Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.

The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.

I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.

When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.

Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.

The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.

Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.

https://youtu.be/GrAME1p2Ijs

  - Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
  - Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
  - Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.

In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.

And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.

As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?

If the argument is that forensic evidence decreases uncertainty, well, it certainly doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

Convicting anyone of anything is a slippery slope. The only way to be truly sure is to never do it, ever.

the south is also known for putting people in prison without even having a charge. just a guilty result

There is no hard rule for physical evidence. If other evidence is enough to convince 12 jurors beyond a reasonable doubt, it could be very significant.

Why do you think many places would execute petty thieves? So few were caught generally speaking the punishment had to be severe.

The prosecution, regardless of unethical grandstanding, have a duty to prove the case without any resaonable doubt. They hold the burden of proof.

I would, of course, agree with them as physical evidence isn’t necessarily a requirement to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. But I would certainly draw my own inference from their mendacity if they used those words.

Your duty as a juror is to make a determination of fact and apply the law as guided by the judge to reach a verdict. When the prosecutor gives you some blabber approaching instructions, that’s an attempt to influence you.

A suspect is under no obligation to prove their innocence but when it comes to circumstantial witness testimony, the suspect absolutely must do everything they can to fight the narrative.

same reason they are really out to disqualify jurors who know about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

If someone commits a crime and ten people in the room say they were also in the room and that person did it, that shouldn't get thrown out because the suspect didn't leave a fingerprint.

The expectation of evidence makes its absence significant, but not definitive.

A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.

He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.