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Notes -
Loay Alnaji Will Not Be Going To Prison
He might go to jail. VCStar reports:
This isn't quite the standard plea deal, because the prosecutor's office doesn't want it, either. It's an indicated sentence or judicial plea bargain, depending on how cynical you are, but don't take that court case saying 'judicial incentives for plea are unlawful' to mean judicial incentives for a plea actually get the judge in any hot water, or likely result in the plea bargainer getting screwed. There is, as far as I can tell, nearly zero information on how prevalent indicated sentences are, in California, nor how typical this case is, nor what the normal outcome would be in a comparable case, or even if indicated sentences have been used ever in a comparable case. There's even less information on how fucked up one has to be to actually get sent back for another try, and spoiler alert: this ain't it.
So it's probably weird, you can't prove how weird, and gfl for caring about it.
The reporting says up to a year in jail, but that's phantasmal. There's only a moderate chance Alnaji will receive the maximum end of that probation offer, only slightly better chance he'll end up toward the top of that scale, and if I'm understanding the (admittedly convoluted) good conduct credit rules he's very likely to only serve half of whatever sentence he does get. Alternate custody arrangements are on the table for this class of sentence, such as work release or partial home confinement, though I've got no idea what the chances of it getting granted here are. Do the math, and there's nontrivial chance he'll spend less time in jail than Kyle Rittenhouse did.
So on one hand, Alnaji is pleaing guilty to everything in the case; on the other, he's getting a massive discount, quite plausibly a ten-fold reduction in custodial sentencing (again, dependent on me understanding California's fucked up good behavior credit system, but I think the plea keeps his charge as a 50:50 good credit where a prison sentence would be 85:15).
It's also worth spelling something out :
That's a defense attorney, and not the judge, saying that, to be crystal clear. And he's talking to a reporter, so there's a minimum of two professional liars involved. Even if it's not made up wholesale, there's a lot of ways this could have been taken out of context, or misrepresented, or had some other reasonable explanation.
I would be very fascinated to know if the judge pushes back against a defense attorney, if that defense attorney is aggressively mischaracterizing the judge's on-the-stands statements about the merits of an existing case to the public. Because if not, there's a very fascinating problem here.
There are two theories of the case. The prosecutor theory is that Kessler stood near Alnaji, Alnaji hit Kessler in the head, and Kessler died. There is pretty strong evidence, here: Alnaji's megaphone has blood matching Kessler's on it, and injuries to the front of the face inconsistent with the fall. The defense's theory, and I quote the reporting: "Bamieh [defense lawyer] said that during the protest, Kessler aggressively put his cell phone in Alnaji’s face and when Alnaji swatted the phone away, he unintentionally hit Kessler’s face with a megaphone. Bamieh said Kessler had a brain tumor, which exacerbated the injuries when he fell." Alnaji's lawyer also claims that Kessler fell down eight feet away from where Alnaji unintentionally hit Kessler's face, or perhaps the tumor caused the fall. The gymnastics involved I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
Unfortunately, there is no video of the strike or fall itself. It's not even clear, from public information, if Kessler approached Alnaji or Alnaji approached Kessler, first.
Note, however, that there is also no theory of the case where Alnaji did not commit every necessary component to the charges. As a matter of law, in California, if someone runs into your personal space waving a camera, you can't lawfully smack it out of their hands. If you try, and in doing so you wave a heavy rigid object near their head, hit them unintentionally, you are committing an unlawful and negligent act. If you do so, and they turn out to have a skull made of eggshells, you have committed manslaughter. There is no theory of the case where Kessler committed to mutual combat, or put hands on Alnaji; there's no exception for oopsies. Had this case gone to trial, the defense would have rested on nothing deeper than playing to the jury's sympathies and confusions.
"[A]n accident happened" is, in this framework, a very specific unusual claim for a judge to be making, if a judge made it. It's simultaneously disavowing specific responsibility and minimizing any conduct. I mean, yes, there's also a justice matter about whether judges can or should be accepting pleas where there's signs that the plea is insincere, but that's not going to matter in a case where the judge is presenting the not-a-plea-deal.
Sentencing is at the end of June, assuming it doesn't get delayed. I'll leave spelling out the various comparisons to other high-profile cases for then, but this is a pre-registration that the comparison does matter, whether my predictions are correct or wrong. Even had this case gone to trial and he received a maximum sentence, Alnaji would never face a sentence as long as Adamiak, or Dexter Taylor will have spent in prison before they got their fair day in court. I'd be willing to bet cash at very steep odds that Alnaji will not spend as long in jail as the Hammond's did in federal prison before they got a pardon, at steep odds that Alnaji's sentence will not be as long as the year-and-a-day that Steven Hammond's original pre-bonus sentence, before Alnaji doesn't have to serve all of it.
And none of them killed anybody!
There's a morbid post, here, but it's all the more morbid where the original advice was "For Reds specifically". Kessler was not a Red. As I said two years ago, "It's not about X as a principle goes to this."
It seems like everyone (except the victim) basically got what they wanted here. The defendant got a very lenient deal, the prosecutors are making a show of protesting but still get to count this as a successful conviction for their stats, and the state of California can use a limited prison spot on a criminal who poses an actual danger to the public. It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone. It's hard to muster up much outrage when this was a one in a million unlucky outcome from a typical scuffle at a protest.
No but if the state government says "You can attack people at protests and get away with it as long as we like you and it's plausibly ambiguous," the mob can make a habit of it.
Plus the whole 'if this happens with political spectrum reversed the dead guy is a national martyr and there's riots if there's no meaningful charges filed' aspect
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