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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that

a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.

b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;

c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.

On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?

The whole case seems like a Toxoplasma of Rage classic. A scumbag whose guilt for the murder is near certain, but at the same time procedural errors in convictions get guilty people off all the time, or at least delayed. It's a surprise that the anti-death penalty people lost on this one as they rarely seem to take such high profile defeats. But for me the big question is why this awful, guilty murderer has been made a cause celebre. Sure, I just referenced toxoplasma of rage, but that only explains public attention. Why did the innocence project and other anti-death penalty campaigners choose this case to focus on? It's clearly going to be a disaster if anyone pays the slightest bit of attention!

Because they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered.

Remember, these are the same people who thought rittenhouse should have let himself be beaten and shot rather than have the gall to defend himself, all because he decided that rioting and looting were wrong

Are they, though?

Rittenhouse haters insisted he was a murderer, and that didn’t earn him any sympathy.

The "crime is good" crowd makes an exception for self-defense, which is only valid when used against cops.

There is no “crime is good” crowd. There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

Said group assumed Rittenhouse was a provocateur looking to play cop. They probably also assume the state cuts corners and commits injustices in cases like this one. Neither of these is an endorsement of crime.

I remain unconvinced that morally or practically the distinction matters, though in tone-policing forums such as this it may be worth distinguishing.

There is no “crime is good” crowd.

Criminals are a "crime is good" crowd, including Seth Rogan and Chesea Boudin's entire extended family.

There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

I do have a hard time accepting the positions of people who are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their beliefs or immune to the logical conclusions of their beliefs.

I believe it's Chesa Boudin.

Friend/enemy distinction

and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.

The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".

I think you’re applying too much charity to a sneer at the outgroup.

It's possible, and the naked phrase alone is certainly low-effort. On the other hand, I think there's a point there that deserves more than you're given it. If the problem is how that point is expressed, fair enough, it should be expressed better. But if "better" is undefined, then it becomes a fully general counter-argument. Hence why I'm replying, trying to tack away from arguments over the phrasing, and toward what appears to be the underlying issue.

I think that if we go to reddit, we can find an arbitrarily-large number of people who believe that Rittenhouse is clearly a murderer, and that this guy is clearly innocent. These people will be disproportionately likely to care about Rittenhouse's "victims", and they will be disproportionately likely to know little, and to have little interest in learning, about this man's victim, or indeed his previous, non-murder victims. Further, I think these same peoples' views on a lot of other questions of justice will strongly correlate: they will reliably treat people provably guilty of multiple violent felonies as though they are entirely innocent, and they will treat people provably innocent of any crime at all as though they are crazed murderers. Likewise, they will consider moderately questionable uses of lethal force by the authorities as clear murder, and entirely unjustifiable uses of lethal force by the authorities as obviously good and correct, based entirely on tribal logic.

If I'm correct about the existence and general views of the above cohort, "they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered" seems like a reasonable encapsulation of the problem. Further, if I'm correct, it seems to me that this is a pretty important problem that certainly bears discussion, because it would seem to imply that our justice system isn't going to get better, and in fact is going to get worse, with consequences that flow through to a whole lot of other flashpoints in the culture war.

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