Comments on: This I believe

By: Jeff Gamso

Jeff Gamso — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:31:06 +0000

It’s that wonderful line of Sister Helen Prejean’s. “We’re all better than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

I’ve represented people who’ve done monstrous things. I can’t see them, won’t see them, shouldn’t see them as monsters. And while I have an obligation to make the effort, it’s also a proper one. They aren’t monsters. They are, however, as is each of us to some extent, consequences.

You have to get inside and understand how it happened. There’s choice, of course, but there’s also and always context. There but for the grace of god, if you believe that sort of thing.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:25:56 +0000

I guess it depends on what you mean by “evil”. I’d obviously disagree that there’s anything like “pure evil”. It’s philosophically untenable.

Sure, choices are what make us and what lead us down different paths, but we are not defined solely by our bad choices – or shouldn’t be, rather – but by the sum of our existence.

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:22:52 +0000

There is evil out there, and I’ve seen it. It doesn’t matter where the stepping off point is. What matters is that a person steps off.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:21:17 +0000

Whose point? That wasn’t my point.

I understand that “choices” may be what separate “you” from “me”, but that doesn’t mean that you’re in any way morally superior to me.

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:19:47 +0000

The point, though, is that while many may share the capacity for evil, we make choices. Every day, we make choices. That’s where our sharp lines come in.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:16:23 +0000

That’s not what that sentence says.

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:14:17 +0000

I believe that the man who is about to spend the next 5 years of his life for shooting someone else has the same capacity for evil as the man who is sending him there.

You believe the man who pulled the trigger deserves the same as the man who never picked up the gun?

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.