A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early • Hacker News Board

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#111

Post by ptaipale » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:49 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #13

hyperbovine wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifteen years while loved ones of the deceased spend the rest of their lives in mourning? Thank God I'm not.

FYI "because I want the person to suffer" is not a valid reason to lock someone up. We lock people up as a punishment just like your parents may have sent you to your room when you were acting up. We do it under the thinking of they won't do it again once they've paid their debt but that thinking is flawed on SO many level. Among them are: 1. Prison does NOT reform people in fact it pushes many deeper into a life of…

> "because I want the person to suffer" is not a valid reason to lock someone up.

It's one of the established reasons: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. The following are all from Wikipedia:

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Deterrence is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from offending.

Incapacitation in the context of sentencing philosophy refers to the effect of a sentence in terms of positively preventing (rather than merely deterring) future offending.

Rehabilitation is the re-integration into society of a convicted person and the main objective of modern penal policy.

Retributive justice is a theory of justice that considers punishment, if proportionate, to be the best response to crime. When an offender breaks the law, justice requires that they forfeit something in return.

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The U.S. certainly puts more weight to retribution - in my opinion, too much weight - while European justice systems are more interested in rehabilitation, sometimes being ridiculously naive.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#112

Post by qiqing » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

fixxer wrote: post #110

waterfowl wrote: post #29

The insanity of the charges/sentencing reminds me of a passage from The Hot House (which is excellent, Pete Earley somehow got permission to go mingle with prisoners at USP Leavenworth for a year and write about it). A Bank Robber, 45 'They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I'm really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when…

> All I did was rob a bank I totally understand how somebody might look at that situation and say "gee, he did only rob a bank because the guy who died was his accomplice", but at the same time... he robbed a bank! Had he not robbed it, that life might not have been lost and a body would not have been taken from the scene of a crime. If you want to argue that the quality of one's lawyer plays a large part in the char…

The legal system is supposed to make punishments fit the crime, not heap arbitrarily much punishment on anyone who ever breaks any law ever.

If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive...

As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#113

Post by gootdude » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:51 PM UTC

basseq wrote: post #6

RadioAndrea wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Both men received two counts of first-degree burglary and three counts of aggravated robbery, for each of the three employees they made cooperate at the two stores... Then came the kidnapping charges: three counts of second-degree kidnapping, because they’d forced three employees in those two robberies to move from one part of a store to another." Edit: and edit ninja'd...

I really dislike "stacked" charges. Maybe that's the best way to differentiate between "a burglary", "a burglary where an innocent person was involved", "a burglary where 3 innocent people were involved," and "a burglary where 3 innocent people were involved and made to do stuff beyond 'getting robbed'". But assuming "equal" charges, is involving three people 3x as bad as involving one? Is "forcing people to move" 2x…

"... Two clerks were in the store, not just one. Lima-Marin and Clifton brought them both into a back room, forcing one onto the floor and the other to open the safe. “They put a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘This is where you’re going to die,’” one of the employees, Shane Ashurst, later recalled."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/07/unfreed

A bit more than simply asking them to move to another room.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#114

Post by fixxer » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:53 PM UTC

qiqing wrote: post #112

fixxer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I did was rob a bank I totally understand how somebody might look at that situation and say "gee, he did only rob a bank because the guy who died was his accomplice", but at the same time... he robbed a bank! Had he not robbed it, that life might not have been lost and a body would not have been taken from the scene of a crime. If you want to argue that the quality of one's lawyer plays a large part in the char…

The legal system is supposed to make punishments fit the crime, not heap arbitrarily much punishment on anyone who ever breaks any law ever. If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive... As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironi…

You're comparing violent crime (robbing a bank) with non-violent crime (illegal immigration).

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#115

Post by qiqing » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:54 PM UTC

psychometry wrote: post #36

waterfowl wrote: post #29

The insanity of the charges/sentencing reminds me of a passage from The Hot House (which is excellent, Pete Earley somehow got permission to go mingle with prisoners at USP Leavenworth for a year and write about it). A Bank Robber, 45 'They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I'm really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when…

The deal you get from prosecutors is only as good as your lawyer and good lawyers cost money. This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public whose understanding of punitive systems doesn't get any more nuanced than "let's be hard on crime!"

and the prison-industrial complex who stand to profit off of taxpayer dollars by locking as many people up for as minor infractions as they can get away with as possible...

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#116

Post by zaroth » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:56 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #83

ctdonath wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem with the charges? Felony murder is serious business. Yeah, he didn't choose to kill anyone by his own hand directly, but he wantonly created the felonious circumstances which directly led to someone's death. As for the "kidnapping", that's an understandable edge case for the legal definition entailing taking a human body (which may or may not have been legally dead at that particular point) without…

When felony murder kills a bystander through recklessness, that makes sense. Felony suicide should not count as felony murder by the partners. He got himself killed.

Now when a cop shoots you while you are trying to rob a bank, it's suicide? This seems like a perfect example of felony murder.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#117

Post by song » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:57 PM UTC

onnoonno wrote: post #108

song wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent quite some time in Germany and well I'm sorry to shatter your bubble but Germans do cross an empty street when the light is red. I've even seen people party in nightclubs and go outside to drink vodka or other drinks they bought in their car. And to further tear your argument, Spanish who have a "reputation" in Europe of crossing by red light and of having a bit more of loose attitude towards rules have a…

> I don't know but having lived in all three countries, I don't see that many differences in term of people's character that could explain the difference in murder rate. No offense, but could this be selection bias? You have certainly only talked to a selected subset of people.. I think if 80% of the U.S. population would want a thorough reform of their justice system, it would happen. What exactly would an 'external…

Sure, it might be a selection bias, I was a student in all three cases and, by definition, students tend to be more educated.

What I mean by external factor is the laws, the way the criminal system is setup, the lack or not of reinsertion opportunities for ex-cons and so on. You might say that in a democracy all of this is decided by the people, but there's a certain inertia that sets in that mean that people have very little influence in changing things and there are powerful forces that try to keep things as they are (for profit or different reasons).

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#118

Post by fixxer » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:57 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #82

waterfowl wrote: post #29

The insanity of the charges/sentencing reminds me of a passage from The Hot House (which is excellent, Pete Earley somehow got permission to go mingle with prisoners at USP Leavenworth for a year and write about it). A Bank Robber, 45 'They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I'm really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when…

If you think this sentence was unjust, there is another Colorado prisoner named Michael Dipentino. He is currently serving a 305 year sentence. What was his heinous crime? According to the Denver DA [1] he created phony checks to buy $200,000 worth of postage stamps, that he later pawned or resold. He was facing a minimum of 96 years after his conviction, but the judge decided to give him 305 years. The "justice" sys…

Counterfeiting, IMO and apparently the opinion of the Government (we rarely agree, for the record), is basically on par with treason.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#119

Post by vinceguidry » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 10:58 PM UTC

beamatronic wrote: post #73

zerocrates wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The felony murder rule is somewhat controversial but nevertheless nearly universal in the United States.

Does it always override the Good Samaritan law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law "Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated." Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?

> Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?

As long as the decision is up to prosecutors, no.

Re: A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early

#120

Post by joncp » Tue, Apr 07, 2015, 11:00 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #98

The worst part of this, IMO, is how the mistake was discovered. His former prosecutor was looking up his old cases on the state DOC's website, apparently to delight in the damage he had caused decades earlier. You would have to be a pretty depraved person to derive pleasure from unjustly taking away someone's life.

I thought that too until the article implied later that they were looking for other clerical errors as a result of a really bad mixup.