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Celebrations Abound as Angela Corey, "Cruelest Prosecutor in America", Ousted

posted by janrinok on Friday September 02 2016, @06:39AM   
from the notorious dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

Reviled Florida State Attorney Angela Corey lost her reelection bid on [August 30], prompting widespread celebration as the woman The Nation once suggested was "the cruelest prosecutor in America" was ousted.

"Corey's loss is an encouraging sign that the public will no longer tolerate overzealous and unprincipled criminal prosecutions, including women and children", University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks said in a statement.

Corey, whose eight-year tenure in Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit Court saw her charge 77 children as adults in 2016 alone and sentence more people to death than any other Florida prosecutor, gained widespread notoriety for her inadequate prosecution of Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, and for seeking a 60-year sentence for Marissa Alexander, a domestic violence survivor with three children, for firing a warning shot in the direction of her abusive husband. (Alexander spent three years in prison.)

[...] Corey was defeated by unknown opponent and corporate lawyer Melissa Nelson, who will now face off with write-in candidate Kenny Leigh in the general election--although Jacksonville media noted that no write-in candidate has ever been elected to the state attorney position in Florida, and that Leigh has yet to make a single campaign appearance.

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Original Submission

• Re:not half bad(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:31PM

  by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:31PM (#397124) Homepage Journal

  It is traditional to assume the link, and there is some evidence indicating that it might be real. I cannot take his bland assertion that it is as valid, and the form of his argument is not linked to genetic mechanisms, but rather to social mechanisms

  Those with a 'Y' chromosome are much more likely to commit crime. [telegraph.co.uk] Full Stop.

  From the linked article:

  There are 84,731 people in prison in Britain and according to the latest figures, 80,915 of them are men. Less than five per cent of this country’s prison population is female, and the trend is similar elsewhere in the western world. In France, it’s about three per cent; in Germany, just under six. The global median is 4.3 per cent, according to figures from the International Centre for Prison Studies.

  Holding other factors constant, having a 'Y' chromosome is an excellent predictor of criminal activity.

  How strong the genetic component is may be an open question, but across vastly different human cultures this observation holds true.

  More relevant discussion can be had here [theatlantic.com].

  You can argue the nature vs. nurture angle all you want, but Dr. Eagleman's statement [jrbenjamin.com] (quoted from this book [amazon.com]):

  In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.

  About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.

  We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

  By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.” [emphasis added]

  David Eagleman is not a psychologist, but a neuroscientist [wikipedia.org].

  --
  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr

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