Crime and Punishment

Fighting From the Stern Castle

by

Venturing out to sea on boats during the bad old days of Viking culture was tantamount to suicide.

Their longboats were marvels of engineering. Shallow draft so they could travel up rivers, yet also able to operate in the open ocean, they were the perfect craft for lightning commando raids. They were also fast enough that they could catch any ship the Vikings could see, using oars for propulsion while larger ships were at the mercy of the wind.

If a band of Vikings set their sights on taking a ship, there wasn’t anything the merchant skippers of the day could do to prevent a screaming group of northmen from swarming aboard.

But then some nameless genius, or more likely a group of geniuses, came up with a brilliant idea. If it was impossible to prevent the Vikings from boarding, why not build ships where the crew could fight them after the pirates were on deck?

This simple concept led to a ship known as the Cog, or cog-built ships.

Ironically, the general design was adapted from the Vikings own merchant vessels, but there were two changes that proved to make all the difference. The European ship builders constructed little wooden forts in the front and rear of the ship. They called these wooden castles the “stern castle” for the one in back, and the “forward castle”, or “fo’c’sle”. Quaint names that echo with past blood and terror.

The idea was to let the Vikings come aboard if they so chose, while the crew retreated to their forts. The pirates would be out in the open, vulnerable to any sort of attack, while the crew fought from relative safety.

Read more

Even Russian Admirals Have to Take on Odd Jobs to Make Ends Meet

by

A recent post at Strategypage.com tells a sordid tale of double dealing.

“Russian police caught a group of naval officers (including at least two admirals) trying to smuggle 30 anti-submarine missiles and 200 bombs to China.”

The idea was to mislabel currently used weapons as obsolete, and then sell them to China so Beijing could reverse-engineer the technology. This news article gives us some more details.

It would seem that the Russians have been uncovering various criminal plots in their military with astonishing regularity over the past few years. While they have always struggled with corruption and graft, it would appear that things have really taken off.

“Over 400 Russian military officers were convicted of criminal offenses in 2008, army prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky reports in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper (Rus). The offending officers included 76 base commanders, and around 300 were senior staff, including 20 generals.”

The Russian military took it on the chin after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990’s. The economy was in turmoil, and funding for the troops was pretty much non-existent. Stories of how the armed forces were crumbling, such as how army bases would go dark because the electric bill wasn’t paid, were legion.

But that was supposed to be all in the past, as Russian oil and natural gas sales to an energy starved Europe revitalized the ruble and brought the good times back. Those who think that the recent US economic turmoil is forcing Russian generals to turn to crime as a desperate measure to stave off starvation should consider that the internal investigations to root out corruption started well before our own recession. And, as this op-ed from the UK Telegraph explains, Russia certainly had so much cash as late as October of 2008 that they offered a huge bailout loan to Iceland. A recent post at Strategypage.com reinforces the impression that the Russian government is going to keep spending money on the military, no matter how bad the global economic downturn.

This is probably the barely visible signs of a massive bureaucratic conflict that is raging between entrenched officers in the military, and the government at large. This essay mentions in passing that Putin has been trying to forcibly retire officers who are left over from an antiquated mobilization system, but the generals are refusing to go.

“The Army officer corps has stalemated the massive Defense Ministry reforms. This has delayed the forced retirement of thousands of senior officers. The officer corps wants to retain the 19th century “mobilization army” system. This requires conscription of most of the male population, and maintaining those men in reserve units (which are commanded by thousands of well paid senior officers). Russian leader Vladimir Putin sees this system as unworkable. Too many young men evade the draft and the country cannot afford to equip up to a hundred reserve divisions. Moreover, Russian nuclear weapons protect the country from invasion, and what the country needs is a smaller armed forces manned by professionals. But the officer corps is having none of it, and are digging in their heels, and calling in political favors.”

It seems to me that this is a case of “Use it or lose it”. The officers facing forced retirement, looking at their remaining decades spent as poor pensioners clipping coupons for dog food, realize that they only have a limited time to use their positions to cash in. Sell military technology to the Chinese and become a traitor to The Motherland? As long as a big pile of cash is on the table, then sign them up!

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Imagine

by

What would happen if the police chief of a major city in the United States was kidnapped, tortured, and executed by criminals?

I’m asking because something like that occurred in Mexico over the weekend.

The operations against the Mexican drug cartels is entering the third year. They are calling it The Cartel War.

Anyone planning on a vacation in Cancun this year? I hear accommodations are cheap and spring break is only a few months away.

(Hat tip to Murdoc.)

The Law in the Real World

by

Daniel J. Solove wrote a short essay titled “Why the Innocent Are Punished More Harshly Than the Guilty”. His position is that wrongly accused innocent people will, at least sometimes, refuse plea bargains and reduced sentence deals. Instead they will simply insist on their innocence, which will lead to harsher sentences than if they played ball and admitted guilt.

Jonathan wrote a cut-and-paste post of his own, agreeing that our criminal justice system is terribly outdated, woefully inaccurate, and completely unreliable. (Paraphrased for dramatic effect, of course.)

This set off a little back and forth in the comments. Since law enforcement is an interest of mine, I decided to chime in. My remarks soon became too large for a simple comment, so I decided it might be more useful to write a post of my own.

The first comment I want to discuss is by Shannon Love. He runs the numbers an concludes that our justice system works pretty well most of the time, but might be improved if judges were allowed to empower panels of experts to ensure that only reliable scientific testimony is admitted.

This is actually something I come across fairly regularly when someone finds out that I used to work in law enforcement. “Why don’t the cops have this piece of equipment, why doesn’t the courts do things this way?” As Lexington Green points out in his own comment, there just isn’t enough money to do everything. And there never is going to be, since expectations rise as technology increases capabilities. As the system can accomplish more, the public will demand more. And the media isn’t helping any.

Take the popular television drama CSI, where a PhD and a group of others with advanced degrees work the night shift. Just how much money does it take to lure such a dream team away from their studies, anyway? And this is just the graveyard shift! Is Stephen Hawking working the daylight hours?

Forget adding to the burden on the budget by advocating new programs. We can’t afford what is on our plate’s now.

Ginny points out that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, but she is not too crazy about living in a world that encourages us not to believe our “lying eyes.” She also thinks it might be a bad idea to get rid of it. Jonathan says “Eyewitness testimony is not reliable. Everyone knows this except, it appears, lawyers.”

It just so happens that I’ve recently discussed that very thing on my own blog. Bottom line is that the vagaries of eyewitness testimony is extremely frustrating to the professionals who choose a career in law enforcement, but it really is something the system can’t do without. The reason why is that juries always want to to listen to someone who was there, even if it is some flight of fancy. Get a criminal dead to rights, with a non-existent alibi and fingerprints all over the corpse, and you can still have a shaky case unless you can get someone to say that they saw them do the deed.

Harsh reality dictates that no one on the enforcement side of the law cares if the witness really saw what they say they saw, it only matters if the jury will believe. Educating lawyers on basic science would be pointless since their job is only to convince the jury that the science is correct if it bolsters their case, or to convince them that it is suspect if it harms their defense.

Educating juries, now. That might do something.

On that same comment, Jonathan also says “…there is a non-trivial percentage of convictions of innocent people, about which prosecutors profess unbelief even in the face of incontravertible DNA evidence.”

I’m not really sure what he means by that. If Shannon Love’s figures are correct, then only a tiny percentage of death penalty cases are overturned by re-examining the DNA evidence. Is anything less than a 100% confidence rate unacceptable?

If so, I’m afraid that Jonathan is not being very realistic. It is an imperfect world, and violent crime is usually a chaotic and frenzied act that the guilty will desperately try to deny any responsibility for. The standard of “beyond reasonable doubt” recognizes this basic flaw in the fabric of the world, and it is really the best we can do.

(I can’t say for sure how many capital cases are overturned by DNA evidence, or even how many cases have seen the evidence re-examined, because there doesn’t seem to be any statistics on this issue. Groups in favor of abolishing the death penalty claim that no one should be executed because some cases are overturned, which isn’t an argument I find particularly compelling because they like to lump in instances where someone was freed on procedural grounds. This muddies the water further, and I really can’t see any clear picture here.)

The British Police Are Sifting Through Facebook

by

The headline reads “Police tackle Internet knife gangs“, but it is completely false.

It seems that the cops in the UK are looking at profiles in Facebook and other popular Internet sites. If they see a picture of someone posing with a knife, a picture taken in a public place, then they go arrest the miscreant. It would appear that simply having a knife in public is enough to have the full weight and power of the law come down on your head. The police can arrest you, and the courts will convict you, even if there isn’t any reason for them to suspect you are up to no good with that knife.

It is legal to own knives as long as you keep them at home, but that doesn’t stop the cops. Even though no law has been broken, they still will lecture the poor knife owning bastard and confiscate his legally bought and held possession.

Notice, if you will, that there is no hint that a gang is involved. The cops are targeting people who want to look tough in a picture on a social networking site, not criminals. What gang? Where are the gangs? There aren’t even any “Internet gangs”, just some isolated kids!

Let us consider this as yet another reason why I thank God every day that I was born an American.

(Hat tip to Milo, who seems to have morphed into my go-to info source for British government overreach.)