31–40 of 108 posts
Everybody here in the comments seem to take the story on face value. Meanwhile, the only video attached to the post is pixelated to the highest degree, and you certainly can't see facial features on it. Am I missing something here?
While this could be not the only surveillance video in this case it doesn't really collaborates anything said in the post.
The state needs to financially make whole persons who are wrongly arrested. There needs to be a standard set of damages that get paid out to someone who is in jail wrongfully. I would propose that the state owes you double the highest paid salary that you have earned in your career for the duration of your stay in prison. This is to both make a person whole for their missed earnings, and to repair the damages that ha…
It's complicated, though. How do you define "wrongfully arrested"? "Not guilty" is not the same as "innocent". "Charges dropped" is not the same as "innocent". This is not to say that all those arrested are guilty - far from it! But you would need a separate legal mechanism to distinguish actual wrongful arrests - and sadly, that mechanism would almost certainly be as badly biased by race and class as the existing co…
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95% of white people maybe black people have no alternative to understanding how the world really works
This is an incredibly racist way to look at the issue.
The state needs to financially make whole persons who are wrongly arrested. There needs to be a standard set of damages that get paid out to someone who is in jail wrongfully. I would propose that the state owes you double the highest paid salary that you have earned in your career for the duration of your stay in prison. This is to both make a person whole for their missed earnings, and to repair the damages that ha…
Anyway, in the UK, YOU are invoiced for board and lodging upon release[1] [2]. The UK Home Office use it as a method of effectively diminishing any compensation payment to negligible sums (but oddly, only for male prisoners - female ones are not invoiced, apparently). 27 years wrongly imprisoned gets you total of around 46 pounds (around $80). [3]
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-458006/Man-wrongly-j... [2] http://www.rense.com/general50/25yt.htm [3] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/22/sean-hodgson-compe...
The state needs to financially make whole persons who are wrongly arrested. There needs to be a standard set of damages that get paid out to someone who is in jail wrongfully. I would propose that the state owes you double the highest paid salary that you have earned in your career for the duration of your stay in prison. This is to both make a person whole for their missed earnings, and to repair the damages that ha…
> "a real financial burden on the state for making these kinds of errors" I agree with everything in your post except this; the state does not care whether it is burdened or not, it simply taxes the citizenry to cover these expenses. At least a portion of this compensation should come from the responsible parties if this type of problem is to be discouraged. Imagine that you are a prosecutor or police officer set on…
So, when a prosecutor says: "I put away 300 people, with a 97% conviction rate" their supervisor can say: "Yes, but you also cost this office $250,000 with your 2 wrongful convictions. We're passing on you and giving the promotion to Janice who put away 260 people on a 95% conviction rate, but only cost the office $10,000."
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This is an incredibly racist way to look at the issue.
Recognizing that, in practice, racial identity in the US has a significant correlation to various differences in life experience is not racism.
The state needs to financially make whole persons who are wrongly arrested. There needs to be a standard set of damages that get paid out to someone who is in jail wrongfully. I would propose that the state owes you double the highest paid salary that you have earned in your career for the duration of your stay in prison. This is to both make a person whole for their missed earnings, and to repair the damages that ha…
Following on, it would be far more effective to just radically reduce the obscene rates of arrest and incarceration in this country, make sure bail is fair so unaffordable bail isn't used to force guilty pleas, make sure we have sufficient public defenders (easy to do if we could lighten their case load by 80% or so), and in general radically reduce the chances of someone getting arrested/charged in the first place.…
Prosecutorial misconduct and irresponsibility is a big reason why we have obscene rates of incarceration. I totally agree that we should radically reduce the rates of incarceration, but how do you do that? Do you tell prosecutors to incarcerate fewer people? Do you give each one a maximum quota? Do you apply a penalty for each case that they get wrong?
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There is probably a 3-5% error rate in the justice system. At least that is the academic consensus currently. 3-5% of 2.3 million prisoners is 70~115 thousand people.
If there is a 4% error rate with prisoners on death row, I'd imagine that it's even higher in the general prison population (because they're subject to less scrutiny?).
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Reflexive defense of authority is a pretty common pattern. People doing it don't realize they're doing it, or they wouldn't. That's one of the fundamental mechanisms of racism, among other unpleasant things. Hardly anyone thinks of themselves as racist, so when they make a racist argument (not saying this one is, just making a broader point), they don't think it's racist - they think it's all about the equality. The…
You know, I'm perfectly capable of explaining why I do things. Look at what you've done here: you've taken away my agency. Instead of letting me engage in a conversation, you've pronounced some over-arching reason for my comment, thereby not only eliminating anything I might have to offer, but wiping aside any category of comment that is similar to mine. Gotta watch that. It's perfect fine for an internal dialog. Aft…
2. I haven't taken away your agency, or rejected you from conversation. We're conversing right now, aren't we?
And yes, we might learn something. Are you learning, or just reacting to perceived criticism? In the first paragraph of my original comment, I explicitly excluded you from the broad discussion of racism I went into. I shouldn't have to do that, it should be obvious. But one thing I've learned in these discussions is that people take things personally when they shouldn't, then immediately make the rest of the discussion all about themselves. Which is exactly what you did here. We're not talking about either the "few bad apples" you raised, or the problems of social conditioning that I raised. We're talking about how offended you are that I spoke up at all.
If you can learn anything from this, learn to be aware of the risk of doing that. It's an incredibly frustrating thing for those on the other end. It's a major reason why women and minorities are very wary of discussing sexism and racism with white men. (And no, I'm not accusing you of being sexist or racist, so stop right there.)
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Why are you bringing it up if you don't think it applies in this situation? I always get nervous when people say stuff like this because it's like... he says he doesn't think it's a small problem, but then the only thing he's talking about is how we have to be careful making claims about scale... Why would he bring that up except to question the scale of the problem? But I must be missing something, because you expli…
Whenever I read something that emotionally moves me, it sets off my bullshit detector. That's especially true when it's something I'm predisposed to believing. There is no context here, just a sad story. You can post a thousand of these stories. It all adds to to a bunch of "There's a bunch of sad stories in the world" without any other data. It's odd, because I always get nervous about making comments like I did. Pe…