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Throwing in a quick post because I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed here (unless I missed it!), Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago sets up "ICE-free zones" in Chicago.
This comes on the heels of Trump sending in the national guard after Chicago PD apparently wouldn't help ICE agents under attack. I haven't read all the stuff about this scenario, but on the surface level it seems pretty bad, I have to say.
There's a video clip where that mayor is saying that Republicans want a "redo of the Civil War," amongst other incredibly inflammatory things. The Governor of Illinois is apparently backing the mayor up.
This refusal to help ICE and even outright claim that you're fighting a war with them I mean... I suppose Democrats have been doing it for a while. This seems... bad. I mean sure you can sugarcoat it and point to legal statues and such, but fundamentally if the local governments of these places are going to agitate so directly against the President, I can't blame Trump for sending in the national guard.
Obviously with the two party system we have a line and such, but man, it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war. Not the social media fear-obsessed "civil war" people have been saying has already started, but real national guard vs. local pd or state military type open warfare. I just don't understand going this far, unless the Mayor of Chicago thinks that he can get away with it and Trump will back down.
Even then, brinksmanship of this type seems totally insane!
I suppose Newsom in CA has been doing it too, now that I mention it. Sigh. I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.
Oh no, the perfidy of the woke left truly knows no bounds. And to attack such an upstanding citizen as president Trump, who started his political career with his very nuanced ad about the central park five (about whose guilt he was factually wrong, sadly), based his bid for the presidency on another unfortunate misunderstanding of his and proceeded to win the hearts and minds of Americans by always maintaining decorum and treating his political opponents with respect. Always a voice of moderation and compromise, as well as a great husband and fine human being and an upholder of the highest epistemic norms.
Let me be blunt. Falsehoods are always bad, but if there is one party which has forsaken the high ground here, it is Trump's party. Given all the shit Trump has been spewing over the years, I would not particularly upset on his behalf if the Democrats were to spread a rumor that he has an Olympic swimming pool filled to the brim with the eyes of murdered babies in which he likes to go skinny-dipping with his cabinet.
Besides, "Trump wants a civil war" is far-fetched, but not maximally far-fetched. There is a notable community of preppers and 'militias' for whom "another civil war" has long been a favorite masturbatory fantasy. (Of course, they did not expect to fight on the side of the federal government!)
It is established case-law that the duty of the police to protecting individual citizens is fuck-all. I do not know if relevant local or case law has decided if local police forces owe any service to the feds, but I would default to "no".
Letting the BLM riots happen was actually bad. Deciding that you have more urgent police priorities than helping ICE, which Trump likely ordered specifically into Chicago to punish the people who voted against him, and whose whole mission is to score cheap political points in a rather farcelike manner -- "we get rid of all the illegals, except for the ones in the hotel sector (where Trump is involved) and the ones in the agricultural sector (whose deportation would make the food prices skyrocket even more)".
Why should the local mayor lend Trump the PD for his political stunts? Let him at least waste federal funds for it.
Are you saying that you know that the Democrats are treasonous because Trump sent the national guard to deal with them? Then DC must have turned treasonous already weeks ago!
Here is my take. This is a clown-show. Trumps masked goons try to kidnap illegals to help him score political points (and own the libs). I imagine that local PDs will in turn try to hamper ICE as much as they can. Perhaps their unmarked cars get towed while they are illegally parked mid-arrest, or they are subject to frequent 'random' traffic checks. This is probably likewise not the best use of police resources.
I can not speak for the random people Trump gave a bonus, a badge, a mask and a gun to act as his muscle, but my priors are that both the national guard and the local PDs really really do not want to shoot at each other. If they clash about specific questions which enforcements of local strictures which just so happen to impede ICE are allowed, both sides will refer to the court system to figure it out, and the court system will do this in very short order. Few national guard commanders would be stupid enough to trust Trump to pardon them if they break the law in his name, and approximately zero police chiefs have any delusions about defeating the federal government once the courts have decided in its favor.
At the end of the day, this is mostly a pointless dick-measuring contest.
Excuse me? Those men are guilty as sin, and obviously so. They did, in fact, rape and murder that woman. The fact that they are still breathing is an affront to justice, and one of Trump's best qualities is that he was right on the money about them decades ago.
ETA:
The woman was in a coma, left for dead, but didn't die. I am wrong about details, and can and do quibble about direction below, but she didn't die, there was no murder, and I should have let go of my annoyance instead of shooting off a contrary reply.
Had I come to my senses earlier, I'd have cancelled, or deleted swiftly. I didn't.
See my reply here.
Again, it is technically possible that they aided Reyes in raping the victim alone, then killed her, and for some reason decided to shield him (and only him) in their confessions by claiming he was not present. Perhaps he was a member of the illuminati, and the defendants who were afraid enough to betray their buddies were nevertheless more afraid of him than of a murder sentence, and had taken the steps to coordinate a false version of events -- which lead to them spending decades in prison -- so they did not have to implicate him.
Or it could be that Reyes is psychic and edited himself out of the memory of his accomplices after the deed.
Or perhaps a bunch of forensic experts formed a conspiracy to falsely exonerate a bunch of murderers and get them millions in restitution instead, and falsified the DNA evidence after convincing Reyes to confess. Perhaps they did it to make Trump look bad a decade later when he would start to become a political force.
Here is what I think likely happened. CP5 was a big, political case. Trump published his attack ad on the mayor. The mayor knew that he needed a conviction, and made it clear to the police that he wanted a guilty verdict. For a cop, this is the kind of case which will make or break your career. They found the likeliest suspects that they could find and convinced themselves that they were guilty, which was easy because it was in their personal best interests to believe it (as opposed to telling the mayor that they had been unable to find the killer). Confirmation bias did the rest.
They did not follow good epistemic protocols, like having different cops get confessions from different suspects, and then check the confessions for consistency, or determining if the suspects had perpetrator's knowledge.
In their mind, there was no need, because they already knew that they were guilty ("police instinct" and all that), and their job was simply to paint a picture which would convince any bleeding heart jury.
They very likely cut corners in the process, skipped legally mandated safety checks. Even if you are a cop who will mostly play by the book, this case was to important to leave it up to chance if the real, circumstantial evidence would convince the jury. So you 'forget' to give your suspect the Miranda warning. Perhaps you beat a few of them up to get them to confess, after all, these scumbags just murdered a girl, and you are not even breaking their bones. Or you prompt them with the same story which they should confess. Who cares if you find out in which order they raped her, the important thing is that you present a version of the story which will get them sent to prison, not contradictory confessions which will confuse the jury. Simulacrum level two, not one. Perhaps you even plant a bit of evidence to help justice along.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it were not for the fact that the boffins developed a new forensic technique which is far more reliable than any amount of confessions.
In a way, the case exposed the whole rotten underbelly of the US criminal justice system. I wonder how many other 'criminals' are still sitting in prison because the same dirty cops played the same dirty tricks on them. (While I believe that most convicts are in fact guilty, I also believe that US cops do not have a culture of good epistemics and calling out the ones who use illegal shortcuts to paint a nicer picture.)
The reason why every kid learns that the only thing you say when arrested is "I will not answer any questions and I want a lawyer", no matter if you are innocent or guilty, is because US citizens can not trust the police to be interested in determining the truth, especially if they are already detaining you.
Oh come on. Now every state that does not execute prisoners is inherently unjust?
You skipped an important part in your haste to come to a conclusion. What do you think they were doing that night, when a woman was raped and beaten nearly to death? What do you think happened to her?
It's kind of important to have an idea of what did happen before you start imagining things about the response to what happened.
I think they were there, attacking and robbing people, maybe indiscriminately, maybe targeting whites, along with about 25 other people. I think all 30 deserve a short trip from a high place, and I think these 5 in particular are in fact guilty of the assault on this woman because of their confessions which implicated each other.
I also think the response to that response was a pretty good one.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Once more for those in the cheap seats:
HELL YES.
A state that exercises a monopoly on violence but doesn't put anyone to death is abdicating their duty and denying victims their due justice. Some people deserve to die for what they've done. Many people, in fact. Delaying this is the same as denying it, and denying it outright from the start is cruelty to the victims.
So you support the death penalty for attempted felony murder for 14yo perpetrators (given that you are annoyed that the CP5 are still breathing).
Our different ideas about standards of evidence aside, do you have a lower limit on the age a perpetrator in a similar situation? If an 8yo brother of one of the CP5 had tagged along and taken a minor part in the act as you believe it took place, would you also hang him? What about a 5yo who just finds an unsecured pistol, says "bang, you are dead" and shoots someone?
Or take the severity of the crime. Most of the other 25 were not accused of crimes as severe as the CP5, WP talks of muggings. So the 14yo mugger gets the noose, should the 14yo pickpocket hang next to him? Or the copyright infringer? At what point should society decide that a kid is beyond redemption?
Adult perpetrators get adult punishments. That society is abdicating its duty to train its young men and women and delaying -> denying them a significant chunk of the prime of their life does not change this basic biological fact.
The reason why society does that is related to the reason society generally fails to punish criminals- redistributing resources (intangibles like virtue and intelligence are just as real a resource as physical goods are, though I understand this is a fringe view) from the useful and decent to the useless and evil under a belief that being useless or evil could be solved if the community simply loved them more (that it imposes real costs on everyone else is not material to that analysis).
Thanks to the relatively unbalanced rise in political power of those whose evolutionary biological specialization leads them to solve problems that way, that's the approach we most often see in modern times. And in fairness, there is something to that approach; keeping humanity's natural biological tendencies in check can be greatly beneficial to mankind. That being said, though...
At the point where means, motive/desire, and opportunity become relevant factors (we treat those who are sufficiently mental defective in the same way- they just go to an institution until they are fixed or die). It's very rare- like, once-in-a-generation rare- for actual children to pull off capital crimes in the first place, but I really don't have a problem with the sentence for the once-in-a-lifetime case of tweenagers luring and murdering a toddler for kicks being death. Probably unwise to parade them through the streets before the gallows, though.
Are you arguing that 14yo's are adults, and society should treat them as such in legal matters?
So they should also be old enough to buy smokes, weed and vodka, own guns, drive cars, have full control over their finances, shoot porn, vote, enlist, gamble in Vegas, make medical decisions without their parent's consent (think transgender surgeries), supply and use sperm banks, hold political office, perform for Epstein?
From a physiological perspective, 14yo's are not adults. the median 14yo guy fighting the median 18yo guy will be a lot more one-sided than 18yo-vs-22yo. Still, that is not very relevant to the legal aspects: we generally do not bestow rights based on how good you are at beating people up.
As far as mental development is concerned, 14 is still in the throes of puberty. Some people will, for better or worse, be as wise at age 14 as they will ever be. Personally, I was not prone to life-ruining bad decisions (except for avoiding bad decisions), but I was not certainly stupid about lot of things. Still, I think that plenty of 14yo's would be prone to making life-ruining bad decisions if we let them, which is why we limit the decisions they can take.
Of course, the 18th birthday cutoff point is completely arbitrary. an 18yo will still be more prone to bad decisions than a 25yo, but we can hardly deny people the benefits of adulthood until then. Still, the worst youthful bad decision tendencies will be over by age 18. Personally, I would support the Terra Ignota majority exams. If you are some wunderkind who can convince society at age 10 that you should be allowed to drive a car and own a gun, then by all means let society also punish you for your crimes as an adult.
In order:
They already do, they already do, this was fine in 1960 so why isn't it fine now?, they're nearly there anyway, what finances?, what else do you think 14 year olds use Snapchat for?, no taxation without representation, if they can pass for 18 they lie about it and we didn't much care in the past, welcome to Counter Strike unboxing video #99999, they already do, when they act as sperm banks they owe child support, this would be worse than the current crop of politicians... how, exactly?, meanwhile, in Rotherham...
Oh yeah, and we already try teenagers "as adults" anyway, especially when they break the above laws, so clearly this is just ageism.
Rights are not "bestowed". Men have those rights because they are capable of the organized violence required to force their recognition. Every one was fought for.
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Not the one you responded to, but it appears obvious to me that 14yos are more adult than the law treats them, in many cases. Things like drinking should be acceptable in moderation under parental supervision, if only to teach the teens the limits so that they don't have to learn them getting blackout drunk among similarly clueless but eager peers at 18. (Of course, we then arrive to the issue of many parents being prone to bad decisions.)
Really, the law on drinking age appears now to be designed to account for negligent parents. What is a properly parented 14yo gonna do if they're able to buy alcohol? Get illicitly drunk once?
Regarding crimes, at 14 a human should have enough moral knowledge to know that beating a human being while they're down is unacceptable and enough self-control to stop themselves from doing it. They can be excused to some extent for crimes of passion, but there's a point where "passion" no longer cuts it.
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I should have been more temperate, and I cranked up my, well, crank at the hagiography of the CP5. It's worth being temperate about these things, and I am willing to take the not-at-all extreme position that relatively routine death penalty is justice, but I'm too many posts deep for not enough forethought.
Hanging for thieves is not unknown, but I would consider harsh. If you want to advocate for the death penalty for copying files I'm willing to hear it. I don't think running Napster deserves death, but you might be able to convince me of Silk Road.
Hanging for beating people senseless is closer, especially given the disposition of the victim. If she had died then it would have been murder, even if she was breathing when they left her, and none of them raped her. I think he severity of her injuries given her complete innocence deserves death.
Muggers, yes again, especially if someone ends up dead or in a coma. Not if they are confronted and flee, but more likely if they prey on the women, (actual, prepubescent) children. Carjackers, too, while we're at it. The correct number of these criminals put to death is way higher than zero. It doesn't have to be every single one, but the more violent you are, and the more helpless, innocent, and vulnerable your victims, the more you deserve to die for the same crimes.
Does acting as a prowling gang make each member less culpable, or more? I don't think you can necessarily treat all thirty the same, but it speaks to coordinated action and opportunistic behavior, and neither are cause for leniency.
Does youth remove culpability? You clearly think so, and I'm inclined to agree, but the amount of grace I'm willing to extend does not get to 14, and just like before, the worse your crime the less leniency you deserve on all counts, including age.
For the 8 year old: not hanged but still punished severely. The 5 year old: no legal punishment makes sense but that doesn't mean faultless, blameless, or free from scrutiny. Who is shot matters a lot, as is what happens. That's also part of justice, as there are victims who matter, and everyone has an interest in deterrence of new criminals and prevention of new crime from known criminals.
Redemption should not dominate the discussion of justice to the extent that it has. It is less important than Consequences.
I started with a weak mea culpa but I'm ending with a stronger one. I was wrong on the details and ran my mouth off, then had to go back and justify myself. Had I any sense, I would have cancelled the first reply. I muddled through it, eventually, and I got to a decent thesis of my original reply, but I regret doing it and would take it back if I could.
I've edited, above, too.
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This is good and correct, actually. Muggers and murderers should suffer. This is the foundation of justice. Why should Trump or anyone else be nuanced about this, where nuance means 'being really nice to everyone even if they're actively sabotaging and robbing you, give them a second chance, a third chance, a thirtieth chance'. It's cooperate-bot behaviour. Cooperate-bots lose most of the time, it's a very vulnerable and pathetic strategy. What about the nuance of 'be nice to those who are nice to you and punish those who harass you', there's actual nuance and distinction there.
First, the context was clearly the CP5 case. Timing matters. I think that most here would agree that a lefty posting a "resist fascism" meme within hours of Kirk being killed would be worse than a lefty posting the same meme a week earlier. Personally, I was disgusted by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations a day after the oct-7 attacks, when I week earlier I would been wholeheartedly meh about it.
Second, I disagree with Trump that an emotional response like hate will lead to better justice outcomes. I want judges and juries calm rather than emotional when they make their verdict.
Third, the world is not populated by easily distinguishable cooperate-bots and defect-bots. Your perception of the behavior of other people is always affected by noise. Under such circumstances, tit-for-tat is no longer the optimal strategy, and you want to build in some amount of forgiveness to avoid getting into a defect-defect loop with someone like you. Sure, any forgiveness option will lower your performance against defect-bot, but maximum effectiveness against defect-bot is defect-bot, and it does not perform particularly well. (This also happens to be the gist of the message of Christianity, as far as an atheist like me understands it.)
In particular, the fact that Trump was (as I have extensively argued here) wrong and overconfident about his "murderers" being defect-bots -- an opinion he likely formed with no in-depth knowledge of the subject -- is a cautionary tale.
Sure, we could simply task the police with shooting anyone who looks like a defect-bot to them, and that would tremendously cut down on the costs of the justice system as well as the rate of reported crime, but it would not lead to a much worse equilibrium than our present system, both due to innocents getting killed and such a system being ripe for abuse.
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I mean this is extremely inflammatory especially as coming from elected officials. They aren’t openly saying it, but I would not expect them to be horrified by some random person taking shots at federal officials. You don’t say things like “redo of the civil war” or declare “ICE free zones” or anything of the sort unless you want to escalate whatever is happening on the street level. Which is already at least at the throw rocks stage.
Did you mean from an elected official who is not Trump?
Saying 'Republicans want to redo the civil war' is very different from saying "let's redo the civil war", from where I stand.
Sure, they are longing for an escalation, but they have also learned in the last decade that being a divisive leader who takes a shit on his opponents every chance he gets, always doubling down rather than backing down is what the electorate prefers.
I mean sure, but eventually you get the escalation you wanted and are now being blamed for a dead federal agent or worse member of the military. The ratchet cannot go on forever.
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I think the CP5 were likely guilty.
Also Trump isn’t unique in his lying. He lies a lot. But so do other politicians. Trump is simply more uncouth.
They were not guilty of the specific charges they were facing (we know this because someone else was).
No — we know someone else was also guilty. Doesn’t mean the CP5 weren’t concurrently guilty.
As quiet_NaN points out, there was DNA evidence connecting the other man to the rape; there was no such evidence connecting the CP5 to it. Without a time machine we won't know for sure, but to me it looks more likely than not that they didn't attack that particular woman. That they weren't good people and were committing serious crimes against other people that day is also likely true, however.
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They were guilty, he was also guilty. The confession of the 6th person is the only exculpatory evidence for the CP5 and carries zero weight with me considering the situation he was already in.
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Eh... DNA evidence proved a sixth person raped the victim, but there's a lot of evidence for the CP5 themselves being guilty too, of the crime they were convicted for. Maybe there's some doubt, but I don't think Reyes' confession is anywhere near enough to be certain or even very confident they were not guilty.
Generally, I place very little trust in confessions, little trust in eyewitness accounts and a lot of trust in technological evidence.
We know that Reyes raped her. It is reasonable to assume that this was the same incident in which she was also murdered. We know that there is no DNA evidence linking any CP5 to the rape, which is at least strong circumstantial evidence that they did not rape her.
The accepted standard for criminal convictions is "beyond reasonable doubt". So the prosecutor had to convince the jury that the police had reconstructed the crime correctly. I doubt they told the jury "or perhaps some unknown third party raped her, we don't really know". We know that the police had done no such thing.
So we have cops who extracted confessions which were later falsified in the details, and sold them as the truth. This puts really sharp limits on the trust we can place on the police investigation.
Now, it is technically possible that they were randomly directionally correct and framed the guilty party minus one. But even if they were, the penalty for investigatory misconduct in the US is generally that the gathered evidence gets thrown out, which sets the correct incentives.
Trisha Meili wasn't murdered, she ended up living. And all 6 of their taped accounts (including Lopez who isn't counted in the "central park 5" because his parents made sure he didn't confess like the others did), and those of a few other people who had been around them that night, were really pretty consistent. The only difference was that each kid downplayed his own actions somewhat, thinking that they would be fine if they weren't the one who raped her. And the confusion that everyone knew she was raped, but these kids didn't actually see a rape, so they were trying to fit that into their confession incorrectly.
But the consistent picture of an assault and sexual molestation (but not rape, they were really too young and awkward for that) is pretty clear. It would be pretty remarkable if the detectives in a few hours of the untaped interrogation got them all to get on the same page of implicating themselves consistently in a made-up story, especially when they weren't even suspects in the initial questioning of ~30+ kids until kevin richardson happened to mention that the scratch on his eye was done by "the female jogger". Also especially because a few of them were borderline retarded, as was used in their defense. But they still all knew exactly which kid was hitting people with the metal pipe, who was throwing rocks at joggers' heads, and who was ripping her clothes off, etc.
That Reyes came along later and raped the woman who was lying there unconscious and nearly dead, really has no bearing on the assaults committed (on multiple victims) by the above 6 (which were attested to by multiple other kids as well, who somehow avoided being 'framed' by the detectives themselves).
I stand corrected.
The fact that the police managed to convince the juries that four of the five had committed rape beyond reasonable doubt certainly places an upper limit on the trustworthiness of their investigation. Given that the police did have DNA evidence and knew that none of the CP5 had anything to do with the semen, going for rape convictions seems downright malicious.
I will also note that DA Morgenthau (who recommended vacating the judgements) does not seem like a pink-haired 'defund the police' type (WW2 veterans generally are not, in my experience). Typically DAs are very reluctant to recommend overturning convictions, especially ones secured by their own assistants.
I assume that it is possible that he recommended that because he thought that given all of the convicted we had already served their time, fighting to keep the none-rape parts of their convictions was a fools errand (especially since it was obviously CW fodder and he would have to argue that only the rape part of the confessions were wrong and the rest was fine, which would be a tough position to defend), rather than because he personally believed that they had never touched Meili.
From WP, Reyes killed one of the four other women he raped. As far as I know, none of the other alleged victims of the CP5 had life-threatening injuries, which is likely why their case focused on Meili. It is not like we have a medical examination of her from just before she was raped. Given that the when the cops tried to blame the CP5 for the state Meili was found in, they might have exaggerated the injuries inflicted by the CP5 as well.
Potentially, they groped her and left her with a mild concussion, and the rest was Reyes doing. Or they did everything except the rape. Or they never met her.
Meta: I think that the CP5 case is great culture war material, even a scissor statement. Also, I find this discussion enlightening. I come from my niche, get blowback for what I considered an uncontroversial fact, think to myself "why do these idiots not believe in DNA evidence?", but try to argue halfway politely, get polite responses and eventually a more subtle picture emerges from the arguments. (I mean, @KMC is still completely beyond my understanding, in the appreciation of DNA evidence, the quality of evidence for the attempted murder charge in hindsight and the general morality of imposing the death penalty on 14yo's for attempted murder.)
Yeah I had forgotten about that part. The detectives knew she was hit with a big rock in the head as an attempted death blow finisher, so they were probing these 15 yr olds with questions around that, without giving it away. But consistently they all knew nothing about that (even when trying to come up with what the detectives were looking for, they never came close); they only knew about all the other injuries. So that was Reyes with the final attempted murder using the rock.
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I don't think I got anything wrong. Hitting someone with a pipe doesn't leave DNA evidence, and the fact that someone else raped her at some point doesn't mean these five are innocent.
I also believe this. Hang 'em high.
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They were not just five random boys out for a lovely stroll at 10pm. Some were arrested for criminal behavior before the police even knew there was a rape victim.
But aside from their confessions there's almost nothing linking them to the victim.
I do think their confessions are worth something even if they're dumb kids under duress. Some confessed even with their parents present.
Sure is awkward that someone else confessed and DNA evidence links him to the victim though.
I don't think they're guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but it's definitely bizarre to turn around and conclude that they're heroes, which is how they're being treated by progressives (???)
I think this is a general problem of modern therapy culture - we can't distinguish between innocent victims and actual heroes. (Christian martyrology doesn't help). I first noticed this after 9-11 - far too many people failed to make a moral distinction between the unheroic victims (the office workers in the towers and the Pentagon, the passengers on the three planes that hit their targets) and the actual heroes (the firemen and police who climbed up the burning towers, and the passengers on United 93).
The central park 5 were the victims of serious wrongdoing, in that they were imprisoned for far longer (and under worse conditions, as sex offenders) than would be justified by the various minor offences they committed as juveniles. That 4 of the 5 went straight after getting out is not particularly surprising and is why we have a relatively soft criminal justice system for juveniles - most (but by no means all) criminal youths grow out of it if given the chance. They aren't "heroes", and I don't think anyone capable of making the distinction thinks they are.
People were noticing the problem a decade before 9/11 too:
Homer: "That little Timmy is a real hero."
Lisa: "What makes him a hero, Dad?"
"Well, he fell down the well and... can't get out."
"How does that make him a hero?"
"Well, it's more than you did!"
-- The Simpsons, "Radio Bart", 1992
It's silly to claim that victims of natural tragedies are all heroes, but it's no worse than silly. I think the psychology here is a much more concerning problem in contexts like due process and free speech rights, though. Most people really don't like "defending scoundrels", as the old quote goes. For someone who can't get past that, the only ways to resolve the cognitive dissonance are to either abandon the defense or pretend the defendant isn't a scoundrel, both options that can have awful consequences if they become popular enough.
Nah. Either they were guilty of what they confessed to, or they were guilty of implicating each other with false confessions. Even supposing the cops bullied them, and the other half dozen witnesses, including in front of their parents, that would just make the false-accusation offences excusable, not minor.
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Yeah the whole justice project thing seems to have headed down a weird pathway in recent years. Obviously scope-creep is natural for non-profits but I remember a good Motte comment a few months ago about how it essentially ran out of 'real miscarriages of justice' and now gets by on mostly liberating people who were 98% guilty of horrible crimes but may get clemency with some procedural wiggle room due to lazy prosecutors... which is like fine but doesn't feel like the point of the project.
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