Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Totally fascinating piece on the future of the UK.

Re: NO FUTURE!!
 

There is no future and England's dreaming.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...6ee_story.html

I know, because the admin told me, that the root cause of terrorism is poverty, but em was well to do. Maybe he wanted even more money? No word on his car color choice.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

At least they know when to admit defeat - http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0LS0WM20150224

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

fascinating

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

He was being sarcastic. He really thinks it's the guns that kill people.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Are we all doomed?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Not to make things too complex, but if A causes B, then the absence of B must indicate the absence of A. Everyone here took the LSAT. If the latter is false, the former can't be true.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Sometimes, you know, guns don't kill people, swords do.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I know I'm wonking. I don't fucking care.

I seem to recall this one "paralegal."

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Not on the PB, if memory serves.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I think you'll all find that I'm mainly correct when I speak for the board in declaring your wonking endearing.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Now I'm fixin' to blush....

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Easy, there. Don't tax the ticker.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Netanyahu:

Chicken Little or Wag the Dog?

Discuss.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

You know Wonk. He wants to tax everything.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Georgia was going to execute a woman last night, and didn't because of issues with the drugs. I just read this description of the crimes that got her on death row:

Prosecutors decided to seek the death penalty against her instead of him? WTF?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

One of our local prosecutors had a policy of not conditioning waiver of the death penalty as part of a plea bargain, because it’s way too coercive for the state to say, “Plead guilty or we’ll do our level best to kill you.” Of course, you can say that the DP is inherently coercive no matter what and you wouldn’t be wrong, but jurisdictions that offer pleas in death cases in exchange for favorable testimony and a guilty plea are really ramping up the immorality.

ETA: I had a friend who worked as a social worker slash investigator for death penalty appeals in Georgia, and what I learned from him is that some machinery of death is more in need of tinkering than others.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I suspect that his plea deal was not limited to "plead guilty or...", but also required that he give testimony against his co-defendant. In that context, the death penalty (I won't say "DP" here because some people get confused) is extremely coercive... but it only represents an extreme.

I still think that the defendant's counsel in the case asserting that leniency-for-testimony deals were unlawful as providing consideration for testimony had it right. They would have gutted the prosecutorial system, but they had it right.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Two potential reasons. First, he plead guilty and testified against her (unknown if she was offered a similar option). Two, based on your post, she urged the boyfriend to commit the murder, over an extended period of time, which suggests a type of planning and premeditation that I could see weighing heavily on the decision to seek the death penalty.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

We should send Temple Grandin to Georgia?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Amen. Plea bargaining in this manner is a gaping hole in the moral grounding of our criminal justice system, and prosecutors have every incentive to pull it as wide as possible at the edges.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Maybe not every incentive. Presumably many of them have some interest in using the massive discretion placed in them to do something approximating justice.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I don't think they give that much discretion to the ones who are only a couple months out of law school.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I have recently learned from the local prosecutor who is doggedly pursuing the leaders of a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest who had the temerity to bring a fairly normal weekend-size crowd to the rotunda of the Mall of America that prosecutors have an ethical duty to prosecute all "crimes" and no discretion at all.

She seems smart.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

The practical problems of not doing that, however, are enormous. You could say that under no circumstances can a prosecutor offer leniency for testimony against another defendant -- but how do you enforce that or draw lines? In any crime that involves more than one person, a confession or guilty plea will necessarily implicate others, co-perpetrators are often key witnesses, and you can't take the Fifth after a guilty plea.

Here's an illustration. Back when I worked at a defense firm, we had a client who was arrested at the airport with a suitcase full of heroin -- like 20 pounds or more. He was a mule, and this was the first time he'd done it (that was established by him having to get a passport to make the trip). He immediately rolled on the guy he was supposed to meet, who then immediately rolled on the higher-up guys (in time to board his flight to Chicago with the drugs). This ultimately led to top figures in a Nigerian drug ring being arrested and tried.

My guy had to wait until after the trial for his own sentencing, because the prosecutors didn't want him to be cross-examined on the ground of having gotten leniency on the sentence (the Federal guidelines were, and I think still are, based primarily on the quantity of drugs involved, rather than the significance of an individual's role -- so he was facing a potential decades'-long sentence). That wait ultimately lasted several years, as there were various intermediate appeals and so forth.

The sentencing recommendation ultimately had something to do with the fact that he had provided helpful testimony. I don't honestly remember if that was explicit, but certainly that was there all the time -- after all, the threat of a 40-year sentence if he didn't confess was part of why he rolled at the beginning. So, that it happened after he testified may have reduced the obvious quid pro quo nature, but that he testified consistent with the initial offer of proof statements was critical.

I don't see how you undo that situation, nor that you would necessarily want to. Certainly putting this kid in jail for 40 years would be an enormous waste (while awaiting sentencing he actually got his life back together). You could offer leniency solely for him pleading guilty, but that would be kabuki -- everyone knows you want his help to get the higher-ups, and that's the only way to get them.

Obviously the sentencing guidelines are a big part of the problem, and they are routinely leveraged in this way. But even without that, under any rational approach he'd have faced a lot of time -- 20 pounds of heroin -- and it's hard to say that the system didn't work correctly here.

Babies and bathwater. Don't know how it gets addressed.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Maybe she'll intentionally fuck up the grand jury proceeding so they don't indict.

Oh, wait -- did you say black people were involved? Never mind.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

The Antitrust Division is pretty darn keen on telling people how its leniency program, which offers amnesty from criminal prosecution for people who blow the whistle on conduct they don't already know about, among other things, is a major driver of cases for them.

But maybe it's different with someone's life on the line?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Don't forget to tax the pennies on my eyes.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I only had to think about for a couple minutes. Well, I figured it out right away but let my mind keep wandering.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I had dinner with about a third of the board. About half of them will tell you THEY thought I was smart.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I have suggested burying me with a couple of old roman coins on my eyes, so that, years from, some archaeologist will discover that the Romans were in America.

One hopes to cause trouble even in death.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

It wouldn't work. You'd have to go down a few dozen feet at least, through sandstone, most likely, then refill if flawlessly. Maybe before that had that magic rolling x-ray in the ground thing I saw on the tee-vee. But now. No sir.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Rarely do considerations beyond the W/L record and politics come into play.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I think Ferguson is fucking up the coherence of everyone’s positions on prosecutorial discretion.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Not mine. Nor is Staten Island having that effect. And I suspect the same is true of you. My position is that prosecutorial discretion is a good thing, and that it should not be applied in a manner that is corrupt, racist, or generally douchey.

If anything, those events added the nuance that, when police defendants are involved, the prosecutor should be a federal or other independent agency rather than the local DA who depends on the police, but that's not an incoherence. Just a recognition of where conflicts make it difficult to exercise discretion appropriately. I would still want the agency to have discretion.

What pisses me off so much in this context was that they faked it -- they didn't want to say "we aren't prosecuting," but in Ferguson especially (to my understanding) they intentionally fucked up the proceeding to lose it. I simply could not imagine a prosecutor putting a witness he knew was lying to testify in favor of a defendant in any normal grand jury proceeding.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Exactly. If you're deciding not to prosecute, fine, say that and be accountable.

But the charade that seems to have happened in Ferguson - and apparently happens routinely in cases with cop defendants - is not okay.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

We’ve been around this mulberry bush before, but I prefer it when local prosecutors bring charges when they believe they can get a conviction under the criminal statutes from a legally constituted jury, and don’t when they don’t. Asking the AG or U.S. Attorney to make that call instead is not an improvement. If you want police officers to be accountable for murder, you need a baseline amount of social capital — the same amount that would logically cause Bob McCullough to lose the next election in a landslide. If that doesn’t happen, then neither McCullough nor the grand jury were wrong in their judgments of what was given to them. I would not prefer that these judgments be upstreamed to whichever political actor is willing to vigorously pursue charges any more than I want my wars declared by a “Coalition of the Willing.”

But it doesn’t bother me that others see it differently. Prosecutors should lose elections when they do not reflect their constituents’ idea of justice, on that we seem to agree. I just don’t like the idea of a Plan B for unfiled criminal charges because I see no logical end to that.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I don't get this. At least in theory I think *everyone* wants police officers to be accountable for murder. In specific cases, this gets obscured by different inclinations about how to interpret the facts, but no one thinks police officers should be able to murder people freely. Government decisions are made by institutions that are designed to be more or less receptive and accountable to political pressure. When we think that the voters are likely to make bad decisions (or cynically, when someone in the government doesn't want to have to answer to voters, a la Robert Moses), we find a way to insulate whoever makes those decisions from the voters. If one thinks that voters aren't going to reward even-handed enforcement of the law when it comes to police officer's murders, it makes every sense to make that less politically risky.

Most people who get mistreated by police don't have a lot of social or political capital. Obviously. So to say that police officers should only be prosecuted when people with political capital want it to happen is to say that they mostly shouldn't be prosecuted. I would rather the decision to prosecute have more to do with the actual facts of the particular case, and less to do with whether it upsets the right kind of citizen.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

“Let’s have criminal prosecution decisions be made by somebody insulated from the unpopularity of their decisions” sounds like a dystopian vision to me. The election of judges we can talk about, but executive branch folks being insulated from the blowback of their decisions is frightening to me.

Of course, I happen to think U.S. Attorneys and 100% of the FBI are amoral assholes, so that might be coloring my thinking here.