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Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

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Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#221

Post by stubish »

kbenson wrote: post #167
drpgq wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez I’m wondering what the going price would be for that today.

I've seen reports that it's somewhat common for the rich in China[1], so there might be some info on what it costs there, and maybe some extrapolation could be made. Either the "serve prison in lieu of me" or "say you were the one that committed the crime" version. There are weird perverse incentives at play in some of the laws of criminal justice system in China.[2] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4339051 2:…

Not so long ago the heir to the Red Bull fortune was alleged to have driven his Ferrari through a police check point at speed, killing an officer. Since it was a police officer killed, the matter was investigated and the mangled Ferrari found on the estate. One of the house hold staff came forward, claiming he was the driver. Apparently this is somewhat expected in these situations. But it did ruffle lots of feathers, so the poor heir had to go on the run for a while. But no worry, a few years later all charges are dropped because everyone has been compensated and it was a while ago, so lets just let bygones be bygones, and go back to dealing with the stress of being a member of Thailand's 2nd wealthiest family.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/thailand-charges-agai...

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#222

Post by ada1981 »

lolc wrote: post #171
ada1981 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe you submit motion to dismiss request for a number of random cases. You become hidden among the others.

Difficult tradeoff because that multiplies the chances of detection.

I wonder how often this actually works.

Especially now with virtual systems. It’s a pretty amazing hack if you can pull it off.

And also, couldn’t be that hard to hide your tracks so it’s not clear if it was you or someone who supports you.

You could see this being done by activists or others.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#223

Post by alexpotato »

WalterBright wrote: post #151
doublekill wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped. Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.

Positively identifying people was very difficult before fingerprinting came along. The police used all kinds of schemes of erratic accuracy.

Several years ago I read the book Fingerprints by Colin Beavan [0] and it was really eye opening how different life was before we had modern forms of identification.

Example 1: In countries that had little formal legal structures and rudimentary identification (e.g. India in the early 1800s), it was incredibly easy to be a criminal and just move from town to town while acquiring new identities. In other words, there was a huge upside to becoming a career criminal since it was both difficult to catch you (no forensic evidence) and even if you were caught, you could just reboot your life.

Example 2: He mentions a case where a gentleman was charged TWICE for crimes that were later found to have been committed by someone else who had only a passing resemblance.

I read this book before Twitter/Facebook became ubiquitous and every like, share, comment was public knowledge but even at the time, it was mind boggling how different "identity" was back then.

0 - https://amzn.to/3kDqEgj

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#224

Post by schoen »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #218
friendlybus wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until Teztel started selling carbon offsets for dead polluters. An offered coin springs a dead soul from purgatory.

Sounds like a new ICO opportunity :) Would be interesting if there were a climate change coin... oh wait, https://earth-token.com/

The obvious response is that every PoW coin is a climate change coin.

:-(

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#225

Post by schoen »

bavila wrote: post #174
supernova87a wrote: post #23

I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. There was a story in WSJ like last week about how the Japanese red stamp / seal still survives and is a barrier to them adopting new technology for practical every day speeding up of tasks. And keeps things like faxes around unnece…

> I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. I used to work as a criminal defense attorney, and the job regularly required that I obtain subpoenas from the court in order to mandate a witness's appearance at court. My state courts have a template that subpoenas must follow,…

> I don't think there's a ton of value someone could get out of obtaining a fake subpoena

A subpoena can also order the production of documents (in many cases including business records about other people, such as log files). That could be pretty consequential if the private information turned over was very sensitive.

When I was working at EFF I filed some comments on an international law enforcement cooperation plan where one thing that bothered me a lot was that, if you formalize the idea that jurisdiction A has to directly enforce orders/process/formal law enforcement requests from jurisdiction B, people in jurisdiction A will have even less idea how to authenticate them, and there will be even less likelihood of a remedy in case of a deliberately fraudulent request. The domestic status quo (as you point out) is typically pretty low authentication, but at least there's a likelihood of some significant punishment for people who commit fraud on a court (judges really dislike that). Now imagine if you could do this without even being in the country where you're committing the fraud! :-(

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#227

Post by rhizome »

fouc wrote: post #205
effingwewt wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit- after reading up on this, I'm not sure where you got your information from but everything I could find shows it to just be the common detective/mystery trope.

It just follows logically that historically some powerful families would have paid off a fall guy if necessary, and they could have used a butler in some cases. This could've been the origin of the term, before it even showed up in murder mysteries. Perhaps from the 1700s

I bet a good butler is much harder to find than a patsy.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#228

Post by ThrustVectoring »

sjy wrote: post #199
bavila wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. I used to work as a criminal defense attorney, and the job regularly required that I obtain subpoenas from the court in order to mandate a witness's appearance at court. My state courts have a template that subpoenas must follow,…

A similar process exists in Australia. It is a bit strange that the burden is on the recipient to object to an unlawful subpoena. I understand that it’s pretty common for vexatious litigants to issue subpoenas requiring politicians, governors and other public figures to attend court for cross-examination about a perceived injustice, and there is a bit of work involved in arranging for these to be set aside so that no…

Subpoena power is a hell of a lot of leverage, and probably the biggest reason why all these terms-of-service agreements including binding arbitration. Like, if you can convince a small-claims court judge that it is relevant, it's definitely possible to subpoena high-level executives of multibillion dollar companies over a $100 dispute.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#229

Post by el_nahual »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #178
texasbigdata wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems similar to the Catholic concept of buying indulgences as a carbon offset type concept against sins. Pay to play

That is a common misunderstanding of canonical Catholic teaching about "indulgentia a culpa et a poena". Keeping the carbon offset analogy, an indulgence in the Catholic sense would be more akin to first making sure you are carbon neutral (all parties are at peace and forgiven/reconciled), then you spend %10 of your salary to go beyond that and offset the carbon credits of the person you wronged.

An even bigger misconception is that indulgences were actually bought on behalf of _someone else_.

They were meant to address a very real problem with catholic heaven/hell theology:

What if I belong in heaven, but somene I love, who I can't possibly imagine spending eternity without, belongs in hell?

Indulgences were originally meant to address this: the party that belonged in heaven could, through their sacrifice, guarantee a spot in heaven for their loved one. It was only later that the "sacrifice" become strictly monetary.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#230

Post by joubert »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #178
texasbigdata wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems similar to the Catholic concept of buying indulgences as a carbon offset type concept against sins. Pay to play

That is a common misunderstanding of canonical Catholic teaching about "indulgentia a culpa et a poena". Keeping the carbon offset analogy, an indulgence in the Catholic sense would be more akin to first making sure you are carbon neutral (all parties are at peace and forgiven/reconciled), then you spend %10 of your salary to go beyond that and offset the carbon credits of the person you wronged.

Instead of sticking with the carbon credits analogy I'll articulate more directly what I understand from reading up on indulgences at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm

For a sin that has already been forgiven, an indulgence is associated payment you owe that if you didn't pay, you will spend more time in purgatory.

If this is an accurate reading, does it not dilute the meaning of "forgiven"? Does it not amount to a money-making racket at best, or, more probably, extortion?

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