They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.

  - 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.

I'm surprised they'd even need to say that, let alone people who heard it were just learning it. I would imagine the overwhelming majority of cases don't involve forensic evidence. I've only had close involvement in a handful of cases that resulted in a conviction, but none involved forensic evidence. In one they took fingerprints (and the handle to our cash drawer, which they never returned), but that didn't result in a conviction.

Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?

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

Individuals don’t require exoneration in court.

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.

> If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

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

This just means that you can't insist someone is innocent despite overwhelming evidence just because they didn't leave any forensic evidence behind which is completely reasonable.

I mean...yeah?

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.

Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.

I mean of course if not 10,000 people could stand in a room, watch someone murder another, and then all 10,000 come and testify exactly who it was and what the jury would not be allowed to convict?

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure.

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

Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.

Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago.

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.

I have on at least two occasions forgotten my phone in my car at highly inconvenient times... One of which was just before a flight, for a vacation. I was amazed it had any battery life at all when I got back.

Yes, this stuff does happen to real people doing normal things.

This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.

This smells like an urban myth.

The individual who would prosecute them also needs to work with them to prosecute civilians. So pretty much, so long as it isn't murder.

Doesn't parallel construcction mean that judges actually don't care how evidence was collected? They can't possibly care that much if they are fine with a fig leaf like parallel construction.

There is no good faith protection once the case law is set.

Apparently, the legal understanding is that the Fourth Amendment doesn't guarantee some right that illegally obtained evidence can't be used against you (it merely guarantees that those obtaining the evidence illegally will be punished).

The reason why evidence obtained illegally is generally suppressed is to act as a deterrent to the Government. Even if individual officers were willing to risk their own punishment for illegal search or seizure (say, maybe they believe they are acting for the greater good), the evidence will generally be suppressed so that there is no rational gain from these illegal actions.

However, if the officers who obtained the evidence illegally were acting under good faith, then there is no deterrence obtained from suppressing the evidence they obtained. They did not act to illegally obtain evidence, in a way that they might be deterred from doing again if the evidence is suppressed - they thought they were collecting the evidence legally so they would do this again. So, in this case, there is no point in suppressing the evidence - no one is harmed by it being admitted (because, again, the Fourth Amendment doesn't promise you that illegally obtained evidence would not be used against you, it just promises that the Government will do all it can to avoid illegal search and seizure).

Because the police got a warrant, exactly as this decision now says was required.

And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.

This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

According to the ruling, the exposure of your location history is the automatic price of conventional cell-phone usage—which, just as Carpenter noted, is a "pervasive and insistent part of daily life."

If we can't step out of our houses or drive to the doctor without that fact getting placed into a searchable database, then I'd argue that it qualifies as a "pervasive and insistent part of daily life."

I think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store, with prominent disclosure to people entering.

I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.

> Should they not be allowed to do that?

If that camera system is closed-circuit and its data is restricted to the premises they should be permitted to do that.

If the data from that camera system [0] can be removed from the premises by anything less than a search warrant or court order, then no, they should not be permitted to do that.

I know this isn't how the relevant laws work now, but they haven't been adequately updated to account for radical changes in the ability for companies to perform mass surveillance.

[0] ...whether raw or "processed" by -say- a "customer analytics" software... [1]

[1] Want a count of the day's customers? Check register receipts. Want to know what displays are most popular? Ask your employees, or employ someone to take notes. etc, etc, etc.

Try walking around a grocery store with your phone and take a picture of every person you pass. See how they react.

That's the expectation people have for privacy.

Japan, for example.

You can easily look up which other countries strictly enforce personality rights in public spaces and see for yourself, I'm not here to service you.

I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince

When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.

Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.

She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.

Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.

> can't setup genuinely independent agencies

The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.

I agree that motive is likely in at least one justice. But at the same time, if they really wanted to get back to original principles, they would have to take a wrecking ball to virtually every agency without being able to provide any substitute for the load bearing bits. I think these artificially narrow rulings are what some of the justices think is the middle ground to work in that direction without bringing the roof down. Thomas in particular has advocated for simply taking out the walls and trusting congress and the states will somehow fix everything and it isn't their problem. I think his opinions have occasionally been horribly flawed, but I see his vision and get what he is hoping for. I suspect something like that is the only way a representative democracy could recur in the US. Right now, states with strong geographic bents towards authoritarianism can use power of the federal executive to strengthen their position. If the federal executive had no agencies and was powerless the way Thomas suggests, those states wouldn't have much impact. But that entails acknowledging the entirety of the federal bureaucracy is unconstitutional and creating all sorts of power vacuums. Who knows how that would turn out? I increasingly think it couldn't be worse than the likely end state of a federal autocracy if we don't.

People are maximally incentivized to be right because of the monetary risk and reward.

A 94% odds indicates an extremely high likelihood that something is going to happen. It's relevant because it's a different, additional perspective than whatever a news article says.

It's a 2500℅ ROI if it's not struck down, so I would encourage you to bet if you think the outcome will be no.

Presumably the justices (or their clerks) have told their friends how they're going to rule, and their friends have told their friends, and that's made the market. Or that's supposed to be the value prop of Polymarket.

There's precedent. Roberts was so angry that someone leaked the Dobbs decision that he spearheaded the investigation that found that nobody would admit to leaking and there's nothing they can do.

Because Polymarket is full of corrupt folks with insider information. Trump Jr. Is a senior advisor to Polymarket. Iran admitted they would observe Polymarket bets during the height of the war to see when they were next likely to get bombed.