anti_dan
2d ago
Replying to this comment, but I am also addressing @cjet79 's post below because they are similar and my answer should either answer both, or at least open the door for more precise questions.
The answer as to why multiple charges are filed is both for proof reasons and for plea reasons.
As you speculated, if a man shoots another man the prosecutor will charge Murder, Manslaughter, Aggravated Batter/Assault with a Firearm, Agg Discharge (probably not reckless discharge because at least in midwest states those laws wouldn't apply to an intentional discharge at a person and charging both can be self defeating), etc. In fact, there will typically be dozens of charges of murder alone because some will contain enhanced sentencing language, and some will contain different theories of mens rea such as knowingly vs. purposely vs. indifferently etc.
But also those are included for plea reasons. Lets say your top charge is Murder 1st Degree, by discharge of a firearm. Where I live, the minimum sentence would be 45 years with 10 additional years of whats called MSR, which is just super fancy strict parole. But, you would also include a regular 1st degree murder charge which has a minimum of 20 years. Now, if you are in a courtroom in Chicago, you realistically as a prosecutor have to pick which murder hills to die on. Getting a conviction on a plea to 30 years on the 1st Degree Murder charge without the gun enhancements is a nice thing to do once in a while, because otherwise you are constantly picking murder juries and then putting on week-long murder trials. And, thats just the murders, you have no time for the armed robbers, hijackers, sex crimes, etc. Not to mention your thieves, drug dealers, drug users, etc.
This pattern is particularly useful for some sorts of crimes where a gun or other weapon is not actually recovered, but is alleged to be used in a crime, like a Carjacking. Carjacking with a gun in IL is a Class X felony carrying 6-30 years. But, you can't always prove it was a real gun, right? Well Carjacking where you indicate you were armed is a Class 1 which is 4-15. If there is a jury trial you present both charges and say, "hey if you think the carjacking happened like our witness says, he's guilty, but if you don't think our witness has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the gun wasn't a painted toy, he's still guilty, just of a lesser, but still quite serious, offense."
As for other posters speculating about double jeopardy with multiplicative charging, I have never heard of that argument getting close to winning at any significant appeals court in any state. It simply is a profoundly silly argument. There won't be two juries and two judges hearing each charge. Its one jury and one judge hearing one trial. And if convicted the cumulative convictions out of a single act are served concurrently, so its not like if you shoot a guy and are convicted of all 10 murder counts alleged that you now are a 10x convicted murderer and serve 10 sentences. You are just sentenced on the most serious charge and all the others follow (of course this is different if you kill 2 people at once, or as some felons like to do, were caught with 2 illegal firearms, those can often times be sentenced consecutively as they are separate offenses).
I will say, however, that everything I wrote only really applies to state and local prosecutors offices, which do handle the majority of crimes committed. The feds get to pick their cases and spend more time on a single fraud case than most state prosecutors would on multiple murder or sex crimes cases (which are typically the longest trials in state courts). So overcharging does happen much more often with that level of prosecution. But for some prosecutors in Chicago or Milwaukee or Indianapolis? Haha no, they charge what they think fits, and then the defendant often gets a very generous deal on one of the lesser included offenses. Its more like undercharging, if we are being pedantic. But to change that reality you would need to double the size of every PD, triple the number of prosecutors, and triple the number of judges, while also tripling the jury duty burden on your citizens.
TLDR? I guess its that multiple charges for one crime typically makes a lot of sense.
anti_dan
10d ago
The identity of the shooter was hidden by media and LE up until after this OP was posted, at least as far as I can see. There were several RW people doing the usual "haha this guy is obviously a leftie or a Muslim" thing for a significant period of time up until the ID was released for that exact reason. However, "woke leftie attacks other woke lefties on a woke leftie campus in perhaps an old school leftist's classroom" doesn't have the culture war salience this would have if he was a Muslim in a Synagogue. That the professor is Jewish and teaches Israeli relations just means he is basically Brown's Chuck Schumer or the like.
anti_dan
13d ago
Its not just tactics that Fuentes won on. He won by focusing on topics that he is strongest on and emphasizing facts that support his position. I only have watched the first 20 minutes or so, but the Chicago Mag Mile shooting anecdote + black crime statistics combo that Fuentes pulled out as a response to Piers accusing him of being racist and accusing his dad of being racist was both rhetorically skilled, and appeals to people's common sense. What he does is paint a picture of black youth as out of control, shows an example, then gives backup stats.
This is not just tactics, its just how actual debates are supposed to work. Fuentes has the upper hand, and Piers thinks he has an upper hand, but is actually bluffing (he just doesn't know it). Fuentes has facts and anecdotes that are proximate in time; Piers has what he thinks is a super power word "racist", and the former disarms the latter easily when the former is allowed to speak at all. This is why the left hates Joe Rogan, despite him being on the left, and hates "platforming" on podcasts and podcast-like content, and desperately clings to things like 4 v 1 "moderated" CNN panels where everyone is allowed 30 seconds and the "neutral" host gets the last word. The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think. This wasn't some Harvard professor dressing down a freshman, or even a Steven Crowder embarrassing a campus kid, it was one media figure against another, and the leftist media figure was given a significant handicap, its his own show, he picks the topics, he plays whatever clip he wants, and he's just flailing.
This isn't an isolated incident, its a common occurrence. A realization I frequently share is that, if modern progressives were swapped with 1850s/60s abolitionists, we'd still have slavery today. In fact, they might have made the people of the 1860s pass a second constitutional amendment wherein anyone advocating for abolitionist views without deportation of freed slaves a capital offense. That is simply how bad the arguments around race are coming from that side.
anti_dan
14d ago
What you are missing is that the criminal mind is not ordered. At least not often. Also, some of the things you speculate about would be foolish IMO from a LE perspective.
Did Mangione want to get away with it? I dont know. His actions imply some dedication to that cause, and some failures. Key failures are not remaining masked and fully anonymous in a city space chock full of cameras while making his escape and keeping implements of the crime on him up to the point of being caught.
The first is probably because he didn't do enough research. The second is more likely he was trying to keep mementos of his achievement. The latter is a common thing. But even if you didn't, smattering bullets and gun parts into trashcans only works if you never get seen and reported. They can retrace your steps and see all the trashcans you walked near then search them, stop order trash trucks, etc. All your plan assumes his date of being found is much later than it was. Burying things in the woods is probably better, but dont rent a car to do it. Jeeze. For a crime like this, you have to be in super anonymous mode to have a chance. You executed a civilian on video in NYC. You need something like a plan to get to rural PA without ever uncovering your face and without ever leaving fingerprints or DNA on anything. Then you need to ditch everything off a boat you rent in florida 3 days later when you take the metra from harrisburg to miami (if that exists).
anti_dan
15d ago
I find this almost comedic in its wrongness.
There are visceral reasons some people dislike Indians, it will rarely be their skin color, rather it is smell and fashion.
There are personality reasons why people dislike Indians. It is not lack of masculinity, although some people think it cricket is a little queer. Rather it is backstabbiness, the general grafty and scammy nature of doing business with an Indian, wherein every transaction is a negotiation. And once you thought you had a deal there is another round of negotiation. Its like going to a used car dealer, except for something as simple as fulfilling an order of widgets that is the same volume and the same widget as last month, or asking a junior associate to take on a project.
There is also, the ever present trash/littering issue as well.
anti_dan
15d ago
Yeah, people who were not around or memoryholed the 2000 election as "Republican SCOTUS picks Bush as President" forget what the real takeaway was, which was that Miami-Dade county was a hive of scum and villainy that had been doing shady things for decades to tilt its results in the direction of Democrats. It took such and embarrassing display for the state government to get cajoled into fairly authoritarian measures to force them to actually run their elections competently and fairly.
It beggars belief that anyone would really think that places like Vegas, Philly, LA, Atlanta, etc don't have similar problems. To put it bluntly, if you don't have votes fully tallied within 12 hours of polls closing you are so grossly incompetent, or are intentionally manipulating vote totals, that none of the votes in your jurisdiction should be treated as legitimate.
anti_dan
17d ago
Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.
This just means you are old, not elitist. I have to read a lot of work product of 2Ls (2nd year in law school) from kids from just about every law school in the midwest. From U-Chicago, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Iowa State, all the way down to SIU and the now defunct Valpo. The writing is abysmal, yet the GPAs remain universally high. Through some magic writing ability has cratered over the last 15 years, while GPAs in writing courses have skyrocketed!
Are the 2Ls as bad as this girl? No. But they are solidly within her trajectory.
anti_dan
17d ago
Right, but the people dunking on the quality of this essay are just out of touch with how debased the standards are. Its a pretty average freshman essay whether this girl was at a directional state U or Princeton. The fact is high schools simply do not teach writing well. And the universities aren't really either. If something of that level was in a law school application I wouldn't be surprised. In fact, the only thing surprising is the notable lack of AI slop tells. And so progressives dunking on her writing are really just dunking on themselves, as public and higher education are two of their biggest and longest going projects.
anti_dan
20d ago
You could spend the GDP on disability accommodations and still leave the disabled complaining. Such is the path to ruin.
anti_dan
20d ago
I think he misses the part that is the point at this point: The point of the education system is to employ educators. To be specific to employ educators, a slightly competent group of employees, at far above market rates (when accounting for competency, hours, and benefits). All the other parts are carrots, sticks, and rhetoric. The stick is the childcare. Childcare is expensive (even in public schools, but parents don't pay the full cost), hard to procure on short notice, etc. Thus teacher's strikes are overwhelmingly painful to parents, and thus they are very good at succeeding. The rhetoric is teaching. The cope is weeding out bad employees.
anti_dan
20d ago
I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
Kinder and better are at tension with respect to laws concerning disability accommodations.
anti_dan
20d ago
To be honest, lots of criminals. A lot of crimes are solved by police departments with a lot less resources than the FBI using some pretty hard to pin down evidence. Cell tower + LPR hits can often get you down to only a very small pool of individuals that need to be investigated further. One prosecutor friend of mine got a conviction for an armed robbery based on basically cell towers, LPRS, and a photo of underwear.
anti_dan
21d ago
No one seems to know what is really at issue. You have a bunch of folks pointing out military codes and treaties. You have other people just handwaving. You have other people citing laws about piracy. Given that the "this is illegal" side has deployed so many different niche legal theories that seem to routinely fall apart upon full interrogation, I think we've gotten to the point of clarity that this is an "arguments as soldiers" situation, and some people just want more Coke and Venezuelans in the US.
anti_dan
22d ago
To what end? Is one of these boat guys going to give us GPS coordinates on the Venezuelan El Chapo and then we are going to send in a SEAL team into Venezuela? Otherwise, a Hellfire is $150k, transporting these folks from a shipwreck to the US already probably costs about that. Housing, prosecuting, imprisoning, then deporting them 10 years later would cost several million per head.
anti_dan
22d ago
I think if the government bought at discounted bulk street value most mercs would accept it. Assembling a drug distribution network is time consuming and expensive, and probably requires you interfacing with people who want to kill you for killing their old reliable supplier.
anti_dan
22d ago
Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
War crime conventions apply to uniformed soldiers and civilians. A core portion of the legal argument for these attacks is that these boats are not uniformed military (obviously) nor civilians (obviously) and are instead nonuniform guerrilla terrorists who fail to abide by any conduct contemplated in any war crimes regime the US has adopted.
anti_dan
23d ago
Retard is a perfectly acceptable insult from my youth, as is faggot. The loss of good insults due to PC creep is not an affirmative good in any way.
anti_dan
23d ago
Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.
Is it? I mean I've seen that expressed from time to time, but isn't it generally indistinguishable from generalized anti-Trump complaints like opposition to law enforcement and immigration enforcement, being pro-nonwhite persons, etc? The Mark Kelly statement which some on the right are referring to as the "seditious six" seems to me to be something he's probably said before and seems to fit perfectly into statements made about basically every Trump action of all time.
anti_dan
25d ago
You can door dash with SNAP benefits. The whole ecosystem is confusing for anyone in the upper middle class end.
anti_dan
26d ago
People are defending it because its basically true. We are talking about combat sports where Olympic level women can't make their own high school team. Where the star girl in a gym will routinely get humbled by a guy who's trying to get better at football and so is taking up the sport in the off-season.
That's not to say some men can't just be weak or unathletic, but it's silly to compare a 21 year old girl who's the best in the county to a 40 year old who works out once a week and picked up combat sports in his 30s and think that makes any sense.
anti_dan
27d ago
What I am seeing from you description is that high skill + top 1% athlete defeats 50th percentile fat guy. That isn't interesting.
anti_dan
28d ago
All combat sports would be technically limited in that way, but for wrestling and related fields, knowing the rules actually increases your ability to injure and debilitate people. Wrestling bans eye gouging, weapons, nutshots, biting, fishhooks, etc. But if you are a good wrestler in a fight, you can do those things just as much as a bad wrestler. There is no functional way to train in eye gouging because the entire dojo would be blind in a week. However, there are other holds banned in wrestling that are simple to execute FROM the legal holds, and if you just do one of those illegal things you basically win the fight by ripping their arm, knee, or ankle off of its pivot point and tearing all the ligaments. If I have you in a legal armbar, the only thing preventing me from causing you to have a useless arm is the rules, and whatever grappling training you have that can mitigate me having gotten into that position of significant advantage.
anti_dan
28d ago
What that video shows is a guy who knows nothing about BJJ starts off getting trucked by pretty middling BJJ folks. Then he gets trained up by someone pretty good, at BJJ, and then he demonstrates that against an opponent with very low stamina you can win in BJJ by basically ignoring the rules of the sport.
But MMA hasn't embraced BJJ so much because they are idiots, MMA has because 1v1 combat is messy, and BJJ has a lot of techniques that are good at dealing with messy situations. In a standup situation there's no point of it, yes, but most fights don't end when you pass an arbitrary sideline, in fact, that is one of the great things about MMA's realism is the cage shows how fights actually happen, when people are pinned in by obstacles (sometimes a mob if we are being honest). The standup prelude the the ground phase is also common in real fights, but real fights rarely get decided by a nicely placed uppercut or roundhouse. Most of it is suckerpunches, and surviving until a fight is broken up. MMA asks the question as to what you should do if bouncers and beer bottles don't exist and you get in a fight. A big part of that is on the ground, wrestling and BJJ generally are thought to have decent answers.
The issue is that this is the level of the writing that other students have successfully coerced universities into giving high grades to over the last 30 years. If she had just done a woke AI slop essay with no citations she gets a solid 9/10 or whatever. So the "standards" argument is completely specious.
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