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Notes -
What are the odds?
In the chaos of the Charlie Kirk shooting, a lot of people forgot about the weirdness of the multiple arrests. Immediately after the shooting, George Zinn reacted in a very unusual way. He insisted that he was the shooter and police arrested him, allowing the real shooter to get away.
Was he an accomplice? No, it doesn't look that way. There's no evidence that he knew the shooter ahead of time.
So that leads to the first, "what are the odds?" Online, we saw leftists explode into cheers of support for Kirk's killer and suggestions for the next victim. But we are told that this represents a small fraction of the left, only the most politically deranged. But a random person in the crowd didn't just cheer on Kirk's death, he was willing to risk arrest, possibly death (if you claim to have a gun during an active shooting, you can't really be surprised if you wind up shot.)
BBC says there were about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University when he was shot. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yev470d59o. At least 1 of those people were very clearly supportive of the assassination. 0.03% isn't that bad, I suppose. There were also several people on a balcony cheering (I saw this on video, I don't have any desire to find that video again for hopefully obvious reasons so if you don't trust me on this that's fine.)
So let's say .03% willing to take extreme lengths in support of political violence, .3% immediately visibly excited by political violence. As a percentage that's low. It's a really, low, comforting percentage. Except when you see it happen in real life. Then it's not so comforting.
Every time you go out in a large enough crowd, there is a high chance that at least one person is kind of crazy. The kind of person willing to take the fall for someone else's crime. This is not comforting at all.
Another set of odds
What brought this on was a press release Andy Ngo shared from the county sheriff's office. Not only was Zinn a political extremist, he was also in possession of Child Pornography (real children, ages 5-12.) He also distributed this material to others.
Now, you might think such a person would have a strong incentive to avoid being picked up by the police and have his phone searched, but Mr. Zinn did not seem to have much hesitation.
Zinn appears to be a long-term psycho. Did jail time for calling in a bomb threat to a marathon, some possible 9/11 fakery etc. A sort of political gadfly loonie like the second Trump shooter, not sure on his actual politics.
Perhaps not surprising that someone extreme in several areas of his life might be extreme in another.
As a side note on the child porn, let me ask a conspiratorial question: Without any opinion on this particular case, given the level of tech access of government agencies and corporations, what are the odds that nobody is putting child porn files onto the devices of people they want to discredit?
Let me go a bit further: how confident are you that there's no child porn on your device right now? As far as I know, there's no exemption for things like browser caches, so merely having clicked a bad link once might make you a potential felon. For a more malicious scenario, what if somebody sends you an email attachment with a trivially-encrypted form of it? IANAL, but I think society has decided that having a certain pattern of bits anywhere in your computer makes you the worst kind of criminal, and I hold no faith that "common sense" will be applied at any stage of the legal process. Especially with tech-unsavvy judges. Double especially if they want to get you for political reasons.
You have to go through a pretty substantial amount of double checking for a conviction.
The prosecutor to even charge you in the first place, then convincing a grand jury (about 16-23) which while typically very permissive especially with just a majority rule often aren't a rubber stamp, and then generally a judge for pretrial and then a trial jury of 12 who typically all have to agree, and while rare you can also get a JNOV and then you can often still appeal upwards multiple times if you feel that strongly about your case.
While wrongful convictions can and do happen, it's often due to a combination of bad luck and a case/evidence being really complex. It is not perfect, it will never be perfect without forfeiting many of the freedoms and privacies we have (a price most citizens do not wish to pay), but we try really hard to make sure only the criminals are punished.
Many of the founding fathers believed strongly that the courts must be trusted to punish the criminals and that the innocent must be safe. Such as this from John Adams, where he believed that a society where the innocent don't feel safe for their innocence breaks down the very rule of law, and they were determined to err on the side of caution to keep free society secure and stable.
"The law makes it possible to charge a lot of innocent people, but it's okay because the system will probably use discretion and not put them in jail" is a recipe for tyranny.
The usual scenario is where the government wants to get you anyway, either because they hate the actually-legal things you're doing, because some prosecutor or cop knows in his heart without evidence that you're guilty of some crime, or because finding you guilty will cover their asses after some kind of mistake, or because it would be good publicity to catch a criminal. Then the double-checking miraculously vanishes. Three felonies a day is a little exaggerated, but it only takes one felony to ruin your life.
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