The left never rests: they’ve been coming for your DAs
There have been a number of articles about the left’s campaign to get a bunch of leftist DAs-in-name-only (DAINOs?) into office, in order to stop prosecuting a lot of people. Rather Orwellian, don’t you think?
Here’s a NY Times article from last October:
“In the first 90 days, I’m going to give you a plan to end mass incarceration,” said John Creuzot, a former judge who hopes to unseat Ms. Johnson in November [as Dallas DA].
In the past, candidates running to be district attorney — if they were challenged at all — touted their toughness on crime. But now district attorneys’ races have become more competitive, attracting large donations and challengers running on pledges to transform the criminal justice system.
Usually their pledges have to do with drug offenses, and this attracts some conservatives as well, who aren’t interested in prosecuting what is considered “minor” drug offenses (what should be classified that way is another issue, one I won’t deal with in this post). But the new DAs—and Creuzot won the election, so he’s one of them—often go far beyond that.
Which is part of the original plan—going far beyond that, although the more popular drug sentencing reform is often what’s emphasized. Here’s an article about more recent doings by Ceuzot in his new job:
“When I ran to become your district attorney, I promised you that I would bring changes to our criminal justice system,” Creuzot wrote in an open letter about the new policy. “The changes that I promised will be a step forward in ending mass incarceration in Dallas County, and will make our community safer by ensuring that our limited resources are spent where they can do the most good.”
In response, Creuzot is taking heat from police organizations, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Reform is one thing,” Abbott and Paxton said in a joint letter to Creuzot. “Actions that abandon the rule of law and that could promote lawlessness are altogether different.”
How was Creuzot elected? The effort was very organized and well-funded:
The Texas Organizing Project estimates that organizers had 75,,000 “conversations” with voters to advance the cause of criminal justice reform. The group knocked on 6,000 doors a day, paying workers $15 an hour and giving them paid sick time. The effort produced 115,000 new midterm voters, Brown said.
“Brown” is Brianna Brown, deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project, “a progressive group pushing to end mass incarceration in America.”
What is this phrase, “mass incarceration”? It conjures up the idea of a group of people—a la Jews during World War II, for example—being put in camps, which is a favored leftist image these days to use against the right.
And here’s an even more recent editorial about Dallas (June, 2019) in the Dallas Morning News:
The district attorney, John Creuzot, is passionate about criminal justice reform and about reducing the numbers of incarcerated people in the county jail.
He has drawn headlines for his assurance that he won’t prosecute minor marijuana crimes or thefts of less than $750 for what he called items of necessity.
We appreciate Creuzot’s passion for seeing fewer people incarcerated. But we are concerned with reforms that place less burden for a crime on the person responsible than they do on society at large.
That is what was so disturbing about Police Chief U. Renee Hall’s misstatement during a news conference Monday about the increase in murders in the city.
Hall said, people in Dallas “who have returned from prison who can’t find a job, who are not educated so in those instances” have been “forced to commit violent crimes.”
The chief quickly clarified her comment and promised justice for the killers. And she shouldn’t be condemned for a single extemporaneous statement under the camera lights.
But she also emphasized that the city “can’t arrest its way out of crime.”
This is a common phrase in criminal justice reform that has some validity insofar as a society has to build up opportunity for all people.
But the phrase also risks becoming a warped cliche that excuses law enforcement from its most important role. People who do bad things need to be held accountable, both as justice for society and victims and as a deterrence to potential criminals.
Another article on the subject can be found here.
But I don’t want to focus on Creuzot or Dallas, because he is by no means the most extreme case. To go back to that Times article, which sheds some light on how the Texas Organizing Project (note the neutral-sounding name) and other “progressive” groups pushing that “end mass incarceration!” theme get their financial backing. Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:
The push to overhaul prosecutors’ offices was pioneered by the billionaire George Soros, who in recent years has backed more than 20 candidates, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, vowing to upend the way prosecutors have traditionally approached their jobs.
In Dallas, Mr. Soros has given more than $46,000 worth of polling to Mr. Creuzot’s campaign through the Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC. And the Texas Organizing Project, a grass-roots economic and racial justice organization that Mr. Soros also funds, has donated more than $190,000 worth of canvassing.
The effort aims to achieve a single overarching goal, said Whitney Tymas, who heads Mr. Soros’s prosecutor initiative, which is separate from his philanthropic work.“We want to end mass incarceration. That’s our North Star,” she said. “We’ve won twice as many races as we’ve lost. We’re not going to win them all. But we’re really trying to, because that’s the difference between people unjustly sitting in jail or not.”
This is one of those things that’s happening under the radar of most people.
[NOTE: Ace describes how it’s been operating in Boston recently.]
The second American civil war will be fought over whether we live in a Republic or a country ruled by the left’s crazy mob.
It is up to the legislators, not the courts, not the police, not the DAs, etc. to determine what the laws should be. It is up to the others to do as the law commands because that comes from “the will of the people” within the confines of the Constitution.
Since, many now decide what, and who, to prosecute regardless of what the law is, I say the rule of law is dead.
Actually, it may never have been more than an idea anyway. sigh.
“Mass incarceration” is code for ‘incarceration’. Some of them object on principle to dispositions which assume personal agency and response to incentives, because that calls into question the utility of the social work and mental health industry. Others object to deplorables like police, prison guards, and provincial state legislators taking discretion away from professional-managerial types (judges) and imposing standards on mascots of the Anointed. Still others object to the idea of public bodies largely composed of white people getting above themselves by holding black people accountable for common crimes.
It’s the Democratic Party, so it’s status games all the way down. As for Soros, he’s a Loki figure who generates ruin just to amuse himself.
Another example of a DA-in-name-only candidate is Chesa Boudin. He Was A Child Of Incarcerated Parents. He Could Be San Francisco’s Next District Attorney.
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn took care of Chesa from infancy. BTW, “Chesa” was named as a combination of “Che-South America.” Given his name, it is perhaps not an accident that he traveled as a backpacker to Latin America. He wrote a book about his trip. Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America. Because Chesa had a leftist royalty pedigree, which includes his Boudin grandfather and great-uncle, within 24 hours of arriving in Caracas, he was invited to Miraflores, the Venezuelan equivalent of our White House. Chesa ended up working in Miraflores for a year.
Bill Ayers came down to Venezuela to shower praises on the Chavista regime.
NOTE FOR NEO:
The video link to Rudy’s interview in the “some reactions to the Horowitz report” autostarts when I open your blog “homepage” for the first time each day, to read your new posts. If I pause the video, it doesn’t restart later (although it does restart on it’s own post when I add a comment or reload the page).
The embed may need to be disabled or something.
Best regards – you know how much I love your blog!
AF
AesopFan:
Thanks for letting me know. I HATE autoplay!
I can’t undo it, but I will fix it by putting a “more” to click on to lead to it, so it doesn’t load every time the home page is visited.
This is Seattle. Until the voters revolt it will continue.
Soros spent $600 k to elect a new Sheriff in Phoenix in 2018. That was top replace “Sheriff Joe” as part of the two pronged effort including a Clinton judge who convicted him in a bench trial and sentence him to 6 months prison. She is the same who ruled against SB 2010, Arizona’s attempt to deal with illegals ignored by Obama.
If I self-identify as George Soros can I commit any crimes I want without going to jail?
As for the communities that elected these AGs, Welcome to NYC under John Lindsay and David Dinkins, you’ll love it when the policies are fully in place.
My wife and I were in Dallas three weeks ago, staying with good friends, the husband is a retired big time lawyer, lots of technical trade mark and in the old days anti-trust, and both husband and wife are Democrats. We talked, mostly listened to the mess Dallas is having with the Democrats in charge and while in Dallas we had coffee with one of my best friends a lawyer still practicing, IT privacy, intellectual property, his wife is a lawyer who has worked for the Dallas County appeals court system and he told me it is chaos because so many of the old Republican judges were pushed out by a crop of Democrat candidates who have no idea how to be judges, he and his wife are Democrats too.
At one time the outlying cities in the Dallas area turned out to vote Republican but now lots of Californians and other folks have moved into those towns and this last time a lot of inner-city (black) votes were cast and turned things over to such an extent that things might be a mess until new judges learn how to run their courts and perhaps a new DA gets elected.
This is not the first time Dallas has had unusual DA’s and the circus keeps coming to town.
Arguably, any DA who refuses to prosecute a class of crimes is acting as an accomplice to those crimes and also guilty of obstructing justice.
Soros has been very busy in trying to do anything he can to destabilize democratic countries, and to push them towards the Left.
As I have mentioned here before, reports are that Soros has also poured money and organization into another largely under the radar project, his “Secretaries of State” project, which is trying to get as many leftist Secretaries as possible elected.
Why?
Well, these Secretaries are usually in charge of elections in their respective states—they administer and set election rules, and rule on any election controversies.
You can imagine how much help it would be for leftist candidates to have a sympathetic Secretary of State on their side in any election controversy.
For example, you might remember “Hanging chads,” and that in a very hotly contested election, Al Franklin was elected Senator by only a little over 300 votes. Who rules on the number and legitimacy of votes is critical.
I believe it was Stalin who said something like—“It doesn’t matter who votes, it’s who counts the votes that matters.”
Firstly DAs should not be “reforming” the criminal justice system. That is the job of legislators. The DA’s job is to enforce the laws that are on the books. A prosecutor who refuses to enforce the law… Hmmm… Obstruction of Justice at a minimum.
Having said all that, and dismissing the “mass incarceration” rhetoric, America does have a disproportionately large percentage of its population in jail. And, a very large percentage of those are in jail for drug offenses. A lot of others are there because of mandatory sentencing laws, but whose case, if looked at on its own merit, would probably not justify it.
We do need Criminal Justice reform, but it shouldn’t be done by the DAs. And, as I’ve argued before, we should end Drug Prohibition and decriminalize all use, possession, and sale of drugs. We should fight drug use and addiction as a social problem and a health problem, exactly as we do with alcohol.
Finally, we need to expand and use alternatives to encarcelation for non-violent crimes.
Roy Nathanson:
Fentanyl for everyone, let’s see how that works out for you and yours. Because the problem is laws not substances. Who loves anarchy? It’s really liberty, don’t you know,
What is a meth head, or a crack whore? Just a misunderstood individual who damages no one but themselves. Those damnable laws! /sarc
Welcome to NYC under John Lindsay and David Dinkins
The catastrophic decline in security occurred during the Wagner, Lindsay, and Beame administrations and hit bottom under Koch and Dinkins. Things didn’t get worse under Dinkins, they just didn’t get any better. Koch despised Giuliani as a person, one suspects because he turned the Koch Administration (which had certain accomplishments) into a warm up act. I don’t think Dinkins has ever acknowledged the accomplishments of Giuliani and Bloomberg or what they say of his own years in office.
America does have a disproportionately large percentage of its population in jail. And, a very large percentage of those are in jail for drug offenses.
No, about 20% of those incarcerated were convicted on a bill for which the top count was a drug charge. The mean time actually served in state and federal prisons is 30 months. The mean time served for those remanded to county jails is measured in weeks. About 60% of those convicted receive no time. Now, you might argue that some sentences in the tail are excessive (especially in regard to federal charges) and you might argue that we’d get more bang for the buck investing in police patrols than investing in prison space and prison guards (Mark Kleiman made that argument). You’re not going to make the case that we’re draconian with our criminal class unless you begin with the assumption that the courts should deal in social work and not punishments (the liberal position) or you fancy there are ‘market-based’ solutions to every social problem (the view of the peddlers of the applied autism commonly called ‘libertarian’). That Canada and Eurotrashland are witlessly lenient with criminals is their problem. We shouldn’t make it our problem.
The mean time on charges of every sort, not just drug charges.
As I have mentioned here before, reports are that Soros has also poured money and organization into another largely under the radar project, his “Secretaries of State” project, which is trying to get as many leftist Secretaries as possible elected… these Secretaries are usually in charge of elections in their respective states—they administer and set election rules, and rule on any election controversies.
New York’s elections are administered by an interlocking system of multi person boards. The state board has four members, two appointed by the state chairman of the post popular party (at the most recent gubernatorial election) and two by the state chairman of the runner up party. Each county has a two person board appointed by the local county chairman of the most popular (statewide) party and the county chairman of the runner up party.
A huge problem right now is the wretched excess in the use of postal ballots. Ballot security has been ruined by the adoption of convenience voting. We need a revised system wherein a standing order for a postal ballot can be placed by U.S. Government employees posted abroad and their spouses residing with them, by servicemen and their spouses residing with them, by college students, and by elderly and disabled people who qualify as shut-ins. If you want more convenience, move voting times to Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. And for pity’s sake, lock the postal ballots away until election day. On election day, open the boxes and count the ballots which have arrive. Any ballots which arrive after election day go into lock-boxes and left there. Once the final tallies are published, open the boxes and mail those ballots back to sender with a pre-printed card of regret saying the ballot arrived too late to be tabulated.
According to Gateway Pundit, St. Louis county DA Kim Gardner refused to prosecute suspects who confessed to crimes, including murder. Some because she believes the officers are corrupt and racist and others because she doesn’t believe the confession. She is supported by Soros.
I’ve been unavoidably following a lot of progressive journalists’ twitter feeds these last 12 weeks because it’s one of the only ways to get real time English language updates of what is happening on the streets in Hong Kong.
In amongst their reporting of bare facts, have to wade through a lot of other bilge when they go off on their various idealogical tangents… and of course many of these tweets are about other things outside Hong Kong, retweets of their friends back home in US or whatever.
One topic I’ve seen cropping up a lot is an obsession with the ‘Carceral State’ and abolishing the police… along with the usual abolishing borders stuff. Back in the good old days it was the Trotskyites making all the noise, now seems that Anarchism is back in a big way… at least down at the Useful Idiots level coal face.
Higher up the chain of command, I’m sure that they’re not looking to dismantle anything… Sauron’s Eye is going to be focussed on folks like us.
“Higher up the chain of command, I’m sure that they’re not looking to dismantle anything… Sauron’s Eye is going to be focussed on folks like us.” – Zaphod
“Police authoritarianism is always acceptable in the first person — our police; it is only in the third person — their police — that it is unacceptable.”
A rephrasing of one of my favorite Ben Franklin aphorisms on rebellion.
Om,
I am, by no means, advocating anarchy. Nor am I advocating drug use. I believe that that people are responsible for their actions regardless of whether they have knowingly impaired their judgment. If someone hurts someone else they should be prosecuted for that crime. But drug abuse, all by itself, does not hurt anyone, other than the user. Hurting yourself is not immoral, just stupid.
And, by the way, there are a lot of very knowledgeable and experienced law enforcement professionals who agree with my position on this. See: https://lawenforcementactionpartnership.org/
Roy Nathanson — I don’t have any data on this, and i don’t know if there is any, but based on my personal experience in law school clerking for a judge, I would say that virtually all misdemeanors that go to trial are the result of plea-bargains. The statistics don’t reveal what the defendant actually did. And if he didn’t do that, he did something else worse.
Richard Saunders:
Somewhat OT, but since you mention it, what’s your opinion on plea bargains? On the balance more good than bad?
I’ve only ever lived in common law jurisdictions which don’t have plea bargaining. Or have I? Is explicit plea bargaining a way to formalise what implicitly goes on anyway in (say) UK, Australia, Hong Kong?
But drug abuse, all by itself, does not hurt anyone, other than the user.
LOL
, St. Louis county DA Kim Gardner
FTR, that’s the state’s attorney in St. Louis City, not St. Louis County. St. Louis County also elected a black chauvinist hostile to law enforcement, but his name is Wesley Bell. N.B neither jurisdiction has a black majority and about 3/4 of St. Louis County is not black. What we’ve seen here is what we see in Chicago and Cook County. A critical mass of non-blacks assent to this sort of asinine social vandalism. No clue what motivates them.
What’s interesting about this, is that there are three features of life in which the experience of blacks differs from that of the majority in ways that are intense and measurable: exposure to street crime, exposure to school disorder, and exposure to decay in the built environment. We have a satisfactory idea of how to address these problems and make large quality-of-life improvements in these areas, but white liberals and black chauvinists are hostile to those efforts. It is perverse.
Leftists paid for a heavy dose of last-minute ads here in Wake County, NC (Raleigh) and ousted our sheriff. The new guy announced, immediately after taking office, that the county would no longer cooperate with ICE, and he fired forty deputies.
Again, same deal as in Chicago and St. Louis. Containing street crime is the most fundamental of public functions. When you have elected officials committed to refraining because Tyrones find questions from law enforcement ‘disrespectful’, it’s hard to see how we all live together.
They also took over Cook County , Il States Attorney’s office and st Louis County MO. The “atcivitists have taken over or heavily influenced State Attorney Generals Offices; when you see the headline the “17 State Attorneys” have sued over a civili rights, voting right or criminal matters it is almost the same 17 and they have all been funded by Soros tye groups..
“Hall said, people in Dallas “who have returned from prison who can’t find a job, who are not educated so in those instances” have been “forced to commit violent crimes.”
Oh no! They were forced to commit violent crimes. They are obviously victims. Have you ever noticed that leftists deny that people have moral agency?
I think Richard Pryor summed it up well years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7DhFhzkjcA
“Hall said, people in Dallas “who have returned from prison who can’t find a job, who are not educated so in those instances” have been “forced to commit violent crimes.” Oh no! They were forced to commit violent crimes. They are obviously victims. Have you ever noticed that leftists deny that people have moral agency?
And talk sociological rot all the time. The number of people released from prison each year exceeds 600,000 (flow). The number of ‘discouraged workers’ located by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is currently under 400,000 (stock)
“…drug abuse, all by itself, does not hurt anyone, other than the user”
Really? Did you think that legal drugs are free? Did you think that drug abusers have infinite trust funds with which to buy drugs?
Even if a drug abuser had a good job to start with, after the job is lost, after any saved money has been spent, after all the good stuff has been sold and most of the rest pawned for whatever a pawn shop will pay, after the last friend or family member willing give money or drugs has cut them off, drug abusers end up paying for today’s drugs by shopping at the store known as “Other People’s Stuff.”
And that doesn’t account for all the other hurt caused to the people in the lives of drug users.
Really? Did you think that legal drugs are free? Did you think that drug abusers have infinite trust funds with which to buy drugs?
There’s a reason Mr. Sailer coined the term ‘applied autism’ to describe libertarianism.
Art Deco, in some ways I want to embrace libertarianism but the policy on drugs is a real sticking point for me. I have spent so much of my life dealing with people who abuse substances; I’m watching a situation now in which someone on a fixed income is spending hundreds of dollars a month on legal marijuana, month after month, with constant, attending drama regarding evictions, phone getting cut off, buying food, etc. I don’t have an easy answer and I am aware of human nature surrounding forbidden substances and black markets, but I do know that making more drug users is not going to help.
Roy Nathanson —
The whole system would collapse without plea-bargains. When I was clerking for the judge, we used to do 100-150 cases a day – in the morning! All as a result of plea-bargains, all three minute or less trials, all based on a lie. The judge asked (because she was required to), “Has anyone offered you anything in exchange for your guilty plea?” The defendant, usually on the nod, would mumble, “No, your honor,” which, of course was completely false. The only issue that ever was seriously considered was the suppression motion — whether to suppress the evidence because “the constable erred” in gathering it.
Few people know this, but two-thirds of crimes are solved because the victim actually knows the defendant or because the defendant is picked up for another crime or on an outstanding warrant and tied to the first crime by fingerprints (in those days) or DNA (today) or other physical evidence. The effect of the suppression motion is worse than nothing, since police are evaluated not on whether the DA gets a conviction, but whether the case is “cleared,” which means the police are satisfied, by their standards, that they have arrested the correct culprit.
(Don’t get me wrong — that one-third of cases remaining is more than enough to keep the detectives busy around the clock. If people knew how many crimes were actually committed in their city they’d have heart attacks.)
I don’t see the system improving without changing the whole structure. You’d have to make the consequences of crime so awful and so certain that it is preferable to the criminal not to commit the crime. The first step would be to abolish virtually all prisons. Prison is nothing but graduate school for criminals, most are run by racial gangs and corrupt guards. Life in prison, for many criminals, is equal to or better than their lives on the outside, so a prison sentence rarely accomplishes anything other than keeping the criminal from committing crimes against ordinary citizens for a while.
As a great multiculturalist, I believe we should take the best ideas from people around the world. So from our Russian brethren (and sisteren!), I think we should substitute for prison healthy outdoor work on a low-calorie diet. Sentences should be known, fixed and immutable — two years for the first offence (with the opportunity for job training instead of hard labor if the defendant can show he committed the crime out of necessity), eight years for the second, 32 for the third, life for the fourth.
The standard for the death penalty for capital crimes should be raised to beyond any doubt, failing that, life at hard labor. This is an opportunity for more multiculturalism — we should learn from our Chinese brethren: the death penalty should be administered (as soon after trial as possible) by a bullet to the back of the head, burial in an unmarked grave, with the bill for the bullet sent to the defendant’s family. The death penalty should be applied to any crime causing death, severe bodily harm, or the risk thereof. So, in addition to the normal capital crime, I would include attempted murder, arson, and aggravated assault. I don’t see the distinction between actually murdering someone and doing your best to do so, but failing because you missed, your gun misfired, or a team of doctors saved the victim’s life. I used to include rape, but since rape has now be defined as “any sex which the woman regrets later,” obviously rape can’t be a capital offense. (Maybe we could have two categories or rape, “real rape” and “snowflake rape,” and restore real rape as a capital crime?)
The only prisons left in operation would be for repeat escapers and offenders too mentally ill to do hard labor. The few remaining prisons should be extremely severe, along the lines of the Florence Admax. Suicides should be welcomed.
Purely economic crimes should not receive hard labor, but such criminals would be required to pay the entire amount they stole or harmed people by, plus the cost of investigation and prosecution, plus a penalty (20-50% — let the legislature decide), plus interest. If seizing all their assets — including anything transferred to their spouse, children, other relatives or friends — doesn’t reach that amount, they should be indentured until they do.
Judges should be permitted to punish any police misconduct in the case, without suppressing the evidence gathered by the “erring constable.” Appeals should be limited to the question of whether the defendant actually committed the crime. There should be no parole.
Yes, Roy, I have thought about this a lot, and no, it will never happen.
I suggest all here read John Lukacs’s “A Short History of the Twentieth Century” (You can look it up on Amazon; I am not Jeff Bezos’ boy, and so provide no link, in which he makes the case a) that it was THE American century, and b) it ended in 1989, and it is all downhill from then on, the interjection of a Trump notwithstanding.
The present posting and comments surely bear that out. The Law? Pffft. The political DAs decide what is the Law by what they will and will not prosecute. We see the same thing in Barr’s DOJ. Lerner? Who is s/he?!! McCabe who?
America is in a fast and faster descent into the ordinary grubby corrupt demagoguery we see elsewhere on the planet. China will rule the globe.
“…drug abuse, all by itself, does not hurt anyone, other than the user”
Depends on how you define “all by itself.” A drug abuser, whose income supports or helps support a family, who loses his or her job due to poor performance has put the other family members in jeopardy. “All by itself?” Tell me another one.
By drug abuse, I would include alcohol abuse, because alcohol is a drug. When I was 6 years, a drunk plowed into the car in which I was a passenger, killing the father of one family and doing grievous harm to my parents- which for one parent took years to resolve. Victimless crime? Tell me another one.
A decade later. in Berserkeley, I took over the lease of a room from a friend who left town. I didn’t know any of the other housemates before I moved in. One morning I was in the kitchen. A neighbor, of the colored persuasion, was asking a housemate for use of his “rig.” (I was so naive, I didn’t realize he was referring to a hypodermic needle.) The housemate declined to lend his rig. The neighbor of the colored persuasion replied, “You’re prejudiced,” and put a gun to my temple- I was just a bystander. He proceeded to wreck the house, including the room of a black housemate. “All by itself?” Tell me another one.
I am not sure what is the best legal recourse for drug use/abuse, but “all by itself” doesn’t hold much water with me.
As others have pointed out, those convicted of drug possession have often committed other crimes. It’s just that drug possession is the easiest one to prove in a courtroom and get a conviction.
Richard Saunders,
I like where you are going with that. I would quibble over a few details, but in general, that is an outline of the type of criminal justice system reform that I could get behind.
Failing that, though, surely there is some mid-point between that and doing what we are doing now. What we are doing now hardly qualifies as justice.
Gringo,
The person in your anecdote committed any number of prosecutable crimes, the very LEAST of which was drug use.
I do agree that drug abuse hurts the families of the addicts, in exactly the same ways as alcohol addiction does. So let’s address the problems the same way.
“Few people know this, but two-thirds of crimes are solved because the victim actually knows the defendant or because the defendant is picked up for another crime or on an outstanding warrant and tied to the first crime by fingerprints (in those days) or DNA (today) or other physical evidence. The effect of the suppression motion is worse than nothing, since police are evaluated not on whether the DA gets a conviction, but whether the case is “cleared,” which means the police are satisfied, by their standards, that they have arrested the correct culprit.” – Richard Saunders
As to the first point, a young man we knew, who was raised to think the world owed him everything without effort, had to get money for some reason (probably to pay off loan sharks, but I don’t remember), got a handgun somehow, put on a ski mask, and — held up the clerks at the fast-food joint where his sister worked.
The police picked him up pretty fast, he pled to something, served his time, and (fortunately) turned his life around.
Your Draconian rules would also turn things around societally very quickly, but the kicker is that we know there are plenty of police and prosecutors and judges willing to put away an innocent person just as readily as they would a guilty one (sometimes more so when they are corrupt in addition to being biased and/or stupid) — their standards of satisfaction are sometimes demonstrably low.
There are enough cases of wrongful conviction, even though they are rare compared to the volume of rightful ones, to raise qualms in the minds of most people about implementing your regime. Sadly, any safeguards against abuse of its strictures would probably go missing just as rapidly as have our safeguards against government malfeasance
Raising the bar to “beyond all shadow of doubt” is a wise idea for capital crimes, as is reducing the number thereof (as we have noticeably done since the 19th century). I have no problem with prisoners living to the norm of our troops in the field, and working at healthy outdoor occupations (such as our parents and grandparents did just to survive), with suitable safeguards against actual harm, which abusive maltreatment was justly complained of in the past.
The maddening contradictions in our “legal” system (not “justice” system, as someone here noted on another thread) cause us to make both type I and type II errors: treating actual vicious repeat criminals with far too much leniency, and innocents or grossly overcharged persons with too much harshness.
And then there is that little matter of vehemently prosecuting / persecuting people on the wrong side of the political line while letting those on your own side skate….
I do agree that drug abuse hurts the families of the addicts, in exactly the same ways as alcohol addiction does. So let’s address the problems the same way.
Why?
Art Deco, in some ways I want to embrace libertarianism but the policy on drugs is a real sticking point for me.
There’s a Baskin & Robbins selection of libertarianisms. ‘Old whigs’ like Hayek and Gottfried Dietze are fairly atypical, because the social vision of old whigs assumes people living adult lives in nuclear families, and the arrested development cases at CATO and the Reason Foundation cannot process that. Contemporary policy libertarians are conventional academics, other-directed and quite concerned with the faculty rathskellar consensus. Compare Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Richard Epstein with the capon cotillion over at the Mercatus Center. Then there’s the crew over at the von Mises Institute, where promoting the autonomy of little platoons tends to get lost while they’re promoting goldbuggery and neo-confederate historiography. Did I mention what’s left of Objectivism?
AesopFan —
There are enough cases of wrongful conviction, even though they are rare compared to the volume of rightful ones, to raise qualms in the minds of most people about implementing your regime.
I’m not endorsing this, but here is the cops’ perspective (utter hearsay, but believable) as told to me years ago by a cop: “Yeah, every once in a while we get the wrong guy, but these are all bad guys, so we’re getting him for the ones he committed that we missed.”
Since studies have shown that criminals commit around 12 felonies for every one they get caught for, I can understand the cops’ point of view.
Please note the following correction to my 2:14 post:
“. . . two-thirds of crimes that are solved are solved because the victim actually knows the defendant or because the defendant is picked up . . .”
Is it not obvious? 86 the entire Soros lmachine. Quietly, and with no fingerprints left behind. This is war.
As so often, Aesop nails it.
–Insofar as “it” is nailable at all. :>(
. . . . .
The fundamental moral point of Objectivism is that people should take responsibility for themselves, and that no one has the right to co-opt (attempt to nullify) another person’s right of self-determination.
In this sense, everyone has a right to life — but only to his own life, his own body and time and thought and effort, not to anyone else’s.
Thus we should not be moochers (parasites on others) nor cheats nor (with a few important exceptions) nor extortionists nor murderers …
Nor appeasers, except when that’s the only way to “live on to fight another day.”
Isn’t it funny how many of us here probably basically agree with that principle.
Isn’t it funny how stable and socially comfortable a society can be when those are the general standards.
Atlas Shrugged is specifically about the difference in attitude and behavior between those who follow the moral principle and those who don’t.
It is also about the social havoc wreaked when the misbehaviors are generally tolerated … let alone encouraged.
Note also this, which is integral with the foregoing:
Objectivism holds that of all Man’s tools for survival, Reason is the foremost. This means Reason in the full sense, the exercise of careful observation of How Things Are, thoughtful consideration of observations (experience) for their content, the function of the parts of the observation and their results, and the application of logic to figure out what one should do to achieve what one wants. So, Miss Rand wrote that “Reason is Man’s tool for survival,” and that to subvert a man’s mind is the worst evil.
(Which of course was the point of Big Brother’s methods.)
.
It’s one thing to have an ideal; another to realize it. But we ought not therefore to reject the ideal qua an ideal. We ought rather to continue to examine the ideal for flaws it may have in itself, and also to recognize that we have to acknowledge that things are as they are and that each of us is going to have to balance priorities.
Miss Rand pointed out that while it is morally wrong of a starving man to steal a tomato from somebody’s garden, it is understandable and forgivable if, the next morning, the thief confesses to the gardener, asks what he can do to make up for his wrongdoing, and, assuming the victim of the theft comes up with a reasonable request for retribution, complies with it.
. .
Prof. Richard Epstein (whom Art Deco mentions above) more or less began as a libertarian, but over the years he’s become more of a Classical Liberal and less of a notional libertarian. He mostly grounds his arguments on the effects (especially but far from wholly the economic effects) on Society of various policies. (He seems to be viscerally anti-Rand.) He thus puts himself on the utilitarian side of the spectrum, but not very far that way.
He thinks that it is better for private action to achieve this or presumably-desirable goal than for government to attempt it, where this is possible.
He believes in voluntary cooperation, but he accepts far more than I do the necessity in a variety of situations for forced cooperation. Pity.
Nevertheless, his rule-of-thumb for how people should conduct themselves is,
Meaning, don’t go getting what you want from other people by force. You are not entitled to hurt their bodies nor to take their property without their willing, uncoerced permission. Honor a person’s person and his property.
. . .
Personally, I sum it up thus: No one has the Great-Frog-Given right to co-opt another person’s right of self-determination. Only by a person’s attempt to do so first, is another justified in limiting that agressor’s right of self-determination.
That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with slavery.
(And, YES, what we do does affect others. That’s the problem of “externalities,” and solving it via some compromise that is reasonably acceptable in moral principle and also to the members of a society … is the Great Worm in the Woodpile. In fact, both Prof. Epstein and, I think, libertarian Prof. Randy Barnett are chiefly interested in trying to resolve various instances of these problems.)
…
I proofread as best I can, but Edit visits me only very, very rarely. Apologies in advance.
Mm-hm. So:
“Thus we should not be … (with a few important exceptions) liars–deceivers, defrauders ….”
Julie – I have semi-joked with my kids over the years that our Heavenly Mother would have phrased the Ten Commandments a bit differently, especially those dealing with interpersonal relationships, especially if She was being channeled by the Moms of Texas:
Exod.20
And God spake all these words, saying,
I am the LORD thy God,…Thou shalt have no other gods before me… Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:
Ya gotta dance with the One what brung ya.
Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain;
Don’t cuss.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy…Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
Thank your Mom for cooking the pot roast and taters.
Honour thy father and thy mother:
Don’t sass your folks.
Thou shalt not kill.
Keep your hands to yourself.
Thou shalt not commit adultery….Thou shalt not steal…/ ..Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
If it ain’t yours, leave it alone.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive — so don’t start.
And one other, which seems to be more of a Mom than a Dad thing, but would make life on earth much more pleasant for everyone. Maybe it was on the first set that Moses broke:
If you mess it up, clean it up.
Excellent, Aesop. Works for me! :>)))