Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're all being kind of harsh. She was just trying to advance her career.
i believe you forgot the /sarcasm and /troll markups in your comment.
I thought the sarcasm was fairly obvious.
Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
91–100 of 173 posts
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is your focus on the chemist despite the fact that she was basically bribed? This is a conspiracy and the prosecutors and DA should be investigated. But of course, they're going to be the ones bearing the case against her, and taking the spotlight off themselves. And the only ones who will correctly investigate the DA/prosecutors would be the FBI, I really doubt anything is really going to be done here that will…
The chemist could have easily spoken out. Protections would have been put into place to ensure that she and her family wouldn't have been harmed. Obviously blackmail and fear plays a part here, but evident by the fact she didn't seem to be upset about being caught nor deny anything, sounds like a classic case of a sociopath (or even part sociopath). How could you live with yourself knowing for ten years you've ruined…
I'd have to disagree. It's not easy to out a prosecutor, considering that they could be the one to tell their buddies (other prosecutors) to fix you good.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own ha…
By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
If taking a life is savage, how much more savage is it to systematically, wrongly deny people their freedom for the sake of promotions?
Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it's savage and barbaric and the opposite of civilized.
Denying people their freedom through a fair court system is also kind-of barbaric since violence or the threat thereof is what holds the system together. But it's supposed to be "justice" in that there's a fair trial and the hope is that guilty people are properly denied their freedom and innocent ones are not. Obviously there are false positives and false negatives but everyone is supposed to act in good faith to ensure that there aren't systematic biases.
This person introduced a systematic bias which has wrongly denied people their freedom. If she had kidnapped ~600 Americans for 1.5 years she'd be called a terrorist. That's precisely what some Iranian folks who did that to American embassy workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
How is this so vastly different?
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#94This kind of case is fascinating. The woman wasn't evil. But her actions really are. It's very easy, too easy, to say that she is evil because what she did was so bad. But that's lazy, and it misses the interesting stuff. How do people get caught up in performing such horrendous acts? There's a bunch of cognitive stuff going on, and some subtle manipulation. I suspect that something similar is how we end up with app…
It's not easy to say she is evil; it requires consideration of what is evil, what is an evil person, her particular situation and how it might apply to the definitions.
Concluding a person is evil does not preclude looking at any other angles on the case. So, I don't think it is lazy to consider it.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, sure, whatever. But she didn't think she was being evil. She somehow persuaded herself that what she was doing was okay. That's the interesting bit. Why do people go along with things that they know are wrong. She wasn't alone in this, there are a bunch of other people involved too. And it's similar for other frauds and deceptions. She didn't wake up and think "Fuck it, I'm going to jail thousands of innocent p…
I think you need to dig a bit deeper than the rationalizations people give for their actions. There is a difference between a person who genuinely considers what they are doing to be OK, and people who are actually rationlizing things they know deep down to be wrong. I think your implicit assumption that anyone might have acted like she did, in her position, is wrong. Both a person's innate (not necessarily genetic)…
I look at her and I think "I would never do anything like that!"
But is that really true or am I just rationalising with the benefit of hindsight?
There was an article on HN about a man running a family business who started defrauding money. It needed the cooperation of other people. Rather than creating any elaborate lies he simply told them, and asked them for help. (I can't remember any more about it, which is making search tricky!). But they all went along. He was a nice guy, and they were helping him, and no-one was really being hurt. Except they were all committing serious criminal offences.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#96[deleted]
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#97Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#98She'll get off on a "tampering with evidence" loophole. Sick sick woman.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own ha…
Like many "criminal-friendly" aspects of criminal law, the opposition to the death penalty goes beyond compassion for the guilty; it is motivated by a desire to protect the other innocent from abuse of power, and principled belief that forcibly ending a life is unacceptable because no person is capable and trustworthy to accurately and fairly determining which cases deserve it, and drawing a bright line to separates…
That's a very good point!
I might counter-argue that at some point there's no doubt and being permanently removed from the pool of people who are alive might be OK.
What I mean is that if someone is attempting to murder me and I manage to kill them first that it was a justifiable homicide and that I shouldn't be punished in any way. That's in the law and it even makes sense to a great many people even if they're not lawyers, and even if they don't know the finer points of the law. In that situation there is no doubt, or perhaps no reasonable doubt and the law does effectively judge people to be competent to make precisely that decision.
Part of what makes this so difficult is that she actually wielded vast power due to her position. In many ways she was far, far more powerful than a judge or a prosecutor. A judge can't just unilaterally accuse someone of a worse crime just because, nor can a prosecutor reasonably trump charges up too much without getting called out for bad behavior. But it seems that this lady did precisely that, totally perverting justice.
If an accountant cooks the books it might be professional misconduct (and criminal!) and people might lose their jobs and all of that is terrible. But that accountant can't somehow make all the employees of the company go to jail by doing something wrong.
The power that this lady had and the extent to which she abused it is simply breathtaking.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#1003-5 years?! THREE TO FIVE YEARS???!!! There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
I agree, in context. If she's purposely stolen years and years from others' lives, she needs to be held accountable for each and every instance. And the idea that this happened in a laboratory doesn't make it any milder...this is, in my opinion, far worse than most violent crimes.
I think the time served should be very long, given that most of our violent crimes have very long terms.
That said, I think we need to revisit very long terms. I don't know the answers, but I think that taking decades for seconds of rage, etc, can be extremely harsh.
I hope we can amend this system, or eliminate the need for it, someday. To me, I'm equally or even more scared of prosecutors that have the power to destroy my life as I am of thugs on the street that have that power.
It's far scarier in cases like this, where they only risk a slap on the wrist balanced against absolutely destroying lives.
I literally cannot imagine losing years in prison, when you have so few already.