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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.

I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.

  1. The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.

  2. I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.

  3. The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.

  4. It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.

I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.

Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict

https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.

https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571

https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/

Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.

Update: They released the offered plea deals. Basically 35-50% of sentences given out. All basically received double max sentence of plea deal. One of them is saying it violates his constitutional right to a jury trial and will appeal on those grounds. Which I believe is directionally correct but the whole system efficiency collapses without this work around. A much broader issue which would be nice to find a better solution.

https://twitter.com/rparloff/status/1699751415076266140?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

ll basically received double max sentence of plea deal.

Not quite. The plea deal specifically says that the Government can seek an upward departure (and the defendant can seek a downward departure).

More importantly, a comparison of the deal with the sentence is meaningless without assessing the strength of the case. Suppose the probability of conviction was 50%. If so, the offer of 50% of what they got is exactly the expected sentence, so there is no "trial penalty" at all. If the probability of conviction was higher, then the offer was great deal. If the probability was lower, then the opposite is true.

I don’t think that is what our constitution means like your playing a dice game. And take the expected value. The punishment is for the crime you are guilty of. Guilt or innocence is from a guilty plea or a jury conviction.

Yeah, expected outcome is absurd in this circumstance. Should someone who is 1% likely to have committed a crime have to serve 1% of the sentence? No, they're either guilty or innocent, and the whole point of the system is to find that out. It is admittedly broken at the moment, but only because we need somewhere around 10X the number of judges/clerks/courtrooms/prosecutors/defenders/bailiffs/police etc that we currently have. Not sure why no one ever seems interested in growing the infrastructure to match the population, but so it goes.

I believe you are correct. Atleast constitutionally. But I also don’t think 10x costs is worth it. And procedurally it would be a complete pain in the ass to prosecute small crimes.

As a middle ground I think 20-30% more time would be the best situation which is enough to get obviously guilty people to plea but small enough that the government can’t just leverage high sentences for pleas.

Should someone who is 1% likely to have committed a crime have to serve 1% of the sentence? No, they're either guilty or innocent, The issue is NOT whether they are 1% likely to have committed a crime. It is whether they are 1% likely to be convicted of the charges against them. Those are not at all the same; someone who is found to be 1%, or 50% or even 90% likely to have committed a crime is 100% likely to be acquitted.

the whole point of the system is to find that out. No, the whole point of the system is to determine whether the prosecution has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person is guilty. And unlike "guilt" or "innocence", there is no black or white answer that question. The exact same evidence might be seen by one juror as crossing the threshold of reasonable doubt, but by another juror as falling short. That is particularly true given that many, of not most, trials are not whodunits, but whatdonits, and whatdonits are often all about the defendant's mental state: Did he intend to kill, or merely to injure? Was he in fear for his life, or not? And, to make things even more complex, some elements of some crimes and some defenses have no existence outside the judgment of a jury. For example, a person can successfully assert compete self-defense only if the jury finds that a reasonable person in his situation would have felt in fear of his life. Similarly, in Oklahoma, a person is guilty of reckless homicide if he acts with reckless disregard of the safety of others, which "is the omission to do something which a reasonably careful person would do, or the lack of the usual and ordinary care and caution in the performance of an act usually and ordinarily exercised by a person under similar circumstances and conditions." Again, what a reasonable person would do is purely the creation of the judgment of the jury, so it is impossible to say whether a defendant is "guilty" or "innocent" of that crime until a jury has ruled.

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