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When Asthma in Jail Becomes a Death Sentence:
Growing up, Matt Santana and Savion Hall were inseparable. The two met in middle school while hanging out with mutual friends in Midland, a West Texas oil town. After realizing they lived on the same block, Hall, a year younger than Santana, started sleeping over so they could play video games late into the night. As they got older, Hall and Santana remained dear friends, often turning to each other for help. Santana, who suffers from anxiety, says Hall sometimes spent hours by his side helping calm him down. "He would stay with me until I felt better, whether it was just driving around, listening to music or talking," he says. When Hall had asthma attacks, Santana would make sure he got his breathing treatments, which included inhalers and nebulizers, sometimes taking him to the hospital three or four times a month. The two looked out for each other. "It was special having a friend like that since childhood," Santana says. "I was hoping we would grow old together."
Then Hall was arrested and taken to the Midland County jail last summer. Court records show that he was accused of failing to wear a GPS monitor and testing positive for amphetamines—violations of the probation agreement he'd signed with the local district attorney's office to resolve a drug possession charge earlier that year. Nearly three weeks after Hall entered lockup for the alleged probation violations, jail doctors shipped him to a local hospital due to breathing problems and low oxygen levels, according to a report filed with the Texas Attorney General's office.
Friends say Hall's asthma attacks were frequent and severe enough that they learned to recognize the wheezing and heaving as signs that he needed immediate treatment. But by the time Hall arrived at the hospital from the jail, his condition had deteriorated to the point that medical staff had to resuscitate him. Santana, who saw Hall in the hospital, says his friend showed little brain activity and suffered back-to-back seizures before his family decided to take him off life support eight days later, on July 19, 2019. He was 30 years old. (Hall's family declined to comment for this story.)
Seemingly preventable in-custody deaths like Hall's are common. But while allegations of medical neglect proliferate in lockupsacrossTexas and the rest of the country, rarely do they result in criminal charges. Hall's case is different. Following a Texas Rangers probe, a Midland County grand jury this summer indicted six jail nurses on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and knowingly falsifying records for Hall's breathing treatments.
Midland County initially reported that Hall died from "natural causes," the most common cause of death reported by jails in Texas. Nearly 800 in-custody deaths since 2005—slightly more than half of all jail deaths recorded in the state during that time—were attributed to natural causes, according to data compiled by the Texas Justice Initiative. But in recent years, lawsuits, Texas Rangers reports, and newspaper investigations have shown many of those to be preventable tragedies that appear to result from negligence on the part of jail staff. Still, justice for families and accountability for those responsible is elusive.
Local jails in Texas, which mostly hold pretrial detainees who haven't been convicted, have been required to report all deaths in custody to the state since 2009.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @06:19PM (12 children)
Just stop. Your anti-anonymity crusade is getting about as much traction as if I were to start shrieking that everyone with a username is an attention-whoring tripfag, and for the same reason.
This site is made of people who find value in, or at least are willing to tolerate, both named and anonymous discourse. If you have a problem with one or the other, you can fuck right off to the chans or to pretty much any other discussion forum on the web, respectively, where you'll find plenty of people who share your norms.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday September 04 2020, @11:40PM (11 children)
You still haven't explained how requiring someone to log in, using a fake identity or not of their own choice , is depriving them of anonymity.
In other words, you have no argument .
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @12:41PM (3 children)
By the very act of logging in, privacy is shed, at most you have pseudonymity.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 05 2020, @01:53PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @02:40PM (1 child)
You're being purposefully obtuse. I'm sure you don't need me to explain concepts like plausible deniability, or that perfect is the enemy of good.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 05 2020, @06:03PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @07:56PM (6 children)
Nor have you made a compelling argument that banning AC posting is either sufficient or even necessary to curb trolling. You bear the burden of supporting your position, which you have failed to do. Slashdot was once home to massive numbers of active troll accounts operated by a large number of distinct trolls. GNAA was able to create hordes of sockpuppet accounts for spamming its message. More recently, trolls repeatedly created numerous accounts to post ASCII art swastikas, curbed only by Slashdot's willingness to delete the comments and disable the accounts. Much like banning IP addresses, it is a game of whack-a-mole, with little intrinsic benefit gained by requiring accounts for posting comments. The effectiveness of banning AC posting on APK is simply a result of the quirky nature of that particular spammer and his unwillingness to post from accounts, not reflecting any general usefulness from banning AC comments.
You have previously suggested that requiring accounts would provide the ability to track which users are posting low quality comments. However, the trolls of yore on Slashdot often maintained several accounts, often posting from the individual accounts with distinct personalities that might make it difficult to associate which troll accounts were run by the same person. In short, it doesn't provide the accountability you suggest it will provide. Your argument that anonymity can be made while posting from accounts undermines any usefulness that you suggest will be provided by banning AC comments.
I firmly believe the prevalence of AC trolling is simply a matter of it being the path of least resistance. If it is simplest to troll as an AC, this will be the preferred method. If it becomes simpler to troll from accounts, that will become the preferred approach. But there is one distinct benefit to encouraging trolls to post as AC instead of logging in. If trolls generate large numbers of sockpuppet accounts in lieu of AC posting, those accounts will also have the opportunity to participate in the moderation system. As of now, there is little evidence that trolls are attempting to abuse moderation to any significant degree. That may change if site policies are modified in a way that makes logged-in trolling the path of least resistance instead of AC trolling.
The burden still rests with you to made a cogent argument that banning AC posting will meaningfully curtail trolling. As of yet you have failed to do so. That said, it seems plausible that banning AC posting may result in the harmful side effect of increased moderation abuse, especially considering that mod points are handed out like candy on this site.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 06 2020, @01:33AM (4 children)
Also, while people still create accounts to post Nazi ASCII-art, it's not like before when there would be 100 posts in a row. Now it's one or two and the account gets banned.
The evidence pretty much speaks for itself.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2020, @03:05AM (3 children)
Is there an advantage to banning an account versus an IP address? If both are disposable, it does not follow that requiring accounts will reduce spam. If anything, Slashdot's success in this regard is because they are quick to ban IP addresses which are probably less disposable than accounts. One can readily create new accounts using throwaway email addresses whereas obtaining a fresh supply of new IP addresses and subnets is considerably more difficult.
It is also illogical to extrapolate the behavior of a single troll with particularly bizarre characteristics, APK, to the entire population of trolls. As I have noted, other trolls are very content to login when it suits their purposes. In the past on Slashdot, once trolls accumulated enough negative karma, they would post at -1 by default, effectively rendering them immune to moderation. Logged-in trolling became a less attractive option when accounts with low enough karma were restricted to two posts per day. In APK's case, he absolutely refuses to create an account, meaning that banning anonymous posting will effectively ban him. However, this most certainly is not the case for other trolls.
Slashdot editors also readily use their unlimited mod points, primarily for the purpose of modding particularly low quality comments to -1, a strategy that was brought to light by sllort's first Slashdot troll post investigation [slashdot.org]. The unlimited mod points were used quite effectively against GNAA spam that reached volumes well beyond anything experienced on this site. Admins here insist that they will not grant themselves unlimited mod points to combat spam.
As with Slashdot, IP bans are being used here to combat spam comments. However, the use of unlimited mod points may actually be more effective here than on Slashdot because of the power of the spam mod. It does not follow that eliminating anonymous posting is necessary, especially because other effective measures have not been attempted.
By the way, I don't recall the swastika spam on Slashdot resulting in a large volume of comments being submitted to the same story. Instead, the comment was posted as an early comment on many stories, often with numerous swastikas being posted in a vertical fashion. It had the effect of being a page lengthening post and requiring those reading at -1 to scroll past a large block of irrelevant text. The swastika was posted from accounts before the ban on AC posting was implemented so it does not follow that the ban on AC comments has curtailed that form of spam. Rather, its existence to begin with speaks to the willingness of trolls to login and use accounts.
Simply put, your arguments for eliminating AC posting are illogical. And if moderation doesn't restrict posting, then Ethanol-fueled would still be able to post. My understanding is that his account and a few others have sufficiently negative karma that they are actually restricted from posting.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 06 2020, @04:05AM (2 children)
Throttling an account for bad behaviour doesn't need to log up addresses, which some people are uncomfortable with. And logging IPs is only necessary if you want to control anonymous posts.
As for creating multiple free email addresses, who cares? You're of required to have a valid email address to create an account, so you can just put 12345@spaceballs.com, nobody cares. The only issue with that is if you don't put a real address, people can't contact you by email.m
Requiring a valid email address would slow things down a bit for people wanting to create fake multiple sock puppet accounts, and it's the norm, but it's not necessary. Unless you take the time to post, the sock puppet will remain at low karma with limited ability to post. And when multiple sock puppets act in concert it makes it easy to detect with a simple script. An the account, and if it's a fake email the person has no way to contest the ban.
Anonymous posts are mostly low value in part because there is no user history. Kind of hard to really care about an ac beyond the moment. They could die tomorrow, nobody would care because nobody knows them even by a nym.
Your arguments run contrary to the facts. Anonymous posts lower the value of the entire site. Imagine if everyone was required to post anonymously - there's a social aspect to all Internet forums, remove it by requiring everyone to be anonymous and you kill the site. So people derive value from non-anonymous posts. Your arguments will never change that aspect of human nature.
Especially as someone has pointed out, this is not a tech site. The real discussions center on politics. Democrats vs Republicans, far right v antifa, BLM vs white supremists, the right , incels, MRAs, misogynists and MGTOW v feminist, LGBT+, etc.
This is NOT a tech site. It's a discussion forum with a definite righ-leaning, libtard, misogynists bent. Explains why so many posters don't want it connected to their real-life identities.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 06 2020, @06:19AM (1 child)
I agree that Slashdot has considerably improved. But were there actually only two swastika posts there today? Or did you only see two because the others were deleted before you would have seen them? I agree that the swastika and APK spam were massively out of control, but those generally weren't posted by ACs to begin with.
I believe the email address you enter has to be valid when signing up for an account. Your password is emailed there, so you have to provide a valid email address to receive the password. I think your comment is factually incorrect in that respect.
I also highly doubt that this site will stop logging IPIDs if AC posting is disabled. They will argue it's necessary for the purpose of preventing the use of sockpuppet accounts to mod bomb people. I believe it's highly unlikely that disabling AC posting will increase privacy as you suggest.
The issue if accounts were removed altogether is that other measures like signing posts would be required to verify the identity of posters. But I'm not altogether convinced it would kill the site. It wasn't uncommon in the late 90s for many popular sites to allow commenting without registration. Even Slashdot was originally like that. Many of those sites did quite well. It's debatable whether that approach would be workable today because trolling is worse and trolls are more willing to engage in extremely ugly behavior. But it's also an endpoint of a continuum with various amounts of anonymous posting and no indication that the relationship between site success and anonymity are related in monotonically.
I will agree wholeheartedly in one respect: this isn't a tech site. Slashdot hasn't been a tech site for a long time, either. The most frequented discussions on here are when there's an opportunity to people to beat each other over the head (figuratively, I sincerely hope) about politics and related matters. I wish that the atmosphere of the old Slashdot would return, whether here, on Slashdot, or somewhere else. I really enjoyed Slashdot at its height around 2000. A lot of real experts and industry leaders posted there, with people like John Carmack frequently active on the site. It's not the same any longer, sadly. I had a lot of good times on Slashdot back in the day. Perhaps the biggest reason I want to hold on to AC posting is because removing it would be a step away from the old Slashdot that I wish would return somewhere.
As for why I wouldn't want my posts connected to my real life identity, the biggest reason is that I'm an employee of the University of Nebraska and I've harshly criticized my own employer over administrative bureaucracy and their handling of COVID-19. If my superiors knew of my criticism, it might seriously test their willingness to uphold the principles of academic freedom. I have a temporary faculty position and I suspect that my comments might hasten its end if my supervisors knew how I criticize the university. But I would also argue that insider information sometimes needs to become public to hold leadership accountable. We actually discussed this in another thread where you criticized experts and politicians for lying and I replied with a defense of Dr. Fauci. We don't have good leadership right now but being able to speak up honestly without fear of retribution is essential for accountability.
I know you get a hard time here from some people. I have no issue with you. You've always been civil with me and I appreciate our discussions.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 06 2020, @11:47PM
ISTR a discussion where it was mentioned that you don't have to enter a real email address. The only consequence would be not being able to do a password reset if you forget your password. Seems to me that wouldn't be a big deal for sock puppets - just create another one.
The Internet has changed. The old ways won't come back because now it's mostly for entertainment, not adding to your store of knowledge. We collectively seem to have taken an off ramp from the information superhighway. Look at the stupidity over g5 - like anyone NEEDS to be able to download a movie in a few seconds …
The use of a random nym can hardly connect you to your real life identity unless you choose something that leaks information, like "such-and-such university alumnus class of 99" A nym like "I_Hate_Trump" could be anyone.
As for people giving me a hard time, it comes with what I am. And trying to think beyond group think.
Sometimes an opinion will be unpopular because it seems to align with a particular political agenda , such as the recent (definitely NOT tech related) story of the guy who violated his terms of release , was sent to serve his time, and died in custody.
If you read through the posts, I made it clear that I have no sympathy. This is an example of an earned Darwin. The whole world knows that US jails are a horror story, he was given a chance to avoid it (thanks to covid, there's pressure to make plea deals that keep people out of lockup), and he blew it in a most stupid and predictable fashion. Don't take amphetamines if you're going to be asked to pee in a cup on a regular basis, duh.
I said the jail staff were in the wrong, but it was ultimately HIS actions that got him into that situation.
I also seem to be the only one who found the tech angle - that with AI we won't need cops on the road handing out tickets , so we can eventually lay off half of them and divert the money to crime prevention by increasing funding for social services, better schools, more job opportunities, etc. Because the police are not out there to prevent crime - just react to it.
In what world is it justifiable that a rookie cop gets paid more (with a lot less training) than a social worker with decades of experience? A world where there's money to be made keeping people in the industrial prison complex.
But people lost their shit because I'm not being a bleeding heart liberal - even though I said the jailers were in the wrong - because I believe the guy has some responsibility in all this. He's an adult. I've dealt with people like him - you need to intervene long before for a decent chance of success. But saying we should put what resources we have where they're going to have the maximum effect is triage, how dare I! Sounds really right wing instead of the best way to help the most people.
In other words, a political discussion, not one based on logic and doing the most good. Because taking money from cops is red meat to a lot of people. And saying don't do the crime if you can't do the time is SO heartless. Even though most people never see the inside of a jail, so a bit of common sense and personal responsibility goes a long way.
Well, gotta charge the phone and then walk the dogs. Enjoy the long weekend.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 06 2020, @01:36AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.