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from the things-are-not-always-as-they-appear dept.
[IANAL]
In the US, courts assess guilt or innocence before a conviction, then after that the appellate courts focus solely on fairness. The Atlantic has an exposé on some people who are wrongly convicted are pressured to accept Alford Plea Deals in lieu of exonerations — that more or less means to plead guilty for a verbal guarantee from the courts to both speed things up and give a much lighter or minimal sentence. But how many do this is not known: this situation is not tracked there are no formal statistics. However, in Baltimore City and County alone, there were at least 10 cases in the last 19 years in which defendants with viable innocence claims ended up signing Alford pleas. These can translate to the occasional innocent person being stigmatized, unable to sue the state, and that no one re-investigates the crime meaning that the real perpetrator is never brought to justice.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday September 11 2017, @03:29PM (3 children)
That's not what I said, though. I specifically stated that we needed to treat rich white people the same way we treated poor non-white people. Complete with planting drugs and guns to justify false arrests, roughing them up during the arrest, denying them medical care while in police custody, bullying them into pleading to crimes they never committed, and so forth. Oh, and occasionally shooting a suburbanite for no reason, and destroying any camera footage that contradicts the police version of events.
As for poor white people getting the judicial shaft, yes, the absolutely do. But it's a whole different level if you're not white: For instance, my poor white friends have never been arrested for being the victim of a knife attack (while the person holding the knife was never arrested nor charged). Poor white people don't get shot and killed for holding a BB gun while shopping at a Toys R Us. Or, in a pair of recent Supreme Court cases where the cops raided the wrong address and the homeowner shot at the cops thinking it was an armed robbery, the poor white guy's case was dismissed while the poor Latino guy's conviction was upheld.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Scrutinizer on Tuesday September 12 2017, @01:11AM (2 children)
You provided no references for your anecdotes.
I'll give you references with my counter-anecdotes: Matthew Stewart [fox13now.com], imprisoned for "drug crime", accused "cop killer", murdered while locked in a jail cell and thus naturally officially deemed a suicide. John Geer [policestateusa.com] murdered by cops who shot him inside his own house after his girlfriend broke up with him and called the cops when her stuff was thrown out of his house. Kelly Thomas [wikipedia.org] was flat-out beaten to death by murderous cops. James Boyd [wikipedia.org], murdered by cops too tired to bother climbing a hill to harass a homeless man.
Criminal government agents murder innocent people regardless of skin color. Injustice and criminality in government is the problem - NOT that some victims of criminal government have this-or-that skin color. If you don't have the authority to do something on your own, you can't delegate that task to the Constitution, the cops, nor anyone else. (I have no authority to forcibly forbid or take a percentage of Eric Garner [wikipedia.org]'s cigarette sales, and therefore neither did the cops who murdered him.) If that task is done regardless, it is literally a criminal act.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:29PM (1 child)
Of debian fame. I am not sure how rich he was, but I think he fell under privileged white person territory and look how the cops treated him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:34AM
I hadn't heard. I'm still not sure what to make of Ian's death, but the reports [truthvoice.com] I've looked at today seem consistent with someone who found out about government criminality suddenly and first-hand.