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We allow protestors to storm government buildings and interfere with proceedings all the time with little or no legal response. This seems like special pleading to me.
Funny, I was thinking the exact opposite. It’s silly to demand justice for statue-toppling and courthouse-torching, then turn around and insist that the other guys were just being good citizens.
I’m not sure how many of the CHAZ folks ended up arrested or convicted, but I hope it was a lot.
... I realize that this was meant as an off-the-cuff response, but can you provide a single example of a statue-toppling or courthouse-torching person receiving a 15+ year sentence?
Actual burned-down cars or buildings arsonists, even when doing so killed people while trying to conceal /other/ crimes, aren't getting that sort of sentence. As far as I know, even where statute-toppling nearly killed someone, as far as I know no one was convicted and the people who were charged and assisted got a sizable settlement from a local government that fired the police chief that charged them before any serious attempt at trial. Actually literally-directly-murdering a teenager in cold blood at CHOP/CHAZ? 14 years
In theory, the guy who plotted to kill Kavanaugh could by statute get sentenced to literally anything, if the court case ever starts, but if I'm reading the sentencing guidelines probably maybe he'd get 14 years at the high end?
Obviously it's easy to draw a thousand lines such that each reference case is a class of one, and there's a million ways you can talk about how all those other protests that interfere with various proceedings are totally separate such that it's absolutely reasonable for them to end with an arrest and no charges ever being brought. But it's kinda hard to draw lines without making the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy obvious.
And that's... kinda the issue. You can well say how much you hope that anything near this gets smacked down with a sledgehammer no matter who does it, but if you want to actually have a norm what matters is what people actually see happening, and the last time a progressive-themed group got hit hard for anything on this class involved a literal bombing, and even that ended up becoming a cause celebre.
That’s exactly the issue!
Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?
One one hand, we have various obviously dysfunctional, obviously embattled city police departments. The bureaucrats who fund and control them are somewhere between uncooperative and actively hostile. They are pursuing chaotic, personal crimes.
On the other, we have the security apparatus of the most powerful country in the world. Its directing bureaucracy feels, for once in their lives, personally threatened. They also have a short list of high-profile suspects who carefully organized and documented their participation.
Which of these two do you think will be better at building a case?
It is unreasonable to expect a tragic accident among protestors to spawn comparable charges to a deliberate plan. It is impractical to compare the FBI’s resources and political will to those of random police departments. And it is irresponsible to insist that, when these vastly different scenarios yield any difference in outcome, it is proof of an insidious conspiracy.
Out of all these examples, the best intuition pump is the murder at CHAZ. Did Tarrio’s crime really deserve harsher sanction than an actual murder? I’m not sure. I can’t find information on his plea. His subordinates certainly didn’t earn such sentences. At best, it’s the old problem of utilitarianism, adding and distributing harms until our intuition complains.
But I think it’s telling that the murder—the most heinous crime which can be thrown at the feet of a BLM protestor—gets closest to your sharpshooter’s 15-year line.
I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders. There is no line. Only the belief that there was an injustice, and a search for the facts which will best support it.
Trivially, many of the cases I've highlighted were prosecuted by the federal government in federal courts by groups prosecutors that they were enforcing the law to the hilt -- at least until they developed sudden sympathies for arsonists and firebombers and people breaking up government meetings who Cared About The Community -- or had a clear federal nexus that could have been. This is most overt with the arson (in addition to the massive risk to life and limb) since the ATF claims jurisdiction over anything even slightly flammable where any component went through interstate commerce, and it's part of why I keep harping on the dramatically different focuses from 'good' causes to 'bad' ones, but it's not solely limited there.
Trivially, the cases I've highlighted tend to revolve around attacks against a person because those seem the only things that got prosecuted seriously at all; threatening or dangerous political
protestsriotsstunts that interact with big-name politicians more often result in little more than an arrest, if even that.Trivially, because we're supposed to not treat politicians as if they were humans++ who's least insult Matters while someone else's house or business getting burned down around them doesn't. Relatedly, because whatever extent interfering with legislative or other government processes might serve to close the gap in theory, in practice they're normally been allowed or even applauded by people who have since done a ton of very cautious line-drawing over severity (they didn't bypass metal detectors that didn't exist!) that fails to grapple with the absence of any serious punishment or even serious attempt to prevent repetition.
More seriously, paeans to a personally threatened bureaucracy on one side and an actively hostile one on the other are... kinda my point. A cross-country movement of bureaucrats across different entire levels of government running interference as their (often armed!) thugs intimidate political opponents, achieve unlawful ends, and are using that violence as justification for political demands and to limit their opponent's access to the public square kinda matters! A lot!
And for some strange reason all of these only come up in response. You hope that CHAZ/CHOP people got punished, but not enough to check before posting or even to have a good understanding of the depth of the problem for that one single case or why people might consider it relevant as a comparison for (stupid, ineffective, and dangerous) actions to overthrow the United States. It's not even limited to Trump or Trump-related, or BLM politics: I've pointed out (and been modhatted for pointing out!) when posters here went from considering mostly-peaceful-but-the-arsons-and-murders riots "not special" to literally supporting the declaration of martial fucking law over truck horns.
Now, because of that, I'm not allowed to go posting examples through your comment history, and hey, it's not like you had a just-before-exodus post talking about how this comparison only ever comes up as a gotcha from righties to lefties. Maybe I've missed something. But it becomes more than a little uncompelling when you yourself bring it up as your best, strongest example.
I mean, you're the one that brought up CHAZ/CHOP.
I don't! Indeed, I've repeatedly predicted that some criminals will get the book thrown at them, and others will get sudden bursts of prosecutor sympathy, and while I've not always been correct -- I'm still surprised Kyle Rittenhouse didn't end up with further gun-related charges, and while Dominick Black did, that they didn't result in direct jail time -- it's been surprisingly accurate as an indicator. I'm not surprised that no one knows what exactly happened with Grosskuetz's CCW permit, and I'd wager cash money the only thing we find out before the statute of limitations passes is the one situation where the ALCU will commit to defending a gun owner.
Or, for a different direction, I'll point to the Hammond case. To save you a click, the Hammonds were accused of starting a fire on the other BLM's land, under the auspices of clearing brush but possibly to cover up poaching of deer. It grew out of hand, someone could have gotten hurt, yada yada. The Hammonds were, by all reports, stellar defendants, accepting both guilt and responsibility early on to simplify the case at the earliest moment; as a result, they received a sentence of a couple months for a federal arson case, even if one that didn't burn down a police car, part of a historic chapel, or a police district office.
That'd be a wonderful counterexample, except the sentence was found appalling and appealed by the DoJ, which found that case -- not the Molotov Lawyers actively encouraging people to take further weapons and burn the system down, as soon as Trump got distracted, not any person convicted for burning the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, often while also stealing body armor, weapons, and ammunition -- required a terrorism enhancement with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
This was not a case that threatened the DoJ bureaucrats, nor had long-term broad ramifications: it simply was convenient. And the others weren't. Even and especially from your theory that one side faced a unified front from the Department of Justice to enforce the law to the hilt, while the other had a bunch of bureaucrats running interference, what it says is worrying.
((And then the people who protested that in a stupid way, without any serious threats to the important bureaucrats... well, they didn't all get serious sentences, but that's because one of them got fatally shot, and the prosecution of some of the ringleaders was so hilariously and incompetently aggressive in pursuit of a long-ass sentence that it managed to hinge of a fat fucking fib it actively hid from the defense and court. Most of them 'only' got a year or two, tots normal stuff the DoJ must be trumpeting everywhere after every dumbass leftist occupation interferes with federal employees.))
Instead, when I talk about this stuff, I get requests to do statistical analysis on unavailable data to Prove Mathematically that this is real bias and not just the selection that no one seems willing to even try to find counterexamples.
Beyond my normal frustration with the impressive tolerance for sudden claims your entire political opposition is both unpersuadable and has no line...
Thankfully, in addition to Trump supporters, we also have parts of the population with both working eyeballs and working brain cells, who can also notice that one group of rioters with empty-headed slogans about overthrowing the United States government wasn't that big a deal short of actual literal murder (and even that received a significant downward deviation from the sentencing guidelines at the request of prosecutors), and one of them was so dangerous that they needed almost twice the guidelines sentence for the crime.
They might find a lot of arguments much less persuasive were they not being inundated with evidence against them.
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Because some people are still stupid enough to maintain a belief in equal protection under the law.
A massive amount of the popular consensus against the Jan 6th protesters was secured through coordinated lies about the death of Officer Sicknick, which was in fact a tragic accident, but was presented for months as a deliberate murder in order to demonize everyone who attended the protest. Likewise, there is zero reason to describe the chaotic destruction of public property, which was without doubt deliberately planned, as a "tragic accident". People did dangerous, stupid things on purpose, and fucked a person up so bad they nearly died. If I rob a bank and fire a bunch of rounds to keep the cops' heads down, and one of those bullets hits a kid in the gut, that's a crime, not a "tragic accident".
But of course, as this as in all things, framing is everything.
No, it isn't. We have ample evidence that the authorities play favorites in their enforcement of the law. Having seen that evidence, it is no longer reasonable expect us to grant them the benefit of the doubt when outcomes differ. Maybe you're right, and partisan motives have nothing to do with it this time. But they burned the trust required to accept that explanation, and nothing was done, and so the trust is no longer a viable option.
Trump supporters don't see riot organizers getting 13-year sentences for approved riots. Why would they accept 13-year sentences for this riot? The correct sentence is a night in jail to polish the radical credentials and arrange good photo-ops, and then a polite release.
You're thinking of the Angela Davis track, where one conspires in an armed attack on our lawful institutions resulting in multiple murders, which leads to tenured positions at premiere educational institutions. Easy mistake to make.
Equal protection implies equal crimes.
I am not basing my condemnation on Officer Sicknick. He’s not mentioned in these extreme charges, either. If anyone was charged in his death, I haven’t seen it—what was the resulting sentence?
Your bank robbery hypothetical smuggled in an innocent bystander instead of a willing accomplice. I’d think you would endorse the cops saying “live by the sword…” rather than demanding justice for a bank robber wounded by his conspirators. And it’s not like accidental injuries are a surefire way to get charged.
As for Dr. Davis, I observe she was in fact charged and acquitted. Perhaps the police bit off more than they could chew, charging her with kidnapping and murder? Or the CPUSA played dirty by defending her with jury selection and expert witnesses? If you’d like to argue that it was all witness intimidation and political pressure, be my guest—it’s always interesting to read about the wild days of the 1970s.
The Jan. 6 actions are obviously not the same as any of these. They were less violent, more coordinated, and targeted different people. You can’t find BLM protestors getting away with 40 USC §5104(e) for the same reason that you won’t see Proud Boys getting bargains for statue-toppling: they aren’t committing the same crimes. Different crimes, different charges, different outcomes.
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I've looked into this before, and so far as I can tell, while many were arrested, nobody was ever charged with anything.
One person was eventually charged with attempted murder in relation to the numerous shootings and attempted shootings by numerous people. No serious effort appears to have been made to identify or apprehend the rest of the shooters.
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Forty something were arrested following the final unlawful assembly order, and given wrist slaps of zero actual impact.
One man pled guilty to second degree murder for one of the shootings, and sentenced to 14 years.
The fact that J6 protestors/rioters/insurrectionests are being given far longer sentences than actual murderers and rapists is one of the many reasons i have lost all faith in American government and legal systems.
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I think there were a couple dozen overnight arrests associated with it being forcibly cleared out, but no actual charges or convictions.
So I don't think the claims of unfair application of justice are baseless. But I also see the remedy to be actually taking control of government processes and using them to punish lawbreakers, rather than becoming the party of lawlessness.
A major point and purpose of these instances of unfair application of justice is to make it impossible for the opponents of those now in charge to take control of government processes, by severely punishing anyone who is too loudly an opponent of the regime and thereby discouraging others from opposition.
The "party of lawlessness" may be bad, but the "party of those who continue respecting institutions which have been suborned to be used against them" is just stupid.
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