I'm sorry to be a curmudgeon but I don't like this guy at all. He wasted valuable city resources on an experiment the outcome of which he should have predicted, being a criminal attorney in Roxbury.
Why were the police and the criminal justice officials apparently angry with him? Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people and to "prove" that getting arrested and jailed can be a violent and unfair experience, someone else was getting away with a purse snatching, or beating up an ex-girlfriend, or playing the knock-out game, or emptying a cash register.
It's not so much that he prevented one of these other cases from being pursued, but that he seems so oblivious of the effects of his actions. Thus, it seems perfectly natural and reasonable for them to say, "OK, you make twice the salary we make yet you wanna be a petty criminal? Poof, you're a petty criminal. Enjoy sleeping in the bed you made, and here's hoping you will be permanently cured of f##king with us in the future, a##hole."
The police are set upon from all sides. If they bend the rules, they are severely punished. If they don't bend the rules, and the rules don't always apply the way liberal suburban white folks might imagine they do on the street, then they get castigated for not "doing their job" i.e. catching the bad guys. At the end of the day, not catching the bad guys is the biggest sin in law enforcement, because it's the mission. If you fail the mission, you're facing demotion, punishment, deprivation of public support and sufficient budget, and the public will view you with contempt and disgust.
I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.
Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.
This is simultaneously the funniest and most tragic thing I've read in a long time. It's nearly unbelievable.
It reminds me a bit of Eddie Murphy's skit for SNL where he dresses up in white-face so he can experience society on the other side. This is almost as funny as that skit, no exaggeration. The tragedy is that this story is true.
The judge [...] ordered three years of probation, a $1000 fine, a $250 surcharge,
a $50 surcharge, 30 days of community service, and a special condition allowing police
and probation officers to enter and search my residence anytime without a warrant.
Wow. Perhaps I'm naive, but I was unware that a first-time, nonviolent misdemeanor could be grounds for removing your 4th amendment rights.
The beginning seems to be him talking about how difficult it was for him to get the police to think he was suspicious. The article was really interesting, and it seemed to be a point about racial/socio-economic profiling.
But once he got into the system, he was treated terribly. Probation, not being allowed to visit his family, for a misdemeanor.
--
Honestly, his conclusion sounds more like justice /is/ being applied evenly, it's just that it was harder for him to get the police's attention while he was wandering around in a suit and tie.
>Honestly, his conclusion sounds more like justice /is/ being applied evenly, it's just that it was harder for him to get the police's attention while he was wandering around in a suit and tie.
Not really. The idea is the system is flawed both ways:
At first, he was ignored because he was white, well groomed and such. (Racism).
In the second part, he was punished harshly not because suddenly the system made a u-turn and decided to "apply justice evenly", but because they didn't appreciate him making waves and questioning their practices.
No, it was not applied evenly. Most people in his situation would not have had their plea deal revoked at the last second. The state's attorney and the judge singled him out and piled on extra charges because he publicly embarrassed the justice system. His real "crime" was bringing a reporter along to witness him handing over his signed confession.
The instant he did that, he lost all hope of seeing how justice works for normal folks. How is anyone to know whether his ill treatment was due to his actual crime or due to the pseudocrime of creating bad publicity for the powers that be?
his conclusion sounds more like justice /is/ being applied evenly
He is one of their own who had gone out of his way to make them look foolish. Once that was clear he was treated more harshly than an equivalent first offender, not less. edit - and not equally.
Interesting aside about the author's accidental ability to elude two members of the NYPD counterterrorism division:
"Two Intelligence Unit detectives arrived and testily walked me outside to a waiting unmarked police car. Court papers show that they’d staked out my apartment to arrest me, and that I unwittingly kept eluding them. In one dramatic instance, two officers had tailed me as I walked down Eastern Parkway. I’d entered the subway station at the Brooklyn Museum, unaware that I was being followed. One of the officers had followed me through the turnstiles while another guarded the exit. The report states that the officers then inexplicably lost contact with me."
>>> This reporter accompanied Constantino on one of those trips, watching as the lawyer handed a guard his passport and driver's license. After calling City Hall staffers from inside the guard booth, the officer told Constantino to come back the next day.
>>> Instead, Constantino dramatically turned himself in at Manhattan Criminal Court that Friday, after the stop-and-frisk protesters were convicted of disorderly conduct.
>>> "Your Honor, I refuse to leave this court," Constantino told the judge. "I am choosing in peace and love not to leave this court."
------------------
The purpose of getting arrested was to protest the Stop and Frisk laws in NYC. It seems like Bobby Constantino is milking the story for all its worth though, and turning it into something else.
Not that it is a bad perspective or anything, but I think it is important to remember his original purpose for getting arrested.
Wow, I wish I could upvote this a dozen times. No surprise here, the guy painted the story in the most supportive light possible.
This is not news, this is a political piece. He's free to publish such a thing, but people need to be more discriminatory when giving so much weight to his "facts".
This is a great article, and I really appreciate this paragraph:
> But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs.
However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
In not going after the author, the police simply did the analysis they are required to do: is this guy a threat within the spirit of the law?
Now, obviously there are shortcomings in the heuristics the police are using here. It's not okay to conclude that someone is a threat because they're a black teenager in a hoodie and aren't a threat because they're a white professional in a suit. But I don't think we really want a mechanical justice system that follows the mere letter of the law instead of the spirit. We don't want police to ignore the distinction between someone tagging a public building to make a point, and gang members tagging a private building to "make a point."
> However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
Right -- and that's the problem. Because once you start down that road of criminalization of proxies for bad acts, you end up with proxies for proxies, like when the city I lived in criminalized -- no joke -- possession of spray paint, marker pens, and other things by teens on public right-of-ways. Because graffiti as a proxy for gang activity was still not easy enough of a prosecution lever, so they wanted to prosecute possession of items which could in theory be used for graffitti (which itself was a proxy for gang activitty).
And eventually you just criminalize everything as a proxy for being bad -- and then criminal justice is no longer really driven at all by law (since you've criminalized all kinds of things that you don't want, or expect, to enforced against everyone), its about arbitrary determinations by police and prosecutors -- guided by personal biases -- about who really "needs" to be punished, and you always know you'll have a convenient lever to prosecute once that determination is made.
And the whole concept of rule of law and proof beyond a reasonable doubt becomes meaningless, because you no longer are prosecuting for the real offense, but for distant meaningless proxies for harmful activities chosen specifically because people are certain to violate many of them in ways that are easy to prove whether or not they are doing any of the acts for which they are notionally proxies.
>However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
Millions of people do graffiti -- and very few of them have anything to do with "gang activity".
This "proxy" notion doesn't hold. Neither would such retribution to such "offences" be fair even if it was so.
In fact, sending people to jail for such trivial stuff is a more effective introduction to serious crime than their initial offences.
Not sure why this has been down-voted. I think you're obviously right about this case. We know for a fact that the author presents no great threat to society. So, in this case we can say that the officers that witnessed his conduct were correct in their assessment that he was no threat.
The problem is that the only people who seem to benefit from laws being enforced based on their spirit not their letter are white people. Minorities on the other hand don't seem to enjoy the same benefits.
And getting past the issue of faulty heuristics, the authors experience post-arrest was pretty ridiculous.
How is anyone or anything served by treating arrested people like that?
Keeping in mind that hypothetically you are innocent until proven guilty. You should not be punished until you've been convicted of something.
exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
How does that work exactly? Surely if you want to target violent gangs, you target the violence. Arresting them for painting seems to be about the most backward thing imaginable.
> However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
You are referring to the broken windows policy of policing, where minor crimes or infractions are pursued heavily under the notion that catching people that do this early will somehow curb harsher or violent crimes in the future. However, crime rates in NYC have been falling even before that policy came into existence in the 90s and that policy also has been applied in a way that ties in to racism.
The proxy angle is interesting, but I don't think that's main factor here. What's walking through someone's lawn a proxy for? The cops see a kid who looks like trouble and who's technically breaking the law and they arrest him, whether the specific crime is a proxy for anything or not.
And then there's the question of what "the spirit of the law" means. The courts wouldn't allow a blanket prohibition on "gang activity," even if that may be what legislature had in mind.
>>However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
I hear Banksy is the head of a premier criminal gang in the UK.
The author hypothesis is that criminal profiling is based on race. A simpler hypothesis is that such profiling is based on looks. Now, instead of wearing suits, if he wears baggy jeans that almost fall off his butt, puts on a few tatoos, nose rings to match, and starts doing seemingly illegal things. And if the cops still don't stop him, then maybe being white has something to do with it.
Do we really need to punish people with prison for non violent crimes?
We might as well call in the Criminal Punishment System, or the Government's Justice System, as it doesn't engender my views of justice, and nor should it for you.
A prison sentence isn't meant to be only punishment for the offender - it's also (theoretically) a deterrent to other potential criminals, a chance to rehabilitate the prisoner, and a method of preventing immediate re-offense.
We probably shouldn't send people to prison for first-time trivial crimes (which this might have been) but "trivial" and "non-violent" aren't the same.
I think there should be kind of mystery shoppers for justice system. They'd commit misdemeanors and get arrested so they can report how they were treated to improve operation of police and justice system and to weed out personnel that doesn't obey the law or neglect procedures.
> From Brownsville to downtown Manhattan, I would estimate that I passed more than 200 police officers, some from a distance, some close enough to touch.
Wow, is police that common in NY / the states? That's more police than I have seen in my entire life.
To provide more context: in 1990, London and NYC were of a similar size (~8 million) though NYC was and is quite a bit more dense. London had 184 homicides. NYC had 2,262. This past year London was down to 86, versus NYC's 414.
I was shocked when I visited NYC and saw hundreds of police in the subway carrying very large weapons in their hands, and wearing what looked like some kind of combat gear.
I've never seen an assault rifle in my life, but that's what I assume they were, and I still find it very bizarre that's an every day occurrence for tens of millions of Americans
For NYC, Sort of... maybe you'll pass the occasional cluster of ~10 cops on a subway platform, or other transportation hub.
But if you also count police in police cars, and the likelihood of undercover cops and unmarked cars, and pass a police station, well... that's a stretch, but you could pad your numbers with an amount of assumption.
Oh and by the way, to provide context, he was travelling from Brownsville, which, if by subway, might take an hour to reach.
A tag on City Hall, deliberately in front of the police.
I would expect a more severe sentence if I keyed a cop car vs some random car on the street. While I'm uninterested in discussing the severity of the sentence (I have no experience or knowledge to be able to judge), it stands to reason that if you directly attack the justice system you will not be treated kindly.
In a similar vein, I would highly recommend the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing[1] by Ted Conover.
The author was a journalist who wanted to do a story on the prison system in New York State. The Department of Correctional Services froze him out and refused to give him any sort of access or interviews. To get the story, he actually took a job as a correctional officer officer in Sing Sing prison and worked there for a year. His account of the entire experience is fascinating. I think the whole discussion around these sorts of issues could really benefit from more accounts like this that introduce some transparency into the criminal justice system.
We avoided inner city streets because they were dangerous, and we relied on the police to keep people from those places out of our neighborhoods. Whatever they got, we figured they deserved.
i find the last statement just as disturbing as the rest of the article. carrying this sentiment around plays a big part in the apathy we see all around us, towards most of the atrocities being committed these days.
Lots of places that have low violence, low social instability, high social homogeneity, high socioeconomic equality, etc, to begin with have correspondingly docile criminal justice systems.
Works bombs, mixing Works Toilet Cleanser and Aluminum foil in a 2L plastic bottle were popular in my high school. I can't imagine the charges the children would get today if they were brown. Lucky for them they lived in rural NC.
To me the whole problem comes down to one of discretion. The police officers in the beginning of the story had too much discretion. By not arresting someone defacing city hall, they trivialized a property crime. The author intimates this was because of his race or at least his appearance. Maybe so.
Next the judge exercises his discretion to come up with a non-standard sentence for the crime. Any non-instigator first offender would have gotten the slap on the wrist. A minority, we are lead to believe, probably much worse. Same crime but the discretion is wide in the sentence.
Later, the issue swings the other way. He has some real cause to go the rally in honor of the fallen student. Here, the discretion is taken away from the parole officer.
Discretion is power. In some instances, society grants too much discretion. In others, too little. We know this is the case but it still shocks us and we like to second guess.
This reminds me of the work I read about Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) doing around mental health and institutionalization in the late 19th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly#Asylum_expos.C3.A9). It's not a complimentary comparison for our criminal justice system.
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|12 years ago|reply
Why were the police and the criminal justice officials apparently angry with him? Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people and to "prove" that getting arrested and jailed can be a violent and unfair experience, someone else was getting away with a purse snatching, or beating up an ex-girlfriend, or playing the knock-out game, or emptying a cash register.
It's not so much that he prevented one of these other cases from being pursued, but that he seems so oblivious of the effects of his actions. Thus, it seems perfectly natural and reasonable for them to say, "OK, you make twice the salary we make yet you wanna be a petty criminal? Poof, you're a petty criminal. Enjoy sleeping in the bed you made, and here's hoping you will be permanently cured of f##king with us in the future, a##hole."
The police are set upon from all sides. If they bend the rules, they are severely punished. If they don't bend the rules, and the rules don't always apply the way liberal suburban white folks might imagine they do on the street, then they get castigated for not "doing their job" i.e. catching the bad guys. At the end of the day, not catching the bad guys is the biggest sin in law enforcement, because it's the mission. If you fail the mission, you're facing demotion, punishment, deprivation of public support and sufficient budget, and the public will view you with contempt and disgust.
I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.
Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.
Just my 2 cents.
[+] [-] nate_meurer|12 years ago|reply
It reminds me a bit of Eddie Murphy's skit for SNL where he dresses up in white-face so he can experience society on the other side. This is almost as funny as that skit, no exaggeration. The tragedy is that this story is true.
[+] [-] kaffeinecoma|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|12 years ago|reply
The beginning seems to be him talking about how difficult it was for him to get the police to think he was suspicious. The article was really interesting, and it seemed to be a point about racial/socio-economic profiling.
But once he got into the system, he was treated terribly. Probation, not being allowed to visit his family, for a misdemeanor.
--
Honestly, his conclusion sounds more like justice /is/ being applied evenly, it's just that it was harder for him to get the police's attention while he was wandering around in a suit and tie.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Not really. The idea is the system is flawed both ways:
At first, he was ignored because he was white, well groomed and such. (Racism).
In the second part, he was punished harshly not because suddenly the system made a u-turn and decided to "apply justice evenly", but because they didn't appreciate him making waves and questioning their practices.
[+] [-] logfromblammo|12 years ago|reply
The instant he did that, he lost all hope of seeing how justice works for normal folks. How is anyone to know whether his ill treatment was due to his actual crime or due to the pseudocrime of creating bad publicity for the powers that be?
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
He is one of their own who had gone out of his way to make them look foolish. Once that was clear he was treated more harshly than an equivalent first offender, not less. edit - and not equally.
[+] [-] mdturnerphys|12 years ago|reply
"Two Intelligence Unit detectives arrived and testily walked me outside to a waiting unmarked police car. Court papers show that they’d staked out my apartment to arrest me, and that I unwittingly kept eluding them. In one dramatic instance, two officers had tailed me as I walked down Eastern Parkway. I’d entered the subway station at the Brooklyn Museum, unaware that I was being followed. One of the officers had followed me through the turnstiles while another guarded the exit. The report states that the officers then inexplicably lost contact with me."
[+] [-] dragontamer|12 years ago|reply
Alternative take on what has happened here.
>>> This reporter accompanied Constantino on one of those trips, watching as the lawyer handed a guard his passport and driver's license. After calling City Hall staffers from inside the guard booth, the officer told Constantino to come back the next day.
>>> Instead, Constantino dramatically turned himself in at Manhattan Criminal Court that Friday, after the stop-and-frisk protesters were convicted of disorderly conduct.
>>> "Your Honor, I refuse to leave this court," Constantino told the judge. "I am choosing in peace and love not to leave this court."
------------------
The purpose of getting arrested was to protest the Stop and Frisk laws in NYC. It seems like Bobby Constantino is milking the story for all its worth though, and turning it into something else.
Not that it is a bad perspective or anything, but I think it is important to remember his original purpose for getting arrested.
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
This is not news, this is a political piece. He's free to publish such a thing, but people need to be more discriminatory when giving so much weight to his "facts".
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
> But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs.
However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.
In not going after the author, the police simply did the analysis they are required to do: is this guy a threat within the spirit of the law?
Now, obviously there are shortcomings in the heuristics the police are using here. It's not okay to conclude that someone is a threat because they're a black teenager in a hoodie and aren't a threat because they're a white professional in a suit. But I don't think we really want a mechanical justice system that follows the mere letter of the law instead of the spirit. We don't want police to ignore the distinction between someone tagging a public building to make a point, and gang members tagging a private building to "make a point."
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
Right -- and that's the problem. Because once you start down that road of criminalization of proxies for bad acts, you end up with proxies for proxies, like when the city I lived in criminalized -- no joke -- possession of spray paint, marker pens, and other things by teens on public right-of-ways. Because graffiti as a proxy for gang activity was still not easy enough of a prosecution lever, so they wanted to prosecute possession of items which could in theory be used for graffitti (which itself was a proxy for gang activitty).
And eventually you just criminalize everything as a proxy for being bad -- and then criminal justice is no longer really driven at all by law (since you've criminalized all kinds of things that you don't want, or expect, to enforced against everyone), its about arbitrary determinations by police and prosecutors -- guided by personal biases -- about who really "needs" to be punished, and you always know you'll have a convenient lever to prosecute once that determination is made.
And the whole concept of rule of law and proof beyond a reasonable doubt becomes meaningless, because you no longer are prosecuting for the real offense, but for distant meaningless proxies for harmful activities chosen specifically because people are certain to violate many of them in ways that are easy to prove whether or not they are doing any of the acts for which they are notionally proxies.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Millions of people do graffiti -- and very few of them have anything to do with "gang activity".
This "proxy" notion doesn't hold. Neither would such retribution to such "offences" be fair even if it was so.
In fact, sending people to jail for such trivial stuff is a more effective introduction to serious crime than their initial offences.
[+] [-] RokStdy|12 years ago|reply
The problem is that the only people who seem to benefit from laws being enforced based on their spirit not their letter are white people. Minorities on the other hand don't seem to enjoy the same benefits.
And getting past the issue of faulty heuristics, the authors experience post-arrest was pretty ridiculous.
How is anyone or anything served by treating arrested people like that?
Keeping in mind that hypothetically you are innocent until proven guilty. You should not be punished until you've been convicted of something.
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
How does that work exactly? Surely if you want to target violent gangs, you target the violence. Arresting them for painting seems to be about the most backward thing imaginable.
[+] [-] king_jester|12 years ago|reply
You are referring to the broken windows policy of policing, where minor crimes or infractions are pursued heavily under the notion that catching people that do this early will somehow curb harsher or violent crimes in the future. However, crime rates in NYC have been falling even before that policy came into existence in the 90s and that policy also has been applied in a way that ties in to racism.
[+] [-] nimble|12 years ago|reply
And then there's the question of what "the spirit of the law" means. The courts wouldn't allow a blanket prohibition on "gang activity," even if that may be what legislature had in mind.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|12 years ago|reply
I hear Banksy is the head of a premier criminal gang in the UK.
[+] [-] brodney|12 years ago|reply
I don't think we know that. Maybe it's true, but I can't rule out other possibilities.
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
But otherwise a tag is a tag.
[+] [-] vph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenizer|12 years ago|reply
We might as well call in the Criminal Punishment System, or the Government's Justice System, as it doesn't engender my views of justice, and nor should it for you.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
No, and when it comes to white people in the suburbs we largely don't do that (except serious financial crimes).
When it comes to the inner city and gang activity, that's not so clear cut. What are you going to do, issue monetary fines?
[+] [-] patmcc|12 years ago|reply
We probably shouldn't send people to prison for first-time trivial crimes (which this might have been) but "trivial" and "non-violent" aren't the same.
[+] [-] scotty79|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaaats|12 years ago|reply
Wow, is police that common in NY / the states? That's more police than I have seen in my entire life.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] startupfounder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|12 years ago|reply
I've never seen an assault rifle in my life, but that's what I assume they were, and I still find it very bizarre that's an every day occurrence for tens of millions of Americans
[+] [-] qwerty_asdf|12 years ago|reply
But if you also count police in police cars, and the likelihood of undercover cops and unmarked cars, and pass a police station, well... that's a stretch, but you could pad your numbers with an amount of assumption.
Oh and by the way, to provide context, he was travelling from Brownsville, which, if by subway, might take an hour to reach.
https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q...
But consider where he was headed: City Hall.
City Hall is an area teaming with cops. He might see 150 officers there alone, given their proximity to the courts.
[+] [-] swashboon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enkephalin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nealb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RogerL|12 years ago|reply
I would expect a more severe sentence if I keyed a cop car vs some random car on the street. While I'm uninterested in discussing the severity of the sentence (I have no experience or knowledge to be able to judge), it stands to reason that if you directly attack the justice system you will not be treated kindly.
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
And it's probation, not prison.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|12 years ago|reply
The author was a journalist who wanted to do a story on the prison system in New York State. The Department of Correctional Services froze him out and refused to give him any sort of access or interviews. To get the story, he actually took a job as a correctional officer officer in Sing Sing prison and worked there for a year. His account of the entire experience is fascinating. I think the whole discussion around these sorts of issues could really benefit from more accounts like this that introduce some transparency into the criminal justice system.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Newjack-Guarding-Sing-Ted-Conover/dp/0...
[+] [-] enkephalin|12 years ago|reply
i find the last statement just as disturbing as the rest of the article. carrying this sentiment around plays a big part in the apathy we see all around us, towards most of the atrocities being committed these days.
[+] [-] redblacktree|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eliezer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confusion|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfnslyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] base698|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tn13|12 years ago|reply
Are you serious ? And I make fun of Indian laws.
[+] [-] dmourati|12 years ago|reply
Next the judge exercises his discretion to come up with a non-standard sentence for the crime. Any non-instigator first offender would have gotten the slap on the wrist. A minority, we are lead to believe, probably much worse. Same crime but the discretion is wide in the sentence.
Later, the issue swings the other way. He has some real cause to go the rally in honor of the fallen student. Here, the discretion is taken away from the parole officer.
Discretion is power. In some instances, society grants too much discretion. In others, too little. We know this is the case but it still shocks us and we like to second guess.
[+] [-] tsaoutourpants|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3am|12 years ago|reply