Passing it to get a driver’s license?
3 Likes
In the beginning, they started offering a single major-- government.
I wouldn’t trust the alumni to thwart a Trumpian coup. Quite the opposite.
4 Likes
You tricked me into getting sucked into reading the Youtube comments 
but there’s one fairly good response thread there -
click to read the 4-comment thread:
In this exact case it has to be punishment and deterrence. Sorry, but this isn’t just a crime against some property, it is a terroristic act and deserves - demands - strong measures.
– Brian Smith
Bear in mind that vengeance and deterrence scale very differently. Vengeance is what scales with the damage a crime does to society. Deterrence scales with the benefits of the crime. So let’s look at the 6th under that lens, weighing what people hoped to gain by invading the capitol:
First, you have the people who just wanted some excitement, maybe some cool selfies, or to get on the news. Most seriously believed they wouldn’t get in trouble. These people are easily deterred by a fairly small punishment. They only acted because they thought there wouldn’t be a punishment, and the ‘gains’ were some pictures and a story. Not exactly a big score. Insurrection is a very destructive crime, but it’s not a very lucrative crime.
The vast majority of people who are just in it for the fame and money generally only jump in when they think it’s safe. The exception are people who are willing to suffer or even die for ‘a place in the history books’. Those people want harsh punishments. It makes their story and their name more memorable, which is what matters most to them. Trying to employ harsh deterrence against glory hounds only adds fuel to the fire.
Second, you have the true believers, who honestly thought they were saving the entire country from tyranny. To deter those people, you need a punishment worse than that. That’s why it’s generally understood that deterrence is not very effective on real terrorists. Terrorists (wrongly) see themselves as heroes, acting for the good of all, not just themselves. That’s why in extreme cases, these people wear bombs.
Now, there are punishments harsh enough to work as a deterrent on true terrorists, but they tend to involve things like going after the criminal’s family instead of the criminal themselves, or executing X random innocent civilians from towns sympathetic to the terrorists for every government official who was attacked. I do not recommend going down that road if you want to live in a healthy and peaceful society.
– Fal Leithani
To live in a healthy and peaceful society is what I desire but I live in the United States. The insurrectionists are emboldened every time they see a timid, weak or dilatory response from Justice. The zealots among them must be removed from society long enough for them to be forgotten. And they must see their orange cult leader humiliated beyond anything anyone has ever seen. This is the way a nation defends itself against an internal enemy, imo. They hit you, you hit them 10x harder. They must be defeated at their own game on their own terms or they will be back.
– Brian Smith
Okay. That’s a very popular idea, so let’s break it down and take a good hard look at it.
First, as a tactic, especially against terrorists, it’s not very effective. The whole goal of terrorism is to provoke an extreme reaction from the government. ‘Hitting them back 10x harder’ is usually exactly what they want, and not something you’ll find in any military or agency handbook. You might find it in a police handbook, but it’s the sort of police handbook used by officers like Derek Chauvin. Not exactly a pillar of justice, there.
The last time the U.S. government fully embraced the strategy of ‘They hit you, you hit them 10x harder’ against a group of well-intentioned extremists was during the Vietnam War. And just like all the modern manuals predicted, it added fuel to the fire. People who see themselves as heroes expect to face cruelty and brutality.
Second, in those rare cases when it does work, it literally works by crushing people’s spirits and snuffing out their hope. You take someone who thinks they’re good, and instead of trying to change their mind about what is good, you try to convince them that ‘evil’, as they see it, will always prevail, by literally adopting the tactics of cartoon villainy. Yeah, you’ve heard ‘we’ll hit them back ten times harder’ from lots of tough guys, probably mostly in fiction and politics, but I’d bet you’ve also heard it from villains and dictators, because it’s their bread and butter.
One of the things you should do in terms of success: If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit 'em back five times harder than they ever thought possible
– Donald Trump.He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. Fighting fascism with fascist tools and rhetoric is not a good idea. If the best idea you can come up with is crushing the opposition’s spirits with extreme suffering, you should probably take a step back from the abyss and ask yourself how a good person would try to tackle this problem.
Third, you said ‘They must be defeated at their own game on their own terms or they will be back.’ Must? Why? Is that really the best idea anyone has come up with, or is it just the only idea you’ve come up with? There are other, waaay more effective, safer options, which don’t sacrifice the moral high ground.
Actual anti-terrorism tactics, like carefully sabotaging and undermining leaders of their organizations who advocate violence and zealotry, and subtly bolstering those who favour negotiation and peaceful, lawful solutions. That can and does work. Has worked. Very well.
Rehabilitation and negotiation tactics work on people more extreme than the insurrectionists at the capitol. The US government extracts more effective intielligence from ISIS terrorists, more consistently, by negotiating and offering shelter and assistance and education to the families of those terrorists than they are able to extract through literal torture.
We’ve got options. Let’s avoid the ones which lead down the path of sinking to their level.
– Fal Leithani
Some interesting thoughts. I’m not so sure I agree with the “work within the (terrorists’) system to encourage them to favor peaceful negotiation” part.
But the part that the big majority are just there to be part of an experience - to get some selfies, maybe get on TV, have a cool story to tell, but not willing to die for it or kill for it, and that those people are relatively easily deterred, is a good one. Though it would be useful to make clear that a short 8-month sentence also means 8 months you can’t work or pay bills, probable loss of home and car and some relationships, etc. plus a permanent felony record. The people who would go along as part of the crowd are the type that likely would not think of all that until it’s too late. But it would sure deter them.
As for the really dangerous ones, assuming they would act anyway without the crowds of sightseers supporting them, I think that’s probably a case where Beau’s mention of locking them away so they can’t cause any more harm might just be the best option for everyone involved. But it can only be done after the fact.
There are a few talented negotiators who could play the “No, we’re the good guys and we’ll prove it to you by taking care of your family and making sure your personal needs are met if you don’t do that.” card. But I’d doubt there are enough, or that they’d be able to do it pre-emptively. ‘Turning’ a die-hard after the fact might be useful, since they might be able to turn some of their followers, but on the other hand their followers might just decide that they’re a traitor/sellout and weak, and start following another die-hard.
3 Likes
Wonderful! So not TL;DR!
There’s been folks like the Jan. 6. rioters ever since humans began walking upright and disagreeing with their fellows, I would think. So we just gotta keep on doing the best we can with what we’ve got.
I STILL think that Esptein’s Island is the place for them. But is there enough room?
1 Like
Apparently there’s a point where “I smelled marijuana so the search wasn’t unreasonable” is still not quite enough to give a cop a pass.
The Court agrees with Gray that it is incredible that Officer Hiser—who self-admittedly does not have a heightened olfactory system—could smell the scent of two resealable sandwich sized plastic baggies of unburnt marijuana coming from a moving vehicle when patrolling in his cruiser. This occurrence is not only contrary to any common experiences, but is “implausible” and seemingly "contrary to the laws of nature. "
6 Likes
5 Likes
Lithwick’s reaction is scathing.
8 Likes
5 Likes
But Molina seemed an odd choice for the honor, primarily because he didn’t work a single day in 2020. He spent the entire year on paid administrative leave that ultimately lasted 19 months — from September 2019 to April 2021, according to Tom Madruga, a contract attorney for the city.
You see, Molina was suspended for spending more than a year working a single child abuse investigation that “yielded little work product.” And he couldn’t even manage to not move this investigation forward during regular work hours. He racked up 42 hours of overtime not getting the job done, adding another $4,400 to the taxpayers’ tab for services un-rendered.
The case was pulled from Molina and handed to another detective, Pedro Yanez. Yanez closed the case in 44 days and the two suspects are now awaiting trial.
5 Likes
In one exchange, Justice Laura Denvir Stith asked Assistant Attorney General Frank Jung, “Are you suggesting … even if we find that Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?”
“That is correct, your honor,” Jung said.
The court disagreed, and Amrine was exonerated. But the Missouri attorney general’s office has fought to maintain convictions in potential innocence cases.
6 Likes
2 Likes
How can I “like” the last three posts?
We need more buttons.
2 Likes
I think the 
can also mean “thank you” or sometimes “hi.”
3 Likes
The new york times gave him an exit interview:
The immediate reason for his retirement was less abstract, he said. He had become concerned with the plight of litigants who represented themselves in civil cases, often filing handwritten appeals. Their grievances were real, he said, but the legal system was treating them impatiently, dismissing their cases over technical matters.
“These were almost always people of poor education and often of quite low level of intelligence,” he said. “I gradually began to realize that this wasn’t right, what we were doing.”
So either he had changed his opinion-- very possible, or he was playing devil’s advocate, also possible.
The cited passage comes from this book:
not at my library.
2 Likes
found a copy online: http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/50818/1/3.pdf
full quote, omitting footnotes, from page 162
Let us look more closely at the expanded right to counsel. Although most criminal defendants are indigent, the annual expense of providing lawyers for all indigent criminal defendants, state and federal, is only $1.4 billion.145 This is less than $6 per American per year. Granted, the agure of $1.4 billion is an understatement. Some lawyers are pressured by judges into “volunteering” their services to indigent criminal defendants at be- low-market rates. (Others truly volunteer their services, but do so either to obtain on-the-job training or as genuine charity; in neither case is there a net cost to the volunteer.) Still, the total costs of defending the indigent are small—but these are only the direct, budgetary costs. A represented defendant is more difacult to convict than an unrepresented one, so the provision of representation to indigent criminal defendants makes the criminal justice system more costly, and possibly less effective in deterring crime.
I say “possibly less effective” because a system of criminal justice in which innocent persons are frequently convicted may actually reduce the expected punishment cost of crime. That cost is net of the expected punishment cost of not engaging in crime. In the limit, if the probability of being convicted were independent of guilt or innocence, the prospect of punishment would not provide any inducement to avoid committing crimes.146 But it is unclear that the denial of an automatic right to counsel in criminal cases would result in frequent conviction of the innocent. When the crime rate is high in relation to the resources allocated for prosecution, prosecutors will tend to select for prosecution only the strongest cases, and in general these will be the cases in which the defen- dant is least likely to be innocent. This selection effect will be weaker in a nation that follows the German practice of mandatory prosecution rather than the U.S. practice of discretionary prosecution, or if the nation con- tains a disliked minority that has a high crime rate. In that case it may be easier to convict an innocent member of the minority group than a guilty member of the majority. This was a serious problem in the southern states of the United States with respect to blacks as late as the 1950s and was an unacknowledged motive for the Supreme Court’s expanding the rights of criminal defendants; it is a much less serious problem today.147
An extensive literature criticizes as inadequate the current level at which the defense of indigent criminal defendants in the United States is funded, noting the low quality of much of this representation.148 I can confirm from my own experience as a judge that indigent defendants are generally rather poorly represented. But if we are to be hardheaded we must recog- nize that this may not be entirely a bad thing. The lawyers who represent indigent criminal defendants seem to be good enough to reduce the probability of convicting an innocent person to a very low level. If they were much better, either many guilty people would be acquitted or society would have to devote much greater resources to the prosecution of criminal cases. A bare-bones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendants may be optimal. But here is a complicating factor. If constitutional law entitles a defendant to effective assistance of counsel, as it is now interpreted to do, then paying lawyers too little to attract competent lawyers to the defense of indigent defendants may cost the system more in the long run by leading to retrials following a determination that the defendant’s lawyer at his first trial was incompetent.
These are difficult issues, and I do not pretend to have resolved them by this brief discussion. (I may, for example, be unduly complacent about the unlikelihood of an innocent person’s being convicted.)149 I raise them in order to underscore the shortcomings of constitutional theory, of which the most grievous is blindness to the consequences of constitutional rulings.
So many assumptions!
3 Likes
In that case it may be easier to convict an innocent member of the minority group than a guilty member of the majority. This was a serious problem in the southern states of the United States with respect to blacks as late as the 1950s and was an unacknowledged motive for the Supreme Court’s expanding the rights of criminal defendants; it is a much less serious problem today.
“was a problem??”
2 Likes
his source is Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, and the Law. The cited section describes a series of early civil rights decisions including Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935) and Powell v. Alabama 287 U.S. 45 (1932) It was generally well regarded, but Paul Butler’s review (COLOR) BLIND FAITH: THE TRAGEDY OF RACE, CRIME, AND THE LAW is quite scathing.
Half of the young black men residing in Washington, D.C. - the capital of the freest nation in the world - are in prison or under the supervision of the criminal courts.2 This ugly fact was reported a few months after Randall Kennedy published Race, Crime, and the Law.3 The timing would occasion no regret from Professor Kennedy, however - he all but ignored the equally bleak statistics that were available to him at the time he was writing. As far as Kennedy is concerned, the extraordinary rate of incarceration of African-Americans is not a racial issue. Reading Race, Crime, and the Law, which the white legal establishment has hailed as the seminal work on race and crime,4 it would be hard to understand why many African-Americans believe they live in a police state. Even upon careful examination of the book’s 538 pages, one finds no citation to the extraordinary evidence: half of prison inmates are black;s almost half of the women in state prison are black;6 nationally, nearly one-third of young black men are either in prison, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial;7 more young black men are in prison than in college.8 One might think that those facts would command substantial attention in a treatise that purports to “recount, make vivid, and explain” the circumstances that cause African-Americans to “perceive the criminal justice system with suspicion, if not antagonism” (p. x).9 The book’s author, however, seems to believe that they are irrelevant.
Not the most reliable source.
Still, perhaps there is something to be said about the public undervaluing the societal cost of “incompetent” lawyers. If wrongful convictions were to instead cost the state hundreds of millions in damages…
4 Likes
1 Like
The pair, both lawyers, appeared briefly at last year’s Republican National Convention, and Mr McCloskey has announced plans to run for a US Senate seat in Missouri.
“When the angry mob came to destroy my house and kill my family, I took a stand against them,” he reportedly said in a recent campaign video. “I will never back down.”
1 Like