Proofiness - Charles Seife [87]
This is just a ballpark figure, of course, but it’s probably not so far from the truth. A handful of studies have attempted to come up with a firm number for wrongful convictions, and they yield similar figures. For example, a 2007 paper looked at convicts who had been convicted of raping and murdering a victim and then were subsequently cleared by DNA evidence—a sure sign of a wrongful conviction. The data implied that between 3 and 5 percent of those convictions were in error.
Scalia’s image of a nearly perfect judiciary, one that falsely convicts a felon only 0.027 percent of the time, is absurd. He knows it too. Scalia is sophisticated enough to understand how flawed the judicial system must be. He no doubt realizes that a human endeavor as messy and subjective as a criminal trial would not be correct 99 percent, much less 99.97 percent, of the time as he claimed. Scalia was almost certainly aware that Marquis’s figure was a Potemkin number, but he used it anyhow.
Scalia’s proofiness served a definite and cynical purpose. The ugly fact that the justice system is imperfect, the possibility that as many as 5 percent of the people who are on death row are not guilty of the crime they committed, is damning for proponents of capital punishment. The sheer number of errors in our courts make the finality of an execution—of an irreversible mistake—hard to justify. The only way around that hard fact is to pretend it isn’t so. Scalia used his Potemkin number to construct an alternate reality. In this parallel universe, the justice system is nearly flawless. No undeserving innocent is ever put to death. And each night, judges sleep with dreams untroubled.
8
Propaganda by the Numbers
Modern man needs a relation to facts, a self-justification to convince himself that by acting in a certain way, he is obeying reason and proved experience. . . . The problem is to create an irrational response on the basis of rational and factual elements. That response must be fed with facts, those frenzies must be provoked by rigorously logical proofs.
—Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
Every afternoon at five o’clock, in a reinforced building a few blocks from the Saigon River, the Pentagon pelted the press with numbers, hoping to convince them that the United States was winning the Vietnam War.
It wasn’t enough for generals to declare that the war was being won. Reporters were far too cynical about human nature to take a military official at his word. Journalists demand objective facts, verifiable truths that they can use to prop up a sagging story. So the Pentagon began providing them.
Hamlet Evaluation System
Figure 16. The United States marches toward victory in Vietnam, according to the Hamlet Evaluation System.
The briefings were a jumble of numbers and statistics. Officers and officials recited a litany of body counts, numbers of weapons captured, head counts of troops in different theaters—any quantifiable information that could help prove that American forces were making progress, no matter how ridiculous the numbers were. The Pentagon invented a “Hamlet Evaluation System” to quantify how much of the South Vietnamese countryside was “pacified”—under U.S. and South Vietnamese control—and proudly reported the numbers to the press. Each month, the numbers ticked up, showing that government forces were slowly winning the war. Year after year, the number of hamlets under control dutifully kept climbing and the number of Vietcong-controlled hamlets kept dropping, demonstrating slow and steady progress until our inevitable defeat burst the balloon.
The savvier journalists, the ones who got away from Saigon and visited the troops in the field, saw that the situation was steadily deteriorating, not getting better. They realized that official-sounding statistics