Barbara O’Brien on Race, Reform and Wrongful Conviction Rate Estimates- #30

Our guest, Barbara O’Brien, explains why we don’t know much about conviction error outside of murder cases, making error rates for the vast majority of crimes: misdemeanors, sexual assaults, armed robbery, etc. a “dark ocean”. She explains factors that contribute to wrongful convictions including mistaken cross-racial identification in sexual assault cases. Barbara also talks about the surprising frequency of “rain damage” to evidence rooms and why Texas leads the way in both executions and criminal justice reform. The two consider why having your death sentence commuted to life in prison means you are actually less likely to ever to be released.ResourcesTranscriptBarbara O’Brien (Faculty Profile)The National Registry Of Exonerations Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.