Morning Ed: Law & Order {2018.08.29.W}
[LO1] This does a pretty good job of explaining how you can screw up a self-defense case.
[LO2] Gotta watch where you put your hands.
[LO3] I can understand how hard it might have been to resist the jokes, but you have to resist the jokes. Seriously.
[LO4] It can be hard to convince women to step forward with accusations when they’re not taken seriously when they do.
[LO5] As a newborn, Paul Fronzcak was stolen from his parents by a woman dressed as a nurse. Over a year later, Paul Fronczak was found abandoned and given to the Fronzcak’s. But it wasn’t the same baby.
[LO6] This is pretty crazy. It’s also interesting that most of the trouble areas are in the south. I’d assumed they were closer to us.
[LO7] Walmart is coming down on shoplifters. Even some who aren’t actually shoplifters.
[LO8] He was very, very sorry.
[LO9] An in-depth look at the prison strike.
[LO0]
Anytime you feel life isn't nice, remember this Brazilian prisoner who dug an escape tunnel for 5 years only to burst out in a Guard Room. pic.twitter.com/1B71odY3w6
— Omaram_ (@Omaram41333816) August 27, 2018
LO3: as if I needed any more reasons not to fly again. Ugh. Planes need brigs that people can be put in.
LO7: That’s kind of terrifying. I find myself wondering how isolated these cases are. I admit I have enough money that if I were approached, told, “you can go to trial and maybe get your life ruined, or pay $200 to make this go away,” even though I knew I was in the right, I’d probably write the check.
Also tells me not to use the self-checkouts any more even if it means waiting in line longer. (We don’t have the option of “order online and pickup” in my town; i think the local Mart of Wal has too few employees for that and too much employee turnover)
Crikey, we really do live in a dystopia now.Report
[LO1] Good read. Starts with making me wonder how in the world he could be guilty of a crime, and left me wondering why he didn’t serve more time.
[LO7] Poorly written NYTimes; reads like a Pollock painting with various pieces of stories and half-anecdotes splattered throughout. Left with way too many questions for an informative piece and with a deep sense of foreboding about shopping offline.Report
Yeah, re [LO1] I was expecting him to have been in the clear except he said some dumb shit to a cop or something, and then I got to him waiting in a tent for the burglars to return….Report
It’s sort of a guide to everything one can do to mess up a self-defense claim, all in one case.
And it’s stories like this that make me skeptical of headlines like “I was just minding my own business”.Report
Yeah, particularly since the first part of the linked story appears to be based on the media coverage, and the important details brought up in the second part were provided by the prosecutor after judgment.Report
LO5: There is a theory that the infant Paul Fronzcak might have been kidnapped by Linda Taylor, better known to history as the Welfare Queen. The link is a very long but really fascinating look into a truly toxic sociopath.Report
LO6: The correlation’s not perfect, but to a considerable extent this follows the population distribution. For the most part, the areas of Mexico close to the US are quite empty. And are looking even emptier as we get better data. The general topic of showing maps that don’t control for population in some fashion is becoming a hot-button item for me. Over the last couple of months I’ve seen maps for several US things — eg, school violence incidents, location of hate groups — that are almost dead ringers for simplified population dot maps.Report
LO1: Once the fact that the guy was setting up in ambush was established, I knew where the rest of the case was going to go. You would think that if a person was setting up to catch a crook, they’d have done at least a cursory check of state and local law to figure out their limits.
LO2: I can watch that video all day. Although she’s lucky the video caught the grab so clearly.
LO3: If they are joking about it, it’s a common enough occurrence that the gallows humor has kicked, which means… Ewwww!
LO4: I didn’t read the whole article, but if it wasn’t in there, I am sure that the PDs will soon be requesting more money so they can handle sexual assault cases (because the feds don’t give you kickbacks for busting rapists, like they do for drug users and dealers, or ‘terrorists’).
LO7: As if I needed another reason to avoid Wal-Mart.Report
Avoiding wal-mart is easier in some towns than in others.
I WISH I had the hour (and the gas money) to drive to the Kroger’s every week. Then again, what’s to say Kroger isn’t doing people this way?Report
I couldn’t open LO4, but there is huge variation in how police departments treat reports of rape, even when the departments are in towns separated by just the width of a road. In the 80s when I started college at Michigan State one of the first pieces of advice I got from a fellow student was “if you’re raped in Lansing, crawl to East Lansing to report it”. The East Lansing PD was known to take reports seriously. The Lansing PD, at least at the time and I truly hope they have changed by now, was known to basically take the side of the rapist and grill any woman on every way they could imagine she could have been ‘asking for it’.Report
LO4- seems like cases are “handled” this way more often than not. This one hits home.Report
LO7: The list of torts is scrolling through my forebrain. The article mentions several lawsuits, but not their outcome or pending status. My guess is that we are looking at settlements with NDAs. A better written article would have included that. I can see some potential for pretty substantial damages. Then there are punitive damages. The standard for those here in Maryland is high. You need to prove “actual malice.” But “they had me falsely arrested and then tried to extort money from me” is a pretty good case. I can totally see WalMart offering settlements so long as an NDA is included.Report
One of my main gripes about the article was it skimmed right across the issue that O.J. Simpson could not both be guilty of a crime and liable for wrongful death. The civil suit for shoplifting doesn’t involve law enforcement, but traditionally requires a pre-suit demand to weed out mistakes. All the while, if there is a criminal case, then another set of processes and rules is going on. So, if one of the points of the article, was to confound the distinctions and illustrate how people can be confused about what’s going on . . ..
Back to your point though, false statements to law enforcement officers is also a crime, so it might be more than tort law at issue.Report
More important than my gripes, I found this article from a Maryland public defender about the issues that was quite good:
Shoplifting punishment doesn’t fit the crime
Things written by criminal defense lawyers that recognize crimes are sometimes committed, but the system is weird, are the best types of analysis.Report
I, too, didn’t like the article. Not necessarily for the reasons you mention (which I didn’t think of but make sense), but also because something just doesn’t seem right.Report
If you’ve been keeping up with the Taos Compound story, you know it’s nuts.
Well, it’s even nutser: it looks like a judge dismissed the charges against Siraj Wahhaj and Jany Leveille.Report
Stuff like this makes it real easy to believe some of the weirder conspiracy theories, I tell you what. I mean, remember the apartment for the San Bernardino shooters being opened to the press and then being rifled through by reporters live?
That stuff is weird.
This stuff is weird.Report
It really isn’t that weird, not at all.
Cases where parents deny children medical attention pop up in the news ever other year or so, sometimes in connection with horrific abuse, sometimes not, sometimes in connection with cultish religion, sometimes not.
In this case, only some of the charges were dismissed, and the charges against the parents are still in place.
And in this case, you have the ooga booga fright factor of their religion which makes the case get amplified by the howler monkey network on the right.Report
Cases where parents deny children medical attention pop up in the news ever other year or so, sometimes in connection with horrific abuse, sometimes not, sometimes in connection with cultish religion, sometimes not.
Would you say that both sides do it?Report
Another weird thing: did you expect that the compound in which the alleged children were abused and in which the alleged child was found dead would still be investigated by authorities at this point or would you expect it to have been destroyed by the authorities?
If you guessed the latter, you’re right.
But, please, keep in mind that both sides do it.Report
Well, I would expect more information on whether they got all the evidence they needed before I set off the woop woop alarms.
I mean, what are you saying-but-not-saying here?
I can practically see your eyebrows arched.Report
Charges against three of the five people have been dismissed on procedural grounds.Report
How often does the prosecution screw something like this up?
Like is this something that happens all the dang time and it’s only getting noticed now because this is particularly high profile?Report
I don’t know that I would characterize this as weird per se. Unusual, certainly. First, it sounds like there are a lot of interested LE agencies involved. State and local police in NM plus FBI and CBE. Alsotoo, perhaps Georgia officials. Also more than one crime or possible crime; the murder of the little kid but also the whole possible terrorism angle.
Then all of THAT is bumping up against a NM procedural law (how common or unusual is that?) that says the prosecution has sixty days to do… something… for the initial evidentiary hearing IF the suspects are out on bail but only ten days if they’re in custody.
So it sounds like a complicated situation with a lot of cooks in the kitchen and it doesn’t really sound like these people are actually walking out of jail anytime soon.Report
Well, I would expect more information on whether they got all the evidence they needed before I set off the woop woop alarms.
Could you read the article and let me know which law enforcement agency claimed responsibility for destroying the compound? The one that said “oh, yeah, we got everything first”?
If you can’t, could you say “huh… this is kinda weird?”
I mean, what are you saying-but-not-saying here?
That this is weird.Report
LO3: Last time I flew coach on United, they didn’t give out blankets. Maybe this is why.Report
LO7:
Cool business model.Report