Judicial and Prosecutorial Control of Lying by the Police

Zeedox

Resident Canadian
Dec 1, 2020
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Canada's Ocean Playground

Allowing a court to take into account a pattern of lying or institutional failure to take corrective action, in deciding whether to exclude the evidence, or as a basis for having a reasonable doubt (assuming Ghorvei is no longer followed), would encourage systemic change because it would put an onus on the police to address the problem or face the prospect of serious cases being thrown out of court.
 
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Not done reading it yet, but this really stands out:

Why do so many police officers lie? There are several obvious answers. Most obvious is the fact they are human beings. They do it because they believe they are doing the right thing, that the end justifies the means. They do it because they didn’t understand how to do the job correctly and honestly in the first place. They do it because, like any group made up of human beings, some are lazy and look for shortcuts, some are too proud to admit they are wrong and some are simply dishonest.​
 
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And here's the really, really big one:

First, we permit lawyers to call witnesses to impeach the credibility of other witnesses. This is done on reputation, which is often grounded in nothing more than hearsay and rumours. No ability to test the foundation of the opinion is permitted by our jurisprudence.​
The most recent of these is the Chauvin trial. Most of the "expert" witnesses that were called had absolutely no first hand knowledge of the case at all. They all read what others had written and then voiced their "expert" opinions.

The defense "experts" were laughable at best. In reality, I would categorize them as perjurers for hire. Their conclusions were completely contrary to any common sense, let along medical fact.

But you pay someone enough, they'll testify as an "expert" witness to the fact a cow can literally jump over the moon given the appropriate settings.
 
Oh boy...and here it is:

Under the new system, if a judge makes findings or comments that an officer was deliberately untruthful, or the Crown attorney has reasonable evidence that the officer was lying, the trial prosecutor must report it to his local manager. From there, the supervising Crown will review the case file and court transcripts to see if there are grounds to believe the officer deliberately lied. If there are grounds, the case gets forwarded to a regional director, who makes the decision whether to send the case to police for investigation.​
And this is the very situation we have right now in the States. If there's evidence of some sort of lying or tampering with evidence or violation of police procedure, it's the very police that committed the act that investigate it.

That's the very problem: You have police investigating the police to see if the police lied. They all have at one point or another, so they all create the "thin blue line" which actually amounts to "you cover my ass and I'll cover yours".

That is exactly where we are right now. If that's your "new" system to come, go ahead and trash it because we have that very system and it CLEARLY doesn't work.

In fact, it creates the very avenue to allow even more lying and covering it up to take place.
 
I said for over 20 years, any oversight committee where the majority membership is ex-professionals of that group or one in which it inter-acted with, isn't worth it's weight in salt.

Police oversight committees (with termination rights), in particular, should never have more ex-police, ex-judicial, and ex-lawyers as the majority John-Doe members.
 
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