Comments on: This I believe

By: Why didn’t they get a second opinion? « The Jury Room

Why didn’t they get a second opinion? « The Jury Room — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:15:29 +0000

[...] to say about a reporter who crusaded to free the wrongfully convicted. And what the anonymous ‘Gideon’ (from ‘a public defender’ blog) chooses to believe about our justice [...]

By: John McNamara

John McNamara — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:51:19 +0000

The only way to prevent prosecutors from requesting, and judges from imposing, inordinate 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, etc., Life, sentences is to drive it home the consequences of those acts. Every prosecutor and every judge should be required to serve 60 days in the state penitentiary (not as a special guest), but as a non-descript inmate, before being allowed to act in judgment of free men. OF COURSE, THAT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN. Therefore, prosecutors will ask for such sentences and judges will pronounce such sentence in the absence of semblence of consequence.

The federal government must stop subsidising the lucritive industrial complex called prison. As long as their is profit to be had, innocent persons are going to be sent to prison, and as long as law schools pass on the incompetent, injustice will prevail.

By: John McNamara

John McNamara — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:41:32 +0000

I believe . . . I believe . . . that, if the hound dog didn’t stop to take a leak, he would have caught the rabbit. I believe, further, that if it doesn’t rain, we are going to have a long dry spell.

It is true that COPS are probably more corrupt than those they arrest; that prisons are now more for purposes of revenue collection than for corrections; that warehousing is now more important than rehabilitation, and that once convicted of a felony, your abilities to obtain any job are becoming slimmer and slimmer as each day passes. More than anything else, I believe that many, many innocent people are in prison due, aolely, to incompetence, and corruption. I believe that the AEDPS (The Kill-Em-Quick) Act is the most serious attack on our liberty and rights since before the year of 1215, when King John affixed his signature to the Magna Carta.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:41:41 +0000

I don’t think I suggested any such thing – but I could have been inartful in my writing. Certainly free will exists – and that’s the point. That our decisions/actions are informed by our circumstances, not that anyone who does X must necessarily be Y.

As to how an ideal system would be different? Well, for one, it wouldn’t be a numbers game; secondly, we wouldn’t throw around sentences like 20 years as if they existed only abstractly.

By: gerardw

gerardw — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:21:42 +0000

I believe that our actions are the product of our circumstances
So… no free will? No individual variation in reaction to the same circumstances?

Corollary: sexual orientation is determined by circumstance and not inherent to the individual? (I am not asserting this, simply pointing out that this would seem to follow from the postulate.)

that punishment must come with understanding and with mercy.
What would that look like? How would it be different than the current justice system?