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The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

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Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#341

Post by elwell »

nopassrecover wrote: post #26

> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier. > "He started threatening me, saying that he would kill me. ... I told the school officers, [and] they started watching him really closely. He would say that he would shoot up the school." So I'll start by playing Devil's Advocate very briefly. It's interesting how facts can be shaped with different language ("his onl…

> Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier.

It doesn't have much to do with his danger anyways, as far as I'm concerned. Adam Lanza did not have a criminal record [0].

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lanza#Perpetrator

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#342

Post by lsaferite »

WalterBright wrote: post #303
Pxtl wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada? Yup. The YOA is very expansive. For example, my neighborhood's most prolific tagger is in his mid-'20s and the press still isn't allowed to mention his name when he gets picked up for the nth time because he was previously arrested as a young offender. If they said "Joe Blow was arrested for writing tag X on an overpass" then everybody would know that Joe Blow is X and his young offenses of writing X on an…

I also feel that, if you are an adult and you've served your sentence and paid your debt to society, that your file is closed to the public. The only time it would be accessed is in determining the sentence for your next crime. Adults deserve a second chance, too.

This cannot be stressed or up voted enough. One you have a black mark on your record in this country (USA), it never goes away. At least in most EU countries the law stipulates that after 7 years it's off your record. We, as a country, have given up on rehabilitation and reintegration.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#343

Post by mcv »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #205
mcv wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that though Maine has the lowest incarceration rate of the US, globally they're only average. Most countries in Europe still have a lower incarceration rate, for example. And every other US state has a higher incarceration rate than Maine. Many 3 times as high, some 5, one even 10 times as high. The US as a whole has by far the highest incarceration rate of the whole world. Maybe Maine is the exception as the on…

Agreed the issue needs to be fixed but my point is that the whole of the US isn't the same and painting the entire us as a dangerous place to go is ridiculous and unfair.

But even the safest state is still roughly comparable with the least safe country in Europe. Yes, there's lots of variation, just as there is anywhere else, but on the whole, incarceration in the US is just plain crazy.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#344

Post by mcv »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #262
scarmig wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the USSR under Stalin and the gulag incarcerated fewer people than does the contemporary United States. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777...

And how did that work out for all the un-incarcerated people in Ukraine? Would you care to do a "contrast and compare" between Soviet gulag conditions and those in a typical contemporary U.S. prison? I thought not.

Nobody is suggesting that Stalin was not one of the worst totalitarian tyrants ever. He is personally responsible for more deaths than anyone else, and possibly even Hitler.

And yet, somehow, the US manages to lock more people in prison than this totalitarian scumbag. That should be food for thought for anyone with half a brain.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#345

Post by mcv »

res0nat0r wrote: post #215
mcv wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, I didn't realise US police were that bad. You didn't? Stories about attrocious behaviour by US police, and the sorry state of the US prison system, not to mention the fact that the US locks up more people than any other country in the world, have received a lot of attention here and elsewhere. To me, the worst one was the prison that bribed a judge to convict more children.

So one story of the justice system going wrong in the USA means the whole system is systemically corrupt? By this thinking I hope neither of you drive a car to work every day. You'll really be afraid of the risks with that one.

> So one story of the justice system going wrong in the USA means the whole system is systemically corrupt?

Have you read the post you're responding to? What a single story means or doesn't mean has ceased being relevant ages ago. It's systemic. It's normal. The corruption has become mundane.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#346

Post by mcv »

oskarth wrote: post #181
mcv wrote: post #147

Don't make threats if you don't intend to follow up on them. Also, from his lawyer: "They didn't find pentagrams and candles. He wasn't listening to Judas Priest." WTF does that have to do with anything? Do only Judas Priest fans shoot up kindergartens? Is there something wrong with liking pentagrams and candles? I think that lawyer is the real creep here, and that kind of defense deserves to be ineffective. In any c…

> Don't make threats if you don't intend to follow up on them. Hello, Thought Police. It wasn't a threat. It was a series of tasteless jokes. The consequences aren't even remotely proportional. You know what would be proportional? Someone calling him out for being tasteless, or perhaps even unfriend him, or report the abuse to Facebook so he had to tone it down. It's scary that people think this kind of "justice" is…

> It wasn't a threat. It was a series of tasteless jokes.

It's a joke that looks a lot like a threat. And threats aren't funny.

The arrest was not disproportional. The corruption that happened after the arrest was of course totally crazy and wrong, but the police investigating threats is not wrong. The problem here is that they didn't really investigate it; they just tried to get him convicted by any means possible. But when someone says he's going to shoot up a kindergarten, the police absolutely should investigate.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#347

Post by DanBC »

rmc wrote: post #251
xtrumanx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're not implying situations found in the Rwandan Genocide are typical in Africa.

No, the Rwandan Genocide is not a common event. But my first example was the police beating a confession out of someone. My objection is when people in USA think USA is as bad as that.

But we can find plenty of videos of US police doing exactly that.

Here's a video of police killing a man. He starts off calmly answering their questions, obeying their stupid instructions. He gets frustrated ar their bullshit. They beat him to the ground and sit on him and yell at him to stop struggling. He can't breathe - of course he's going to struggle. More police turn up. They asume the original officers are in the right and this guy is viole t on drugs, so they sit on him too.

http://www.popehat.com/2014/01/20/kelly-thomas/

It is fucking barbaric.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#348

Post by DanBC »

scarmig wrote: post #172
mcv wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America is pretty good -- don't anecdotes from the internet says deter you. It's not merely anecdotes; there's plenty of hard data. The US locks up more people in absolute numbers than any country in the world, including China, which has 4 times the population and a totalitarian government. Per capita, the only countries with more inmates are a handful of tiny Carribean islands, I believe. Law enforcement is struct…

Fun fact: the USSR under Stalin and the gulag incarcerated fewer people than does the contemporary United States. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777...

He did kill about 20 million so it's not sch a fair comparison.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#349

Post by mcv »

amima wrote: post #184
mcv wrote: post #147

Don't make threats if you don't intend to follow up on them. Also, from his lawyer: "They didn't find pentagrams and candles. He wasn't listening to Judas Priest." WTF does that have to do with anything? Do only Judas Priest fans shoot up kindergartens? Is there something wrong with liking pentagrams and candles? I think that lawyer is the real creep here, and that kind of defense deserves to be ineffective. In any c…

But you should not expect to be put in jail, that's nonsense. People say "I'm gonna kill you" every day to their friends as the way of saying "I don't like what you just did", does not mean they are violent in any way. The society where it's OK to go to jail for saying something without being any real threat is not healthy at all. Stupid jokes are non-violent. In my country there is a death threat law that says that…

Serious threats and "joke" threats are not always easy to tell apart. And dismissing serious threats as "it's probably a joke" can be very dangerous. Of course you shouldn't be imprisoned for a stupid joke, but any threat that looks serious has to be investigated.

And people shouldn't assume they can do stupid things with impunity just because they _meant_ it as a joke. Some stupid jokes are far more stupid than people realize, and can really hurt people, directly or indirectly.

This wasn't a specifically targeted threat, but some "joke" threats are targeted, and the target can't always tell whether it's serious or a stupid joke. And assuming all threats are jokes means that the serious ones get ignored. And sometimes some real bastards hide behind "it's just a joke. Can't you take a joke?" while they're threatening and intimidating people.

And considering how easy it is to simply not make "joke" threats, I'd rather see threats taken too seriously than ignored.

Yes, the corruption and travesty of justice after the arrest is horrible, and (yet another) sign that something is really rotten in US law enforcement. But in principle, detaining someone who says he's going to shoot up a school is a sensible precaution. Don't want to be detained? Easy: don't say you're going to shoot people.

Re: The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life

#350

Post by mcv »

Jehar wrote: post #180
mcv wrote: post #147

Don't make threats if you don't intend to follow up on them. Also, from his lawyer: "They didn't find pentagrams and candles. He wasn't listening to Judas Priest." WTF does that have to do with anything? Do only Judas Priest fans shoot up kindergartens? Is there something wrong with liking pentagrams and candles? I think that lawyer is the real creep here, and that kind of defense deserves to be ineffective. In any c…

Look into != jail for several months. There are (supposedly) fairly well-defined use cases for probable cause and sufficient evidence to prosecute, and it seems these were all trampled over in this case. In regards to the Judas Priest comments, I think that may have been some unintentional hyperbole/satire, pointing at the widely disproved profiling of school shooters. The Harris/Klebold case had a lot of cultural ba…

> Look into != jail for several months.

Oh, absolutely. The utter travesty and corruption after the arrest is atrocious. And that sort of stuff seems to happen way too often in the US. I'm not defending that at all.

The only thing I'm saying is that treating threats as a joke is stupid and dangerous, and the police should investigate threats, and not assume they're merely a joke without investigating.

Apparently that makes me a minority on HN, and most people here seem to think joke threats are okay. I don't.

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