probably some overworked public defender because a 16-year-old is probably not the sort who can afford a first-rate criminal defense lawyer.
The claim that you can take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and do some math on them to arrive at some probability above 90% is... not really how arguments are constructed. Juror #8 had serious concerns with each of the core pieces of testimony, which could have been enough to consider each of the witnesses untrustworthy. If the jury is not willing to accept any of the evidence, then there's simply no case.
> This "demonstration" hardly diminishes the strong inference of guilt raised by the fact that the defendant could remember nothing at all about the movie he claimed to have just seen. And nobody saw him at the theater. His alibi, therefore, is highly suspect.
Sure, his alibi (along with the rest of the cited testimony from the defendant) is not very believable. But the absence of an alibi does not automatically prove guilt.
[0] e.g. https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/12AngryM...
(IANAL, etc.)
I assume you're referring to the claims made by the prosecution listed in the Introduction of the document? AFAIK, that's not "evidence" of abuse, but what the prosecution is alleging. Big difference.
...but even if that were the case, being a shitty parent - even to the point of physical abuse, doesn't justify the end result here given that the evidence cited in TFA makes a solid argument that the conviction is unsound.
Ever seen "12 Angry Men"? If not, you should.
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(Also, as someone on the spectrum with low-affect, even before reading about this case a few years ago, I was (and still am) terrified of being falsely convicted of something solely on my mannerisms - so I suppose I'm biased towards the defendent here)