Class injustice

A redditor comments:

I'm in Law School and this illustrates how bad the system is rigged to favor the wealthy, and literally nothing can be done to change it.

Just as an example: The Plea Bargain - which the homeless guy most likely took.

The plea bargain is supposed to keep the court free and moving along, but what it does to the poor who can't afford a lawyer, is forcing them to plea to charges they are likely not even guilty of simply because their lawyer doesn't have the time or money to fight them (PubDef)

The AIG guy has a lawyer who will bury the ADA in paperwork. The ADA knows this, but has to get this guy in jail, but the AIG guy lawyer is good, and knows that he can drag out a trial over the next 2-4 years... the ADA doesn't want to do this... he's got fucking murders to try, so he offers the AIG [just] 4 years for a far more heinous crime... and he takes it, because no matter how well his lawyer fought, 2-4 years later, he'd be doing 20... the state just doesn't have the resources to take rich people to jail for 20 years.

Another adds the sort of explanation I was more familiar with:

I think it is more of how the laws are written, the poor guys was probably charged a federal crime for stealing from a bank. That is usually a violent crime, and as such carries a minimum amount of prison time much higher than fraud that isn't a violent crime.

Things learned in jail

At reddit.

Art of the steal

Via the League, an amazing story on the exploits of an international art thief. The intro:

The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile above ground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.

Another meaningless shooting?

Here's James Fallows...

One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP.

Normally I'd be in agreement, as I was after the Virginia Tech massacre.

But for this Fort Hood case, the suspect, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is a devout Muslim and very religious. We don't know for certain that there's a connection between his faith and the shooting. But reports are he was troubled by the U.S. military's engagements and his coming deployment overseas against fellow Muslims. [Update: Witnesses say he shouted "Allahu akbar" during the rampage. He was to be deployed to Afghanistan.]

Given how many killings have been carried out in the name of Islam in recent history, well...



(Source: Pew, via Ordinary Scott)

Whether you think it's deserved or not, Islam has clearly earned a reputation for encouraging violence. This shooting will do its part to inflame the perception. No good shall come from this, but nor do I see how it will be empty or meaningless.

Against the death penalty

I don't have a clear position, just a vague wish for the threshhold of evidence to be extraordinarily high. Yet this conflicts with another wish: for the process to not take decades and not be more expensive than life in prison.

Lately the arguments against it have seemed more persuasive to me...

Crime rates

Compare any two of eight thousand U.S. cities here.

Detainee rights

An NROite is concerned about prison rape, which is interesting coming from the Right. Presumably his concern extends to all domestic terrorists who are imprisoned. But is he as concerned about the U.S.'s high-profile torture and abuse of foreign prisoners--terrorists and other combatants? Or is he another one of those who believes that denizen criminals don't have rights so long as there is intelligence to be gleaned?

Drinking and entering

An hilariously botched burglary.

Horrific serial killers who are free right now

It turns out Ecuador has no death penalty, so Pedro, who has served the maximum sentence of 20 years, was secretly released in Colombia in 1999. So he served about three weeks for each person he killed. That seems fair.

!! More at CRACKED.