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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30802 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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The fact that the case generated extreme controversy ipso facto suggests that a trial is likely needed.

  • -11

I disagree that that is how the law should work. For example, the Rittenhouse case should never have been brought to trial. Prosecutors generally do not bring cases to trial that they know they will lose. This case is likely one they would lose. Therefore, the incentive is against drawing this out in a court of law.

Honestly I feel like the calculus for Democrats is pretty good for drawing this out in the court of law. Keeps it in the media cycle longer and from the Rittenhouse thing the guy actually being cleared probably wouldn't actually change most people on the 'murder' side of the affair's opinions

That kind of makes a mockery of your commitment to due process, if we're just making decisions based on public opinion.

What? No. It's strictly a one-directional formulation. If super controversial -> then charge someone seems like a perfectly reasonable take to me. Nothing there violates due process. The whole issue about prosecutorial discretion (which to be fair isn't quite "due process") is a tricky one, and honestly probably the weakest part of our system (though possibly the "least bad" attempt at a solution), but that kind of "patch" seems super reasonable, yeah?

To add a personal flavor to this:

One of my police uncles was out on patrol one day with his partner. They responded to a robbery at a convenience store. When they tried to arrest the guy, the partner was shot and killed. My uncle was shot and seriously wounded - multiple surgeries in a hospital wounded. My uncle managed to shoot back and killed the guy.

Believe it or not, this was controversial in the local community! The black community decried it as racial discrimination. Surely he could have shot to wound, surely petty larceny wasn't worth the lives of two people, why did the police have to intervene? The gun was planted, it didn't even belong to the robber (no one argued the guy didn't shoot, just that the gun didn't belong to him, except it turns out it did!) There was even an article in the NYT I'm not going to link to for the tiniest bit of opsec remaining to me. But trust me, it was controversial.

Despite it very clearly being an act of self defense, should my uncle have had to stand trial for this? If the only metric is 'Was the action controversial?" then yes, he would have had to go through a trial and relive that day with his freedom and life on the line. That would have been an injustice.

If it's legally controversial, then sure. But the vast majority of people don't know much about the law at all, so their intuition about what is legally controversial is irrelevant. I don't consider show trials acceptable.

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