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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1794 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 13, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Court opinion:

  • Some 14-year-old urban youths are hanging out on a Philadelphia sidewalk. As a 73-year-old man walks by, a boy and a girl decide to hit him in the head with a traffic cone. He is hit once by the boy and twice by the girl, and dies of the resulting brain injuries. The entire incident is captured on surveillance video. The boy and the girl are charged with murder and conspiracy to murder.

  • The trial judge dismisses the charges against the boy. There is no evidence of conspiracy between him and the girl. Rather, after he delivered his blow and dropped the cone, she independently chose to pick up the traffic cone and deliver her own, totally separate blows. And the boy merely hit the old man once and then walked away, so there is no evidence of the "malice"—either intent to kill or reckless disregard for a high risk of killing—that murder requires (as opposed to the negligence that can support a charge of manslaughter).

  • The appeals panel reverses and remands for trial. The surveillance video clearly shows that (1) the boy dealt his blow immediately after the girl handed the traffic cone directly to the boy, and (2) while the girl was delivering her blows the boy only walked away for a few seconds, and soon returned with a smile on his face. That is evidence of conspiracy. And hitting an old man in the head with a heavy traffic cone even once is evidence of reckless disregard for a high risk of killing.

When is sentencing and how do we get an update?

When I look up this case by its two docket numbers in the Pennsylvania court system, the appellate docket sheet includes an order sealing the record, and the trial docket sheet doesn't show up at all. So this juvenile proceeding presumably is closed to the public.

FWIW this is un-fun enough I would have preferred not to have it on the thread.

Agreed. I generally like these, because they’re fun and quirky rulings on edge cases for the law, unusual things that come up from time to time but which you wouldn’t really think about. The weird ones are the best.

This case is not that. It’s a bog-standard murder case where an unprovoked attack wound up killing someone, where the murderers did not obviously intend for the death but just as obviously did not care about whether or not it happened. There is a specific class for this kind of killing in every jurisdiction that I’ve bothered looking at, because it’s how you classify the casual killings committed by people who think violence is funny or a normal means to whatever end. The only thing unusual is how on Earth the trial judge dismissed charges in the first place, and any speculation there either stops at concluding ignorance or continues on into Culture War territory.

I find learning about random legal stuff like the necessary evidence for conspiracy and murder to be reasonably fun, personally.

Here's the security video. The link is foxnews, so there's .... oh so much javascript and other crap. The victim is fully blurred out and there isn't any gore or shocking content, but still probably technically NSFW.

The interesting thing is that there are half a dozen children who act as nothing more than curious onlookers. I could give you 5 paragraphs on Kitty Genovese, but that would be wasted here on the Motte.

Kitty Genovese

I remember learning about this stuff in my English class as a teenager (in the context of some weird psychological mystery of how nobody helped etc) and the actual story went completely over my head. After some life experience of racialised underclass dynamics and now that I google and see photos of the perpetrator and the victim... the story suddenly clicks in my head very well

Except...it's probably not true:

No one doubts that Kitty Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., in the early hours of March 13, 1964. However, the story of the impassive witnesses seems to have sprung up about two weeks later.

Trial testimony established that Winston Moseley attacked Genovese not three times but twice, with a 10-minute hiatus in between, argues Levine. When the first attack happened, on Austin Street, a shout from a window scared Moseley away. In addition, a retired police officer recalls that, as a boy, he saw Genovese staggering down Austin Street and Moseley fleeing in the opposite direction, and that his father called the police. Others have also said that they called, Levine adds.

As Genovese made her unsteady way around the corner and down an alley to the back vestibule of the building where she lived, Moseley returned and attacked her again — out of sight of the Austin Street windows, says Levine. A man whose apartment had a view of the second stabbing contacted another resident, who immediately called the police, according to the trial. That woman then rushed to the mortally wounded Genovese, holding her in her arms until the ambulance came, according to trial testimony.

In 2016 the New York Times (which was responsible for claiming many witnesses did nothing), admitted it's story was flawed and inaccurate. And that many fewer people were probably aware of the attack than they claimed and that of those who were aware did take some action (such as calling the cops).

"While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital."

"Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original Times article, asking Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story.""

The attacker was initially scared away by someone intervening, but that person did not realize Genovese had been stabbed, so when she got up and walked off he assumed everything was ok. But the attacker disguised himself and came back and found Genovese in the alley where she had collapsed where he then raped her. But that was actually also reported to police at the time, and a neighbor did come out to help, but it was too late. Most of the so-called 38 witnesses who watched and did nothing while she was murdered, were not in fact aware that a murder was happening at all.

Remember, the media even back in the 1960's was still about getting eyeballs and the whole story was the result of a single New York Times article.

I don’t know if @Pasha is just being coy or if I’m more of a culture warrior than he is, but it seems to me that the real story is that the politically correct media, as usual, dishonestly presented a black man’s evil deed as a collective failure (in this case, apathy). This innovative lie immediately made it into textbooks.

Was the media that politically correct in 1964? The Times that did the Genovese story also published this in 1965:

An investigative article by The New York Times claimed a connection between the Fruit Stand Riot and militant bands of anti-white youth gangs "trained to maim and kill" and "roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people"

Which doesn't exactly seem like they were shying away from reporting on black on white violence at the time.

40 people being unwilling to intervene seems like on it's own is a more eyeball catching story than a stabbing and rape regardless of racial dynamics. Which is basically what the journalist said, when asked about it privately. It made for a more interesting story.

Remember clickbait journalism is not new.

This is the article you reference, in case anyone’s interested.

They are not the same thing. Kitty Genovese was ordinary black crime, out of lust and greed. The NYT article murders by contrast, like the zebra murders (in that same decade), were targeted killing of whites for ideological reasons by black muslims.

It’s actually eerie, because the NYT article presents a theory which can come across as a far-fetched conspiracy, but it was proven right by Zebra. How many of those murderous black muslim groups were there? If there were more, they probably disappeared into the statistic of ordinary black crime, which was then further transmogrified by the media into white society’s problems of ‘apathy’, ‘racism’, and ‘poverty ie insufficient welfare for blacks’ .

And so, by leftist alchemy, or scott's paranoid rant's multiple layers of lies, the murder of whites for racist reasons became white racism.

Sure, i am not saying they are the same crime, I am saying the newspaper in the 60's was very different than today and given other headline and stories they wrote it's unlikely they decided to hide a black mans involvement by digging up an angle about bystander apathy 2 weeks later. They could just not have gone back to the story again if that were their goal.

I am saying the newspaper in the 60's was very different than today and given other headline and stories they wrote it's unlikely they decided to hide a black mans involvement

I disagree that they were not PC at the time. Look at what the SF mayor said about the zebra murders:

"DEATH ANGELS", a kind of reverse Ku Klux Klan, is based on the muddled aberrations clearly outside the mainstream of Islamic religions. In my opinion, it represents as much a potential threat to Blacks as to Whites. (Obvious Lie, that he tries to soften with “in my opinion”. As opposed to "in reality". And I suppose the KKK represents as much a potential threat to whites as to blacks) [...]

Special care must be taken by public officials and the police to prevent hate groups from converting a criminal investigation into a racial struggle. The inescapable fact of the matter is that most mass murderers of recent years - Manson, the Santa Cruz murderers, Corona, and Zodiac have been White (but they did not target black people). Murder knows no color (these murderers very much did know color) and must be fought without aggravating sensitive racial tensions.

More comments

After a quick search: white woman victim, black man murderer?

I didn't even know there was rape involved, despite reading about it in a textbook long ago.

What was it that clicked on your head?

Are you thinking that the bystanders were poor black people who thought the white woman had it coming?

white woman victim, black man murderer?

yes

Are you thinking that the bystanders were poor black people who thought the white woman had it coming?

yes either that and/or people who were too afraid to confront black criminality as something might happen to them too and/or people who thought police wouldn't care or be useful

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