- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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I wonder why
When this happens, it means the laws that enable these people are no longer acceptable to the people. That’s a dangerous place to be.
It’s only dangerous if you’re a mass murderer. Don’t want to get gunned down on the sidewalk and have people celebrate your death? Don’t be a mass murderer.
So, not guilty?
If it works for qualified immunity it works for Luigi.
Was Luigi ever trained that he was specifically not allowed to shoot a CEO in the back? If not, qualified immunity
Every time I hear the words “qualified immunity” I think about this:
I was first trained in acute psychiatry years ago to never ever in forever restrain people face down. Me and my highschool diploma were sitting in a side room in a state hospital for I shit you not a two. week. crash course in inpatient psychiatry after which they dumped me out on the unit to work with criminally insane men for two years. And in my four hour restraint class they hammered into us to never restrain people face down.
I remember seeing two men fighting and I just figured I’d grab one and somebody else would grab the other and we’d pull and I remember looking over my guy’s shoulder and seeing the other guy gnawing on his face and then there’s a hole in my memory (likely about 60 seconds; it happens with adrenaline) and the next thing I remember I guess we had all fallen and I was laying on top of the guy I grabbed and I shit you not the very first thought in my head was “oh shit, he’s face down I need to get off him” and I slid to the side and just kept a hand hovering over his shoulders in case he tried to pop up and… idk, bite my face off or something. I didn’t even know who it was until he looked back at me. But they had hammered that one thing into my head that hard that I didn’t know what the fuck this guy was gonna do and the first thought in my head was still to get off him.
So when I saw all these news stories and all this footage of the cops holding people facedown until they asphyxiate I started asking around. I don’t work with cops in the sense that they’re my coworkers but I do run into them a lot dropping off involuntary holds. So I started asking about how they’re trained to restrain people and if they have any training on how to protect people’s airways. And it turns out they do, actually. Everybody I asked pretty universally told me they’re trained to get the cuffs on then immediately turn them on their side. It’s not super advanced, in fact it’s super basic. Basic in the sense that you could’ve taught it to a highschool graduate in under two weeks.
So it’s funny you mention not being trained for something because actually yeah they are trained to not do things that kill people and yet-
Bye bye right to a jury trial
careful, lw mods don’t like that
It was clarified that talking about Jury Nullification in the context of future crime is a no-no because it’s a no-no in the country lw is based. But in the context of already committed crime it’s fine.
So “Go ahead and commit the crime and we’ll do jury nullification!” Is bad, but “Crime was committed, but we sympathize with the motive/person/whatever so let’s do jury nullification !” Is OK
No, it was not clarified, they vaguely mentioned they were not based in “free speech” US but it’s pretty clear that it was their own policy since they changed it (they do say they were asking mods to ban all mentions of jury nullification).
If their opinion was actually based on law, they would not change their policy. They would probably also have added it to their TOS before hand.
I’m not sure what kind of professional legal input they can afford. It’s big by fedi standards but the Patreon raises about 10k/year. Not exactly lawyer money.
I suspect that it’s a lot of guess work and maybe some help with drafting and filing here and there. I’ve never asked.
The whole thing sounded to me like a smokescreen for, “We fucked up, and we shouldn’t have banned talking about it in the first place. We talked about it and banning it was a bad decision that we briefly doubled down on.”
Credit to them for reversing themselves, I guess. That said, coming up with contrived explanations for why you never made a mistake in the first place, because you’re always right, is one of the telltale signs of being full of shit. You can just tell people the main explanation. They’ll actually respect you more, not less, if you don’t engineer your reasonings to maintain this Wizard of Oz veneer.
The whole thing sounded to me like a smokescreen for, “We fucked up, and we shouldn’t have banned talking about it in the first place. We talked about it and banning it was a bad decision that we briefly doubled down on.”
I mean… Yeah.
You’re not allowed to talk about smokescreens before the act of fucking up.
If discussing commiting a future crime on your hardware it can be seized as evidence I imagine. If people discuss an already committed crime I suppose they know the discussion isnt evidence as the person believed to be the angel is already in custody.
Almost like censorship is almost always bad! Who’d have thunk it!?
The world admins have a long history of this kind of shit.
A great example was when they updated the TOS to remove specific call outs for (if memory serves) transphobic hate being against TOS and instead replacing it with very generic text. The response being that they didn’t need that text because the generic call outs covered it.
Nobody with two brain cells was fooled and everyone knew it was about getting ahead of angry chuds who might be mean to the admins. But enough people were mysteriously banned for horrible shit (with their whole post histories being wiped) and everyone else who cared left for different instances.
I’m not going to fault admins for not wanting to get calls from the FBI. I will fault them for abandoning our friends because they don’t want angry emails. But, either way, the constant need to build up weird narratives and assume everyone else is really THAT stupid is just tiresome.
Nobody with two brain cells was fooled
That’s the thing. For some reason, people will come up with this logic that’s designed to fool a 4-year-old, and then just assume that all the adults who are reading it will be totally taken in by it. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t want to throw some individual who ran out in front with a bad decision under the bus. Or, maybe it’s just painful to say out loud, “I think we were wrong now that we’ve had a chance to look at it more.”
I’m not going to fault admins for not wanting to get calls from the FBI.
Yeah, but that’s why you need legal advice. They’re sort of pretending that they’re qualified to make determinations about what is and isn’t a legal problem, which isn’t always a good idea to do all on your own once you’ve grown beyond a certain size. Pretending that you’re making these decisions from a position of knowledge and authority just compounds the problem.
The reality is that legality doesn’t matter a lot unless you have enough lawyers on staff to fight various government agencies. That is WHY most creators and communities use established services like youtube or reddit because it offloads that hassle to a company that actually has the lawyers to figure out what is and isn’t a risk.
Whereas a lemmy instance is a few people who have no idea what they are doing.
The best metaphor I have heard to explain this is: A group of weirdos start singing prayers while you are boarding a plane. The flight attendant tells you that you need to sing along or you will be kicked off the plane. You say that is nonsense. They say they are going to have you escorted off the plane if you continue to be disruptive.
You KNOW you are within your legal rights to not do that bullshit. But you don’t have a lawyer with you. Best case scenario? You get off the plane, you get an apology handy from a CSR, and you get to get on a different plane in 12 hours. But now you have missed your connecting flight and 1-2 days of your trip. So you are wasting personal days or pissing off your boss and missing an important client meeting and blah blah blah. And… the browner you are, the less likely you are to see that CSR after the cops escort you off a plane.
So… you just sing along because it is easier. Even if you know it is bullshit, you know it is “close enough” that your life will become a living hell.
Which is why I have no issue with a site policy of “We don’t want that smoke. Please don’t make jokes about the guy who killed a piece of shit CEO until we know we won’t get investigated by law enforcement”. But I DO have issues with making up weird narratives to justify it.
Prayer day in kenshi
or when they banned piracy at db0 which happened before defederating exploding heads, a nazi instance
Lemmy world should have lost all credibility after they hard commited to the bias bot against the majorities wishes, but even on the fediverse people just don’t want to move instances. Im starting to think centralization is far from the only issue with social medias today, probably still the biggest, but by a lot smaller margins than I used to think.
That is absolutely not what happened, but play your own drum I guess.
Lemmy world should have lost all credibility after they hard commited to the bias bot against the majorities wishes
Hard agree!
but even on the fediverse people just don’t want to move instances
Soft disagree. I took a long time to do it, but I moved from .world because of the whole “being the r/politics of Lemmy” thing.
You won’t find a more wretched hive of scum and Neoliberalism than the .world admins and mods anywhere outside of the aforementioned subreddit and the DNC itself.
Lost it for me when they didn’t say no to threads
Honestly not too happy about that one either.
I think they did, to be honest. I’ve abandoned most of the LW communities and I think I’m not the only one. There’s enough inertia in the system that I’m sure they will still be a big instance, but the reputational impacts of things like that are often permanent.
To me, the big thing about the bias bot wasn’t the enforcing of the bias bot, it was the lying. If they had come out and said, “The bot is useful for moderation, we’re keeping it even if people don’t like it,” I don’t think it would have been any kind of big deal. What causes people to have this really unhappy reaction is telling them, “People love the bot! The minority who doesn’t like it is just mounting a pressure campaign” or “You just don’t understand the issues involved like we do” or “We’re fighting misinformation!” or “The admins are making me keep the bot” “No we’re not, the moderators want to keep the bot” or deflecting into this conversation about the cost of accessing the MBFC API or whatever other totally weird irrelevant issue.
The !news@lemmy.world moderators were the ones who asked their users, got the answer that people didn’t like the bot, and took it away. It doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s why I’m still subscribed to !news@lemmy.world when I’ve abandoned the other LW news communities, and I’ve noticed that my Lemmy browsing experience has been remarkably free of weird bad-moderation bullshit ever since. There are no friendly conversations between jordanlund and UniversalMonk. I haven’t had articles I’ve posted get removed for totally frivolous reasons. There are no bots that every user hates and every moderator insists has to be there. It’s just news! Good stuff.
Tinfoil hat time, I think MBFC bot was the smokescreen for a GroundNews sponsor/ad.
The bot started up at the same time GN started a massive ad campaign sponsoring a lot of YouTubers (~7 months ago). MBFC was the bias checker and GN was the hot new “good” source included in every single post. I bet Rooki or someone was getting checks.
What country is lemmy.world based in? Because having a law about talking about jury nullification in the context of a future crime sound so incredibly stupid and specific that I need to know the precedent that led to it.
Lw mods aren’t nearly as awful as Reddit ones - most removed comments are either personal attacks or open calls for violence. Even calls for civil disobedience are usually allowed unless they’re clearly direct threats.
Even calls for civil disobedience are usually allowed
how merciful of them
I got a comment removed because they said insinuating Isralies shouldn’t be allowed somewhere was racism. It was fine to do that with Russians during their active war, but Isreal is special and its racist when you hold them accountable the way we hold Russia accountable. And thats when I was specifically refering to the Israeli football hooligans who literally trashed the country they were guests in. So I dont buy that they aren’t as bad. They just don’t control the whole fediverse.
i guess ruud thinks he owns lemmy because he won timing lottery and snatched a lot of post-reddit userbase
I don’t think it’s Ruud, I think it’s a little clique of the Lemmy people who stepped forward to take it on day-to-day. Ruud doesn’t seem active on Lemmy.
Weird, jury nullification is super legal and super cool
It’s super legal, but it’s not always super cool:
American Dad basically did an episode on this where Roger is on trial and is so personable that Stan is the only reason jury nullification didn’t happen.
Manhattan has the world’s largest concentration of FIRE (Financial, Insurance, Real Estate) employees
I’ve never seen that acronym used for that. It’s usually Financially Independent, Retired Early
It can be used for either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE
It’s just unclear why this other one would ever be needed…
Just because people work for these places doesnt mean they dont also feel the system effects of them. Most people just need a paycheck to support thenselves
Ever been to Manhattan?
When a person or entity is responsible for the untimely deaths of literally thousands of American citizens, the question should be whether or not this was a justifiable homicide. Is a police officer put on trial for shooting and killing a gunman mowing down children at a school? Why is this case different?
If they went with justifiable homicide they could have gotten an easy conviction. Instead they went with terrorism and Murder 1, both of which there is too much sympathy for.
justifiable homicide
Is that a thing in court??
No, but they sometimes undercharge as manslaughter, negligent discharge of a firearm, or assault.
I’m not disagreeing with your sentiment but legally speaking that’s a completely different situation. The main difference is the immediacy and nature of anticipated harm.
Again, not challenging your take on it, just highlighting that the law doesn’t see it that way.
It was immediate; that CEO was killing people every day.
Again, I appreciate the sentiment but that’s not really what ‘immediate’ means in this context.
If I was a juror I wouldn’t buy that for a second. That CEO was actively killing people.
Again, not disagreeing with the sentiment, but legally he WASN’T actively killing people. Nobody was in any immediate danger. That means physically and temporally immediate. That means the defences and laws that are relevant are entirely different. That’s just how it works and how the law is set up.
Sure but the law includes interpretation by jurors too, and in reality he was an immediate threat. I’m not going to put a man in prison because of a definition that’s clearly wrong.
The jurors have discretion, yes, but that doesn’t kick in at the jury vetting stage. Again, I get the sentiment, but that’s just the way it works.
is a police officer put on trial for killing a baby?
It would ultimately depend on the context but sure. “Innocent” Germans were put on trial post WW2 for enabling the system that resulted in the murder of millions of people, how is this any different?
I think you’re misinterpreting the comment. Police officers in the US are regularly not put on trial even for egregious killings. They’re getting trial more often after the BLM protests, but they’re still usually getting found not guilty because we’re inundated with copaganda.
True. Worth noting as bad as police are most countries outside of America actually have civilian oversight of the police. You can argue the effectiveness of it but it’s lightyears ahead of the lack of training and corruption that America faces.
It’s going to be really difficult to convict him, I’m happy to say. Dude’s a hero.
Part of what made Joan of Arc a name that has lasted 1000 years is not that she was a hero, it’s that she was killed for being a hero.
Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.
He’s already thrown away his life.
Honestly it would be demoralizing for him to get sentenced to death (or life) in this information environment. People would just move on, back to the status quo. But if he gets off, its a vindication of what he did.
Of course. He’s clearly not guilty. Thompson willingly surrendered his humanity a long time ago, and you can only commit murder against a human. What Luigi did was more like deconstructing a cardboard box or other inanimate object.
He did however leave those shell casings on the sidewalk, and that’s just not cool. They should give him a ticket for littering and send him on his way.
Something something pile of garbage in a suit.
To be fair, he may also have run a couple of reds when he cycled away.
Innocent until proven guilty
Based on the recent Emerson poll (https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-poll-young-voters-diverge-from-majority-on-crypto-tiktok-and-ceo-assassination/), they’ll find a jury just fine. They will have to weed out strong sympathizers, but it’s not going to halt the process or anything. While it’s uncommon for murderer cases to get this level of sympathy, prosecutors of high profile cases with a sympathetic defendent have delt with this before.
Statistically speaking: if 17% of people say that the murder of the healthcare CEO is even somewhat acceptable, if you were to pick 12 people randomly from that group (so not accounting for any other potential filters from a jury questionnaire), you’d only have a 10% chance that all 12 answering it is unacceptable.
That’s not how jury selection works, though. They find people, filter some out, bring in the alternates, filter them out, and repeat until they have 12 they’re happy with.
They will try, but people will answer that murder is not acceptable and then find not guilty later anyway. And they can potentially do that truthfully. If they find small issues with the evidence, they can go with not guilty.
There’s limits on selecting people. You can only say not that one so many times.
This is correct. I’ve been in two juries that went to trial, and each side got a handful of denials that they could use, each. Like 5 for my cases, or something in that ballpark. I think that the number is at the discretion of the judge, so because there is so much sympathy for the defendant, the judge may allow a much larger number of denials.
Disclaimer: I have no legal training and my trials were not in New York, so my comments could be inaccurate.
Edit: according to this article, this is the number of peremptory challenges (i.e., objecting to a juror during selection for no reason) each side gets - https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/criminal-procedure-law/cpl-sect-270-25/
- Each party must be allowed the following number of peremptory challenges:
(a) Twenty for the regular jurors if the highest crime charged is a class A felony, and two for each alternate juror to be selected.
This is in addition to presumably an infinite number of juror dismissals for cause, like, for example, if the juror tells that the judge that they would not be able to follow the law.
I’m pretty sure they have to give each side the same number though, right?
Yes. Also, see my edit. I found the law for New York. For a felony of this type, each side gets 20 for regular jurors plus 2 for each alternate juror.
I’m not sure how much I trust that poll.
Data was collected by contacting cell phones via MMS-to-web text, landlines via interactive voice response and email (phone list provided by Aristotle, email lists provided by Commonwealth Opinions), and an online panel of voters pre-matched to the L2 voter file provided by Rep Data. The survey was offered in English.
If someone just called or texted me out of the blue for a survey like that, I would be tempted to lie about my opinion of Luigi out of fear. Honestly I find it shocking so many people ‘confessed’ to that… it has to be an underestimate.
This is actually quite an interesting case study for jury selection / vetting. The motive clearly relates to political views about the healthcare industry that affect every single American other than extreme outliers. It’s therefore pretty impossible to select a jury that can be entirely neutral. Because no matter how politically unengaged they are, it still affects them.
Arguably, the most neutral person would be someone who hasn’t interacted much with healthcare as a citizen. But healthcare issues in America start straight away from birth, because the process of birth itself is a healthcare matter for both mother and child, and there’s no opting out from being born. That’s only not the case if you’re foreign born or from a very wealthy background, but you can’t have a jury comprised of just them because that’s not representative of the American public.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this drags on for a long time before any trial even starts. In fact, I’d be suspicious if it doesn’t.
Just import a jury
If you think of other issues, it’s not as strange as you would think. If someone is accused of speeding and goes to trial, or reckless manslaughter for a traffic accident, let’s say, the jury will be filled with drivers, most of whom break traffic laws on a daily basis.
As a result of this obvious impasse, the standard is not whether people have exposure to the general issue or the shitty system at hand. You can be sure the prosecution will pretend it is, and the defense will point out it’s not.
I’d argue that’s not really equivalent, because being a driver or not doesn’t really have any implications towards motive in that case, or sympathy towards it from a jury. It’s also not political - or at least, most people don’t see it that way.
My point is, this is a race that almost every American has a horse in. So how do you draw a satisfactorily unbiased jury? I don’t have the answer, but I can see why it’s evidently become a sticking point.
Everyone has a horse in the race, just like with breaking traffic laws. If I’m a juror on a speeding case, and I speed too, of course I’m likely to be sympathetic to the defendant. Similarly, what about cops investigating or testifying about DV when over 1/3 of them beat their families? There’s bias, but the “justice” system still operates.
Or we could look at the Google trials. Are we seriously thinking that no potential jurors would be able to have ever used use their services or products? … That all just doesn’t work. It’s nearly impossible to avoid Google. And your standard is even lower – you’re talking about exclusion based on use of competing companies in the field along with the company itself. In other words, I can’t be a juror on a Google case if I’ve used Google or Apple or Microsoft products…? That’s the parallel to the health insurance industry.
Of course that standard couldn’t possibly make sense, and legal scholars knew this centuries ago. So it’s not how the law works, and it never was.
Many young, healthy people haven’t had to deal with it much, but this is also the demographic highly engaged on social media and probably very sympathetic to him.
It’d be pretty rough if they couldn’t possibly find a jury that would convict, think of how the CEOs of the nation would feel if they realized fully just how many people are entirely okay with eating them.
It doesn’t have to even be full jury nullification, a single juror can cause a mistrial by refusing to join in an otherwise unanimous verdict. Imagine this going through 2-3 juries that cannot come to a consensus?
I think Josh Johnson has a killer bit on this, but in it, he was talking about how the news corporations and CEOs and people were horrified to learn that the people are seeing them for how they see us.
We don’t see them as human, just like how they don’t see us as human.
I see the ultra-rich as human. The worst kind of human. They had hearts once, but those have long since rotted to nothing. It’s possible for them to figure shit out, but almost none of them will.
But the problem is, the mainstream and government are calling him a “terrorist” and “terrorists” don’t have rights; under the USAPATRIOT Act, they are “enemy combatants” and the only thing they get is extrajudicial imprisonment and daily
torture"simulated drowning".The sympathy is so thick I can feel it in the air
I thought they put the terrorist label on him precisely to avoid requiring a jury.
I don’t think that’s why they charged him with terrorism. The reason that some terrorism trials are (were?) done in secret in the past I believe is because most of the evidence that would have been presented would have been classified. I don’t think there is any classified evidence related to Luigi’s trial.
I think it’s more likely that they added the terrorism charge just as an enhancement to potentially add time to his sentence or more opportunities for him to be convicted of something. However, someone posted an insightful comment here a couple of days ago, pointing out that in order to prove terrorism they will have to discuss his motivations at length, which will only make him more sympathetic to most jurors.
It also lets the defense examine “would a killer target the United healthcare CEO specifically because they were personally evil vs a statement against the system?” That’s also helpful for a defense angling for a nullification mistrial.
Technical question: isn’t nullification an innocent verdict, not a mistrial?
It is, but you need the whole jury to vote that way which i find particularly unlikely. One person voting for nullification, which is more likely, is a mistrial.
I am not a lawyer.
Nullification is when the jury hands in a verdict of “not guilty”, even though there’s a preponderance of evidence that the law was indeed broken by the defendant. They basically ignore the Judge’s instructions to weigh the evidence and do something else instead. This would trigger an appeal by the prosecution on the basis of mistrial, since the optics on that situation look like something procedural is way off.
I’m not well-versed in these matters, but I am intrigued by what would happen if this went to appeal. If it went all the way to SCOTUS, or even some appeals court with a crooked judge, that might not go so well for the defendant.
You don’t get to appeal a not guilty verdict right or wrong its done forever. A mistrial only happens before a verdict is reached so either side could be looking for justification for one if they believe that they stand to lose the case but the judge has to find there is cause.
Well that certainly gives nullification teeth. Interesting. Thank you.
I haven’t seen anything about this, your saying a terrorism charge doesn’t have a jury at all?
