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Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

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Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, an arrest on your record, even if you're acquitted and/or get a settlement for police wrongdoing, can still mess you up. There are employers and landlords who will ask you / check whether you were ever arrested, regardless of the outcome of the arrest . Mere involvement with Law Enforcement puts a permanent black mark on your record and can interfere with basic things for the rest of your life.

Which is why I believe criminal records should only be kept for serious crimes (killing, etc.), anything less, the record gets deleted after few months completely. Otherwise, just as you said, the black mark on the records are worse than serving a whole year in prison, and can be used to exploit others.

While there are a few other ways it can happen, my state likes to say that certain criminal records are available for expungement.

One of the criteria: "The person has reached 120 years of age."

Cool.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#282
post #236
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yea, an arrest on your record What an awful data environment The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties Uncivilised

> The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties That's how people get disappeared in failed states. It's perfectly fine to force the state to clearly declare whom they have detained and their reasons for doing so. We also need to recognize that arrests are very often preposterous (or worse, retaliatory) and not hold it (absent other information or further…

... subsequent to release.

The fact that someone is in custody should be always available. But it should not be up to Joe Random to pay $11 to my State Patrol to find out why I was arrested last week, especially if I wasn't charged.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did it to show that if you speak out against them, they'll arrest and inconvenience you. So the next person who gets a thought to speak out might decide not to bother. some of my students have expressed that they wish they could get arrested for a meme and walk away with a couple hundred grand. i, of course, have told them that they would be playing with fire. but they are still viewing it as a potentially lif…

>so, for some subset of people, they might be having to opposite of the desired chilling effect. Those ones are the easiest though, are they not? Someone going into it with convictions (or even chickening out because they are aware of the consequences) have consolation and inner reserves. Some kid angry that he can't get a six figure salary at age 22 fresh out of college might regret it as soon as they're in the clin…

not with that attitude there won’t! straight into investments, don’t touch for a few decades and she’ll be right. then again most people desperate for money don’t think like that unfortunately

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#284
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decideds what is free speech and what is a conspiracy theory? For a long time saying tabaco creates lung cancers was basically a conspiracy theory and saying it is healthy was free speech.

Since at least the 70s everyone knew that it caused lung cancer. It's just that industry spending prevented anyone from doing something about it, in the exactly the same way that we've been seeing with global warming.

Again, free speech as commonly used, is about Constitutional protection from the government trying to curtail and/or punish individual's speech.

Prior to the internet, the "free speech" you're thinking of was down to whoever owned the printing press of interest.

The OP was about the government punishing a woman for criticizing their public utility.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#285
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you were arrested, charged even, if not convicted should not be discoverable by third parties That's how people get disappeared in failed states. It's perfectly fine to force the state to clearly declare whom they have detained and their reasons for doing so. We also need to recognize that arrests are very often preposterous (or worse, retaliatory) and not hold it (absent other information or further…

... subsequent to release. The fact that someone is in custody should be always available. But it should not be up to Joe Random to pay $11 to my State Patrol to find out why I was arrested last week, especially if I wasn't charged.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the nature of information propagation in the universe, but how do you propose to require the state to declare whom it has detained one week, and then to make that information unavailable the following week?

(and even if you were able to change the nature of reality as you suggest, why accommodate the state's desire to deny such an action after-the-fact?)

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, an arrest on your record, even if you're acquitted and/or get a settlement for police wrongdoing, can still mess you up. There are employers and landlords who will ask you / check whether you were ever arrested, regardless of the outcome of the arrest . Mere involvement with Law Enforcement puts a permanent black mark on your record and can interfere with basic things for the rest of your life.

You must not have ever been poor because the idea of several thousand dollars right now completely obliterates any notion of "maybe less money later, possibly" Particularly if you're young and poor. Humans don't really work the way you're implying from your armchair.

I was a poor refugee, but different people take such situations differently. For my family, it was a stern adherence to law and rules, an extreme low risk approach. For others, granted, it was dismissal of law and rules. Certainly, being poor and hungry made us even more averse to conflicts with the law / police / society / system. Again, others drew opposite lessons and approaches.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#287
post #204

> The statute requires that a person knowingly circulate a false report. Combs says she was repeating what people told her. Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual. The State Health Services or TCEQ would need to conduct that investigation and ask those questions. Both of those are state level agen…

hippa is not that. well, it more than one person was involved.

it only prevents personably identifiable information to be shared with institutions that are not hippa compliant. nothing else.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#288
post #276
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How can X in the richest nation in the history of the planet be... I've honestly grown absolutely sick of this type of comment as I get older. If you're not from the states, it's maybe understandable, but throughout my life most of the folks with me on the left that make these statements are completely ignorant of how their own government works and just assume "shit should be taken care of" without actually having t…

Well I'm not from the states and I stopped reading at that point. If you're "absolutely sick" of this conversation don't participate in it, but if you're going to you should do so politely and in good faith, not starting with a tirade like that.

If my tone is off-putting, I apologize. I'm currently in San Francisco, living through a combine federal, state, and local politics budgetary nightmare. Here, even the most politically passionate folks seem to struggle with basic civics (especially who has the authority to impose taxes and how) and most don't understand municipal finance, which has real world consequences. The "how can San Francisco not afford X with all the tech/ai money here" sentiment is prevalent. Currently, it is the potential collapse of the Bay Area public transit system.

It can all be exasperating. If you're curious about why a nerd like me can be so exasperated and scared by all this, I'd suggest a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast: https://youtu.be/OXKAfcgl7eU

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sitting on a precompiled list I can just drop into a comment. But I do have a pretty hard rule about investing more effort than someone else already has. So this would be an unequal trade for me to go spend the rest of my Saturday building a list for someone who wrote two sentences on the internet. To add slightly more flavoring, I think its a pretty reasonable view to assume that the massive fracturing happe…

How about this: what's an example of an activist judge, according to you? Bonus question: do you enjoy watching Fox?

I'm not OP, but Matthew Kacsmaryk is definitely an activist judge, no matter what the fuck Fox news thinks of him.

Re: Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the full picture. Activist judges have been a problem for awhile now, and it seems to be mostly influenced by ideology rather than purely money.

What’s an activist judge? Do you believe a judge can just rule whatever they want outside the framework of law?

So many do, starting with the supreme court lately.
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