Miscarriage of justice

So, to refresh your memories, back in early 2009 this guy named Brian Aitken was moving from Colorado to Hoboken, New Jersey, to be nearer his son, and taking his guns with him, locked and unloaded in his trunk as per New Jersey law.  He'd called ahead to NJ police to verify he was doing it correctly and legally.  But his mom was "concerned" that he "might be suicidal", apparently not on any reasonable grounds at all, just a helicopter-Mom thing, and called the police on him.  He got an asshole of a judge who ruled essentially all of the evidence in his defence inadmissable, and a jury that didn't have the gumption to do anything but convict as they were told anyway, and went to jail for a seven-year sentence for felony possession of firearms without a permit.  Gee, thanks a LOT, Mom.

So now, after letting Aitken rot in prison for much of 2009 and essentially the whole of 2010, a year after he "declined to re-appoint" (translation: fired) the judge who presided over the blatant mistrial, NJ Gov. Christie is getting all kinds of fawning by the press for being "just and merciful", and "conservatives will love him", because ... come on here, take a guess.  He pardoned Aitken and ordered his conviction expunged?  Nope, try again.  "Commuted his sentence to time served."

(No, the judge wasn't given his walking papers over Aitken's case.  He was fired over a case where he apparently felt animal-abuse charges were unnecessary in a case involving a NJ cop, the cop's dick, and five calves, because the calves might have been "merely bewildered".  Five calves?  Obvious jokes elided for reasons of taste.)

Hello?  So Brian Aitken serves only a year and a half out of seven for a crime he didn't commit, in which the judge essentially refused to allow the jury to see or hear any of the evidence in his defense, and for which he still has to fight to clear his name, and for this the media is hailing Governor Christie as the new Solomon?  Sure, it's a start, but it's too little, too late.  For crying out loud, the jury in the case asked three times to see the statute on the moving exemption that was key to the defense, and Judge Morley refused three times to hand it over.  Morley also did not allow the jury to hear that Aitken called NJ police in advance to be sure he was in compliance with the law, and additionally ruled inadmissible an officer's statement that boxes of clothes and dishes were found in the trunk of Aitken's car along with the legally-transported firearms, but allowed a prosecutor's assertion that Aitken hadn't actually proven that he was in the process of moving.  (What, don't you carry all your worldly possessions around with you everywhere you go?)  The hearing should have been declared a mistrial right there; Judge Morley was obstructing the course of justice in his own courtroom.

The State of New Jersey owes Brian Aitken, big time, and the fact that the Governor has tossed him out of prison with the felony conviction still around his neck to deal with is something to jeer him over for half measures, not cheer him for being a stalwart defender of justice.  But then, we are talking New Jersey; that's probably about as close to justice as any wrongly accused gun owner can get, there.

Personally, if I were Brian Aitken, I'd be planning to move back to Colorado, and offering a giant FUCK YOU! to the state of New Jersey the moment I crossed the state line.  I'd wish for him to sue the State of New Jersey until it bleeds from the ears, but ultimately it'd be New Jersey's taxpaying citizens who ended up paying the settlement.  (Then again, ultimately it's New Jersey's taxpaying citizens who let the state get as bad as it is in the first place.)

The only real good news here — aside from Brian Aitken not actually rotting in jail any longer — is that Aitken's case offers an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of New Jersey's gun laws under Heller and Macdonald.

"Heller and McDonald have changed the whole world," said [legal analyst Andrew] Napolitano, citing decisions in two cases in which the court affirmed an individual right to possess firearms.  "If you can have a gun in your home, then you have to be able to get the gun to your home."

Oh yeah, and Dear Mom?  You can shove it in your ear, too.

Revisiting the stopped-clock fallacy

Quick quiz (you've probably all heard it before):  Which is more accurate — a clock that runs five minutes fast, one that runs five minutes slow, or one that's stopped altogether?

The "classic", "conventional wisdom" answer, of course, is that the stopped clock is more accurate, because it shows the correct time twice a day.  But this is a fallacy, only technically true and only for a very narrow definition of "accurate".

Let's reconsider this question.

First of all, yes, it's true that the stopped clock (assuming it is a 12-hour clock) displays the correct time twice a day.  However, this is utterly useless, because you don't know when those two moments are.  You know that the clock is stopped at, say, 10:47.  But you don't know when the time really is 10:47, and the stopped clock won't tell you. The only way you can determine the two precise moments when the clock is displaying the correct time is to have another clock that's both working and accurate.  And then what do you need the stopped clock for?

Lacking a second clock, you're left with estimating what the time is to guess when the stopped clock is correct, and very few people can estimate the time of day to within five minutes.  (Most people can do no better than plus or minus fifteen to twenty minutes.)  Thus the real-world accuracy of the stopped clock is limited to how good your estimate, sans a working clock, of the correct time is.  In other words, it's exactly as "accurate" as not having a clock at all.  There are two ten-minute windows each day during which it is displaying a time that is closer to correct than either the five-minutes-fast or the five-minutes-slow clock; but you don't know exactly when they are.  You have only your own best estimate.

On the other hand, let's consider the fast and slow clocks.  If they are consistently fast or slow, and you know which, you can always add or subtract five minutes from the displayed time to get the correct time.  Even if you don't know whether you have the fast or the slow clock, or if the clock you have drifts randomly between five minutes fast and five minutes slow, you can look at it at any time of the day or night and know that it is always displaying within five minutes of the correct time.

The conventional wisdom says that the stopped clock is more "accurate" because it displays the correct time twice a day; but while the latter clause of that statement is technically true, it's irrelevant, because in the real world, where you have to guess when its two "correct" instants are, the stopped clock is never more usably accurate than not having a clock at all — while the fast, slow, and randomly-fast-or-slow clocks are all always accurate to within five minutes, which is three to four times more accurate than the average human's best unaided time estimate.

Yes, the "classic" answer is pithy and cute.  It's also complete rubbish.  It's like saying that blind unaimed random fire into the sky is always perfectly accurate because every bullet always lands on the precise spot that it hits.