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Notes -
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
Incidentally, there is a defense attorney on YouTube who goes by natalielawyerchick who takes an interest in sovereign citizen cases and will react to videos of SovCits arguing in court, and explaining what they're arguing vs. what the law actually is. It's a fascinating little rabbit hole to go down.
There's also a fun bingo game to be played while watching said videos (or uploaded body-cam footage)
People latch on to magic incantations because sometimes you have to be saying things "sufficiently clearly that a reasonable police officer in the circumstances would understand" dawg.
Yassine Meshkout even wrote a post about how he saved a client with just eleven words.
That was one of the saddest AAQCs I've read. I thought what the judge was doing was pretty cool and reasonably obvious...and the rest of the post was all about how thoroughly he missed the point--all a mystery! Who could predict!
I am very confused by your point, even after going back to read the essay to see if I didn't remember it clearly. You say it was clear what the judge was doing - what, exactly, was she doing? It isn't clear to me that she had any sort of plan or agenda, she simply changed her mind when asked. And in that light, the rest of the essay makes perfect sense. You say he was missing the point, but as far as I can see there was no point to be missed. All he could do was speculate why she changed her mind so suddenly.
Yes, that was largely Meshkout's take as well. I believe it's a failure of theory of mind to chalk it up to randomness or whimsy, and it was obvious to me what her likely thinking entailed.
Meshkout's eleven words was an unusual request--as Dean says above, signaling through exceptional effort. The judge decided to take it seriously, as a test of Meshkout's credibility and judgment--that it wasn't a last-ditch effort at empty posturing on behalf of a client that didn't deserve it. The correct lesson to draw from the situation is to use that request--or similar--in cases where you are sincerely trying to prevent a miscarriage of justice and not use it in other cases. It's an opportunity to preserve the integrity of the signal.
In light of this, the essay's response of "it was so random, what can it mean" was intensely frustrating.
I don't think you're completely off-base, but seems like Meshkout was taken aback because for that moment the assembly-line nature of the process stopped and some attention was given to one case in particular and he was actually able to change the state of this machine, where before he was a semi-helpless cog that simply chugged along with it.
The power to convince a judge to drop a sentence from 180 days to 2 shouldn't be based on the vehemence of the attorney making the request.
The legal system isn't supposed to consider the, I guess, 'honor' or reputation of the defense attorney when rendering judgment. So while perhaps the Judge was indeed signalling her willingness to extend leniency in cases where the attorney credibly believes it to be justified, it is still weird that simply asking such a question can completely reverse an outcome like that.
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That is a really bizarre interpretation to me. You're basically saying that the judge went "you asked enough times so I'll let you win". But that is an idiotic way to behave. I don't really think that a person qualified enough to be a judge would act in such a bizarre and irrational way.
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I don't think the point was that it was literally whimsy, but that - within the broader process of the justice system - most public defenders in that position wouldn't say that, most judges in that situation wouldn't lower the jail time from six months to ten days, and, given that, most defendants for similar crimes do not get only ten days, despite likely comparable situations. Which is stark and surprising. The essay's response, as it highlights, is about the impact it had on the defendant, not that the judge was dumb and random. Maybe they should've gotten six months in jail, or that it doesn't really matter, but that sounds rather reactionary, and if they shouldn't have, that's a massive impact from a very small plea that just occurred to him, which is a stark contrast to his usual role in facilitating expected outcomes, and suggests that said 'expected outcomes' might not be ideal!
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How so?
See Dean's comment below.
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The real quality comment in the reddit thread of the same title was the patient response of someone who calmly, softly talked through the principle of signalling through exceptional effort.
As for Meshkout, it was rather typical, given his established fixations for returning to certain topics every few months with the same refrain regardless of prior engagement, which is typical for people with certain communication fixations that are more internally-wired than externally connected.
Unrelated comment: I don't think it makes sense to describe a "communication fixation" as "internally wired" when, well, the topic of said communication is always 'the external world' and the mechanisms underlying all communications and ideas are, you'd think, biologically, internal. It seems to be trying to convey something like 'he has a neurosis where he says X over and over and the neurosis is internal' - but doing the correct thing where you say Y instead would ... also be an internal property, so the internal vs external dichotomy doesn't seem to help.
I have no idea what that has to do with meskhout though.
That he keeps returning to the same topic to the same refrain, regardless of prior engagement.
It clearly is an internal thing of his.
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When I read the original post, I wanted so badly to say something constructive, but was annoyed enough at the situation that I didn't. I read the patient response you mention later, and was so impressed by how well that poster gently pointed out what I couldn't express. I'm glad someone else read and appreciated it.
Went back and looked--the response was by /u/hh26. Very well expressed.
Found the comment here - it's a good post, but I don't see how it's antagonistic at all to the original post
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