Morning Ed: Law & Order {2017.04.10.M}
So, uhhh, what’s going on with mayors in the Pacific Northwest and rape?
Hurm. If we have the tapes, we ought to be able to use them, it seems to me.
On the other hand, they have free health care. Or had it, anyway.
Now Hiring: Execution Witnesses.
Authorities have been listening where they ought not be listening.
Twenty-five million here, twenty-five million there, and sooner or later you’re talking about real money.
Wow.
Is reefer madness returning? {via Jaybird}
I’m sure most have seen these jackholes cosplaying ISIS this past weekend.Report
This & the Greensboro story: police not understanding (or caring) how to manage public perception.Report
@oscar-gordon
I think it is more complicated than that. You are a dude in Seattle, I am a dude in Francisco, Kolohe is a dude in Maryland. Lake County is a very conservative place in Florida that the mid 20th century equivalent of Sherrif Joe for 28?years.
As a cynic, why should the police in Lake County, Florida care about what the three of us thinks? Why do we think public perception is on our side? Perhaps the residents of Lake County, Florida look at this and say “right on”?
As long as the SWAT officers only go after the “right” people of course.
It ties in with Jeff Buregaurd Sessions the III announcing he was revising Obama’s investigation into police departments and the Marijuana thing.Report
Fair point, if this was the 80’s or early 90’s.
These days, no one gets to pretend their optics are so geographically constrained.Report
I’m still a cynic here. I agree that the optics now spread quickly but I am not sure that will lead to an apology or change of course especially with the Sessions DOJ saying that they are very police friendly and wanting to ramp up the War on Some People who use Some Drugs.Report
“OMG! They look like soldiers!”
“Yea… pretty dope, eh?”
Now what?Report
Nevermind military. They’re one logo removed from looking like terrorists.Report
But the problem is if someone looks at them and thinks, “Badass!” and I look at them and think, “Terrifying!” than publicizing these pics doesn’t get us anywhere. It is a fundamental disagreement that will take alot more work to address.Report
I’d expect better lighting design out of terroristsReport
“They look like SpecOp soldiers! So badass!”
Except SpecOp soldiers would never consent to being used as props while in concealing gear. If (and this is a big IF) they agreed to be part of a dog & pony show, it’d be in dress uniform.Report
I agree with this person’s objection
If they were actually soldiers, the stupid facemasks would at least be all the same, instead of everyone being on their own independent ops.Report
Tell that to the guys and gals of GI Joe.Report
Knowing that you never have to stand in formation for a uniform inspection must be like 28% of half the battle.Report
It’s one of the perks of being SF. They don’t have uniform inspections and are creative with the paperwork.Report
The accusations against Murray has people pretty shook up, hereabouts.Report
So much so that KJR (sports talk) had an entire segment this morning on how the various plans for a new basketball/hockey arena might be affected…Report
The execution witness thing: one of the dystopian nightmares I have is that ordinary citizens are selected by lottery to be execution witnesses, and my number comes up, so I have to go watch someone die.
I’m not surprised that Arkansas is having a hard time finding execution witnesses; that’s kind of ghoulish.
(I WOULD sit at the bedside of a loved one who was dying. It would be hard but I would do it. It is different when it is a stranger and that death is coming at the hands of the State.)Report
Meh, folks are wimps these days. They need to put some National Guard guys on orders for a few days and use them. Or change the law.Report
In 1992, Clinton .made a point of flying back to Little Rock to be present for executions. The world needs more Clintons.Report
He flew back to Arkansas both to show that would enforce the death penalty as part of his campaign and to make sure the execution went ahead as the governor. Some folks have said he did it to take publicity off of his Flowers affair. I don’t think he actually witnessed it.Report
Strangely enough, Hillary didn’t make a point of flying back to DC for that DNC analyst…
The world does not need more Clintons (and my friend, who’s worked for the Clintons for nearly thirty years, would concur).Report
Maybe we should make the prosecutors and judge bear witness.Report
Why should they be required to? Do you think they bear some sort of responsibility for the sentence? Maybe the jurors and the defense attorney as well then?Report
If the jury imposes the death sentence (rather than just a verdict), then yeah, they should. I mean, you are condemning a person to death. If you are uncomfortable watching them die, perhaps you shouldn’t be so quick to condemn.
There is value in being required to bear witness to the effects of decisions.Report
Why, the penalty shouldn’t have anything to do with peoples feelings, just the facts and law.Report
If it’s all about law & facts, why bother with a jury at all?Report
Why, the penalty shouldn’t have anything to do with peoples feelings, just the facts and law.
I tend to think the desire for punition itself is a merely an expression of people feelings, so it’s gonna be hard to eliminate feelings from any analysis or justification re: punishment.Report
Each crime has certain elements that the prosecutor must prove to a jury. If the jury doesn’t believe that the prosecution has done it, they find the person not guilty.Report
While that’s an excellent description of the methodological constraints obtaining in a jury trial it has no relevance to my above comment.Report
Ok, we’ll try again. The jurors are disinterested parties specifically so that feelings don’t sway them. Yes we are all human and have feelings, or at least more folks do, but the idea that someone is going to vote not guilty despite the facts b/c 20 years in seems too long a sentence is just silly.Report
Except jury nullification that results from prosecutorial over-reach is a thing.
So yes, feeling matter, they always matter, because juries are never truly disinterested parties.
Don’t be so obtuse.Report
Juries are picked via the process know as voir dire to ensure that they aren’t family members, have a financial interest, knowledge of the case or have already formed an opinion about the case, etc. This by any standard leads to the jurors being disinterested parties.Report
No, it means they don’t have an obvious bias or stake in the case. There is no way they can hope to be purely disinterested parties past the opening statements.Report
And I get nixed because of my street address. Every Time.
I am a disinterested party, and that is exactly what one of the lawyers doesn’t want.Report
And I would be nixed b/c I’m a lawyer. There’s nothing worse than a juror who knows something about the law and argument.Report
As I understand it, sentences are requested by the prosecutor and approved by the judge.
If for any reason, a particular judge or prosecutor was uninvolved in the sentencing decision, they get a pass.
The jury is treated differently because they do not volunteer for their positions nor are they employed by the state and given vast powers throughout the process of determining guilt and punishment.
We’re really getting asswhackey here. One oft offered response to objections to the death penalty is, “Hey, if you can’t serve the time, don’t do the crime.” But now it’s being argued that prosecutors and judges should be shielded from the consequences of their decisions.
It is almost as if, instead of some sort of underlying principle informing these arguments, something else is…Report
A state’s code specifies the penalty for each crime.Report
Who chooses what charges to levy?
Also, I’m like 99% sure there exists a range of punishments for most crimes.Report
Wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?Report
@gabriel-conroy
How so? If something is just and you are charged with pursuing justice and are offered all sorts of powers of the state to aid in that pursuit, then why would it be a conflict to see that just thing happen?
If a prosecutor or judge are unwilling to sentence someone to death because they are unwilling to witness the execution, I would say that either A) the sentence is wrong or B) they do not deserve the power offered to them by that position.Report
Sorry, @kazzy , I just now saw your comment. I was thinking along the lines of what P D Shaw says just below. I presume the role of the witness is to make sure the prisoner’s rights aren’t violated or isn’t put through undue pain. A death-penalty-supporting prosecutor and a judge (or at least a “hangin’ judge”) won’t necessarily have as strong a motivation as a supposedly unbiased witnessed.
I realize I’m making assumptions here about prosecutors and judges and about whether we can find a witness sufficiently wary of the death penalty (and yet who is also willing to watch an execution).
ETA: I have no strong objection to compelling the prosecutor and judge to watch the execution. I just think that if we are to have the death penalty (which I oppose) then we should have witnesses who do not represent the victims or the state.Report
I believe the purpose of the witness is to safeguard the process; make sure that the punishment is conducted in a dignified fashion. Otherwise, prison guards could be witnesses. I believe its common for defense attorneys to act as witnesses, as well as clergy. Not so certain about family. Really it should be someone skeptical of the death penalty that serves, though most would find it difficult.Report
Rio Grande Valley is unusually quiet as illegal border crossings drop to lowest point in at least 17 years
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-crossings-20170410-story.html
I wonder why?Report
Uzbek suspect in Swedish attack sympathized with Islamic State -police
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/uzbek-suspect-in-swedish-attack-sympathized-with-islamic-state-police/ar-BBzAtGT?OCID=ansmsnnews11
I think they need more refugees.Report
The weird thing about the Reefer Madness link is that it doesn’t make sense to crack down on Medicinal at this point. How many states have legalized pot now? Looks like 28 plus DC (and 8 (!) of those have legalized recreational).
Of course, the magic number is not 28 but 38… but it still appears that a tipping point has happened on a national level.
I’m not sure that going for “We’ve added a new schedule: Schedule Zero” will work out anywhere close to the way that Sessions might imagine it would.
If anything, we’ll just go back to the days of “do you want to grow heirloom tomatoes in your basement? (wink wink)” days.Report
The marijuana caucus in Congress has introduced a package of bills that would remove marijuana from the controlled substances list entirely and create an alcohol-like system of tax and regulation.
A pair of US Representatives from Florida (one D, one R) have introduced a separate bill to move marijuana to Schedule III, which would make its federal status legal-by-prescription.Report
Fingers are crossed. I rather expect it to be killed in committee by someone who is deeply concerned that this will put us in violation of some treaty that (figuratively) nobody in any of those 28 states cares about and (literally) nobody in the other 22 cares about.Report
“If anything, we’ll just go back to the days of “do you want to grow heirloom tomatoes in your basement? (wink wink)” days.”
Wait, that’s a thing? Man, have I been sending out mixed messages.Report
It certainly was in Colorado. Radio ads for “Grow Warehouse” allowing you to enjoy heirloom tomatoes year ’round, no matter what the weather outside is like!
I complained about it in the car “are there so very many tomato enthusiasts in Colorado Springs?” I asked. “Listening to the alt rock station?”
Everybody else in the car got really quiet.Report
Heh, I believe it. Tomatoes are overrated anyway.Report
Never underestimate the fanaticism of a true believer. As it became rapidly clear that Prohibition was not working and that the Volstead Act needed to be amended to reflect what most people thought Prohibition would be like, light beers and wine still legal, the Drys held firm. It took the Great Depression and massive electoral victories of the Democratic Party to defeat Prohibition.Report
I’m with Lee here but I also think that the “War on Drugs” is really about race and not really about the substances. You can’t look at drug panics in the United States without examining the racial angle.
For Sessions this is not about the dangers of marijuana, it is about the dangers of Brown-skinned people.Report
Last I checked, the war in drugs is also being fought in white parts of the country. And it’s worth noting at the outset Adair amount if it was supported and encouraged by minorities.
Race is certainly a component, but it’s silly to reduce it to that.Report
Huh. I expected a “Libertarians don’t care about the inner cities and just want to keep women and minorities sedated!”
Good. Hey, if we can paint Republicans as racist, surely the War On Drugs will be well and truly doomed this time.Report
I think you misunderstand. I am separating libertarians and Republicans here. I also stating what I think really drives and has always driven anti-narcotic animus and why people are still opposed and Jeff Sessions wants to reamp it back up.Report
RE: “twenty-five million” (register of copyrights)
An interesting bit from the article:
“[Lofgren] was trying to add an amendment to the bill that would still allow the Librarian of Congress to fire the Register of Copyrights if necessary (under the bill presented, only the President can fire the Register).”
This is an important thing to remember about the Federal bureaucracy. Congress doesn’t control it. This thing where Congress has to pass an actual law to get any sort of control whatsoever, this is the current state of government.
And, from the comments at the end, some perspective on the “twenty-five million”:
Report
A Chicago cop is accused of framing 51 people for murder. #5 will shock you!Report
11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-united-nations-tribunal.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
That’s some expensive justice here, Rwanda and in Yugoslavia. It probably would have been better spent on other thing like infrastructure and aid to farmers.Report
As if that’s the alternative!
The alternative is opening up new frontiers for the American sex trade.Report
If you were waiting for one of the right-wing wags to post something about how “Sweden should just ban cars!” so you could call that a strawman, you waited just a little bit too long.Report
Wow.Report
No, a right wing wag would probably advocate banning Muslims not cars.Report
Its a cranky newspaper editorial. We have those in the United States to. Its good to know that in these days of division, the cranky newspaper editorial remains unifying force between countries.Report
We’ve just about banned new car sales in America, you know.
2.6 cars per driving-age adult.
Viva Free Market!
Viva Recession!
Viva Trump!Report
Hadn’t noticed that at all. The dealerships around my parts of the world seem to be moving new product just fine.Report
per google: Sales for 2016 set a record of 17.6 million cars and trucks.
[actually, i should know better than to respond to Kimmi-facts.]Report
That’s what Google and The Cabal want you to believe.Report
Francis,
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-27/us-auto-industry-crisis-amid-inventory-bubbleReport
Average discount off list is running $5,000. That’s a lot of incentives for the parent company to eat. (And, dude, that’s average. Means that a lot of cars are running at more than that).
But the real problem lies in terms of the dealerships themselves… they don’t make much off new cars. And with that many cars per driving adult, you’re going to crater the used car market.
(Also yes, you’re in LA for god’s sake. I think affordability might be a bit better there than Middle America).Report
http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/11/26/underwater-car-loans-sales/94234050/
Look a little closer… Particularly with the demise of the “Free Money Era”, we’re going to see loans that folks can’t just roll over for free…
Plus, a car that would cost $20,000 new in 2009 now costs $50,000 with “mandatory extras”. Unaffordable, particularly with the bottom dropping out of the used car market.Report
Not worried about the $25K car costing $50K. I’m more worried about the $10K car costing $25K.Report
In 2009, you could get a new car for $10K? Really?
Because I thought even civics were running around $20k.
Besides, no need to worry about $10k cars, with the bottom falling out of the used car market. Worry about car dealerships, if you must.Report
In 2016, you can buy a new model manual Nissan Versa for $11,900.
Pretty sure in 2009 you could have easily found a new car for $10k.Report
Much easier to ban refugees. Keep going with that.Report
I don’t think that Sweden is going to do that quite yet.
But I have read a number of articles that indicate unhappiness with how their beneficence is being rewarded.Report