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Bad design kills people.

That's right. It's not a matter of aesthetics, or of politics, or of opinion. It's a plain fact: When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.

Don't believe me? Well, let me refresh your memory about Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide, second degree -- but not for anything she did behind the wheel. No, she was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed.

Car Justice Community Design Poverty Law Inequality

You might have heard about the story of Raquel Nelson — nearly a year ago, her 4 year-old son was killed by a drunk driver as they crossed the street with the rest of their family. Nelson and her daughter were injured, too. The drunk driver ended up serving six months of prison, and was released, despite having two prior hit and run violations on his record — Nelson, meanwhile, was charged for manslaughter because she failed to use a crosswalk that was a third of a mile away. She faces up to three years in prison.
Outrageous absurdities abound in this case — punishing a mother more than the killer chief among them — but there’s one that hasn’t gotten due attention. And that’s the absurdity of building and maintaining communities in which it’s not only difficult to walk, but downright dangerous to do so — and then favoring the drivers within the legal system. As Grist’s Sarah Goodyear points out, bad city design literally kills.

Car Law Justice Community Design Poverty

For the thousands of Americans who are detained in jail pending trial or plea bargain, the fundamental principles of due process of law and the presumption of innocence are virtually meaningless. 

Justice Fairness Law Procedural Justice Presumption of Innocence

A two-phased experiment tested the hypothesis that the presumption of guilt that underlies police interrogations activates a process of behavioral confirmation. In Phase I, 52 suspects guilty or innocent of a mock theft were questioned by 52 interrogators led to believe that most suspects were guilty or innocent. Interrogators armed with guilty as opposed to innocent expectations selected more guilt-presumptive questions, used more interrogation techniques, judged the suspect to be guilty, and exerted more pressure to get a confession—particularly when paired with innocent suspects. In Phase II, neutral observers listened to audiotapes of the suspect, interrogator, or both. They perceived suspects in the guilty expectations condition as more defensive—and as somewhat more guilty. Results indicate that a presumption of guilt sets in motion a process of behavioral confirmation by which expectations influence the interrogator's behavior, the suspect's behavior, and ultimately the judgments of neutral observers.

Justice Fairness Law Procedural Justice

A principle that requires the government to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant and relieves the defendant of any burden to prove his or her innocence.

The presumption of innocence, an ancient tenet of Criminal Law, is actually a misnomer. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence (Taylor v. Kentucky, 436 U.S. 478, 98 S. Ct. 1930, 56 L. Ed. 2d 468 [1978]). It is not considered evidence of the defendant's innocence, and it does not require that a mandatory inference favorable to the defendant be drawn from any facts in evidence.

Justice Fairness Law Procedural Justice

We posited that self-expressive moral positions or stands (moral mandates) are important determinants of how people reason about fairness. Supporting this notion, we found that (a) people see some trial outcomes in morally mandated terms, e.g., that the guilty must be convicted and punished, and the innocent must not; (b) convicting a defendant believed to be innocent or acquitting a defendant believed to be guilty were seen as unfair, regardless of whether the verdict was achieved by a fair or unfair investigation and trial (Study 1); and (c) a guilty defendant''s death was seen as equally fair, and an innocent defendant''s death was equally unfair, if it was achieved by a trial that led to the death penalty or by vigilantism (Study 2). Procedural propriety only mattered when defendant guilt was ambiguous.

Justice Law Fairness Procedural Justice

For the most part, state courts set their own recusal rules. According to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and Justice at Stake Campaign, so far, courts in nine states — Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington State — have made recusal mandatory when contributions by a party or attorney exceed a certain threshold amount or create a question about the judge’s impartiality.

Courts in two other states are considering similar proposals. But several other states have rejected stronger rules — or have actually weakened them.

Justice Recusation Law Capitalism

Medicine Science Law Jury Justice

The coalition will produce a farce of fairness
Posted by Sholto Byrnes - 31 October 2010 08:36
Exclusive: philosopher Ted Honderich calls for a general strike and mass disobedience to protest against a government of "petty careerists and PR men".

War Justice Fairness Public Relations Philosophy