Justice

[Julian-Dumitrascu]

It seems useful to communicate about anything, e.g. about any deed or happening. Sometimes people avoid communicating about a deed of theirs for which others can make them incur some cost.

1. How have people reacted when someone said / wrote that they had done something that people don’t like? Sometimes people don’t like deeds that cause others costs to which they haven’t agreed. One can call this “abuse”. One can agree with another human or abuse them. Example: One can agree with others on how they manage some resources together, or just use some resources. Example.
   1.1 They caused psychological costs to that person.
   1.2 They hit that person.
   1.3 They damaged some of that person’s goods.
   1.4 They took away some of that person’s goods.
   1.5 They took away some of that person’s titles to goods or other rights of theirs.
   1.6 They sequestered that person.
   1.7 They killed that person.
   Such things can happen to people whom one labels as “wrongdoers”. This can mean that we have been trying to increase the costs of abusing people, maybe hoping that people would prefer activities with higher benefit-cost ratios.

2. What doesn’t one find desirable?
   2.1 Being killed.
   People usually want to live. More than 700,000 people kill themselves every year (0.008%).
   It was estimated that 464,000 people were victims of intentional homicide in 2017 and 230,238 in 2021. The average number: 347,119 per year
   In 2019, the top 10 causes of death accounted for 55% of the 55.4 million deaths worldwide: 30.47 million deaths. The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with three broad topics:
   -- cardiovascular conditions: ischaemic heart disease (8.9 million) and stroke (6.1 million)
   -- respiratory conditions: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lower respiratory infections
   -- neonatal conditions: birth asphyxia and trauma, neonatal sepsis and infections, and preterm birth complications
   7 of the 10 leading causes of deaths in 2019 were non-communicable diseases. These seven causes accounted for 44% of all deaths: 24,376,000 deaths However, all non-communicable diseases together accounted for 74% of deaths in 2019: 40,996,000 deaths.
   Since non-communicable diseases are the main people killer, we can treat them first.
   2.2 Being harmed.
   2.3 Being robbed.

3. Is our “justice” some kind of retaliation?
   How much have we tried to understand the causes of illegal actions, so that we make such deeds less probable?
   What are some common views of the world?
   How do we want to live?
   How realistic are we?
   I like it when the risk of harmful actions is so small that people leave their gates, their windows, and even their doors open. I’ve lived like this for many years. How are we going to live from now on? People seem to have started war after war for a century.

4. They call “confession” one’s statement about one having done something illegal.
   While we can be influenced by statements, they are different from facts.

One can focus on differences between what is and what we perceive, but in this message I’m focusing on data as our perceptions of reality. Instead of asking how sure one can be that a witness’s senses or some recordings show an action as it happened, I focus on using these means to understand what happened. I’m trying to think with you about how well we can administer justice.

It seems that we sometimes pass sentences based on statements that (can) form an understandable account of actions that can have results sensed by legal personnel, witnesses, and jurors.
We try to understand actions using records and recordings, too.
Although there don’t seem to be resources for recording videos for many decades, recordings seem the most reliable proof. They usually don’t show an entire story and have other weaknesses, too. When it is probable that they provide real data about what somebody did where when, they can be used as proofs.
Records can show especially how a computer (program) was used and help piece together the parts of the story. To the extent they show who gave them certain commands, they can provide some proof.
We try to estimate how probable it is that a spoken or written statement is true. It doesn’t seem easy to fight one’s bias to believe every word. It is useful to help people involved in any way in the story on which a court is going to pass judgment to remember and tell or write parts of the story.
To the extent that records and recordings are reliable because nobody has manipulated them to favour e.g. the plaintiff or the defendant, how do we make it more probable that we understand how truthful a statement is, even if someone is not trying to lie?
How do we make it more probable to consider sufficient data before we give a sentence or make a decision?
What can we do about the many cases in which no participant in a story is considered a witness? If there is no witness and (almost) no evidence, why do they tell different stories?
Experts in law or psychology and anybody else is welcome to this conversation, which can result in an improvement in legal services.