Six Baltimore Police Officers Charged In Death Of Freddie Gray
Big news out of Baltimore and, perhaps, the beginning of justice for Freddie Gray.
In a move that surprised some given previous warnings that the investigation may take time, the State’s Attorney for Baltimore announced today that Freddie Gray’s death had been determined to be a homicide and that charges, ranging from murder and manslaughter to assault, had been filed against the six Baltimore Police Officers involved in the incident that led to his death:
BALTIMORE — Prosecutors here, in an unexpected announcement, said Friday they had probable cause to file homicide, manslaughter and misconduct charges against police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody.
In a news conference, the state’s attorney in Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, described repeated mistreatment of Mr. Gray. Time and again, she said, officers abused him, arresting him without grounds and violating police procedure by putting him in handcuffs and leg restraints in the van without putting a seatbelt on him.
Ms. Mosby also said the officers had repeatedly failed to seek medical attention for Mr. Gray after he was injured. By the time he was removed from the van, she said, “Mr. Gray was no longer breathing at all.”
“We have probable cause to file criminal charges,” Ms. Mosby said.
The death, Ms. Mosby said, is believed to be the result of an injury Mr. Gray sustained while riding in the van without a seatbelt.
Ms. Mosby also said that the knife the police say Mr. Gray was carrying had not been a legitimate basis for his arrest. “The knife was not a switchblade, and it is lawful,” she said. She said the officers had “failed to establish probable cause for an arrest.”
(…)
One officer, Caesar R. Goodson Jr. was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office. Lt. Brian W. Rice was charged with manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment. Officer William G. Porter and Sgt. Alicia D. White were each charged with manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office. Officers Edward M. Nero and Garrett E. Miller were charged with assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
More from The Baltimore Sun:
The six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray – who died last month after being injured in police custody – have been charged criminally, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosbyannounced Friday.
Mosby’s announcement on the steps of the War Memorial Building was greeted with cheers and applause. Mosby said she told Gray’s family that “no one is above the law.”
Word traveled quickly of the charges against the officers. In West Baltimore, cars honked their horns. A man hanging out of a truck window pumped his fists and yelled; “Justice! Justice! Justice!”
At the corner where Gray was arrested, 53-year-old Willie Rooks held his hands up in peace signs and screamed, “Justice!”
Meecah Tucker, 23, wearing a T-shirt that read, “I Bleed Baltimore,” said: “If it was one of us doing that against a police officer, it would be first-degree murder.”
In Gilmor Homes, the neighborhood where Gray lived, things were quiet Friday, with a police helicopter circling overhead. At the intersection of North Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, the focus of rioting Monday and demonstrations all week, traffic moved through with many motorists honking their horns.
Warrants were issued for the arrest of all six officers. It wasn’t immediately clear where the officers were Friday morning.
Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 45, who was the driver of a police van that carried Gray through the streets of Baltimore, was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, second-degree assault, two vehicular manslaughter charges and misconduct in office.
Officer William Porter, 25, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Lt. Brian Rice, 41, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Sgt. Alicia White, 30, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Officer Edward Nero, 29, was charged with second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Officer Garrett Miller, 26, was charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
If convicted of all charges, Goodson would face up to 63 years in prison. Rice would face up to 30 years and Porter, Nero, Miller and White would face up to 20 years.
Mosby’s recounting of the events as revealed by the investigation conducted by both her office and the Police Department is quite chilling:
In a detailed recounting of the events, Mosby described Gray being repeatedly denied medical attention by police officers, even as he asked for medical help and later was unresponsive in a police van.
Gray suffered a “severe and critical neck injury” as a result of being handcuffed, shackled and being unrestrained in the van.
Mosby said an investigation found officers placed Gray in wrist and ankle restraints and left him stomach-down on the floor of a police van as they drove around West Baltimore. Despite his repeated requests for medical attention, they did not provide it and continued to drive without securing him in the van, she said.
Officers on at least five occasions placed Gray in the van or checked on him and failed to secure him, she said. By the time they reached the Western District police station, he was not breathing and was in cardiac arrest, she said.
Mosby said her office did a “comprehensive, thorough and independent” investigation that began April 13, the day after Gray was injured.\
“My team worked around the clock, 12- and 14-hour days,” she said.
Mosby worked quickly in filing charges. Baltimore Police handed over their investigation to her office Thursday, one day earlier than they had promised.
More details of the charges will be contained in the indictments ultimately filed in this case and, of course, as these cases proceed forward through the legal system. As with every other person charged with a crime, it is important to note that these officers are entitled to a presumption of innocence until they are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If the charges that Mosby detailed this morning are accurate, though, it would seem to be clear that they did not grant Freddie Gray the same presumption, nor did they even act with the kind of sympathy and respect you would expect from an officer of the law when dealing with someone who is injured and in pain. Instead, it would appear from the facts alleged that they took Gray on what is known colloquially as a “rough ride,” in which a suspect is restrained and placed in the back of a police van unrestrained while the officers take the van on a high speed ride through city streets that results in the suspect being tossed around the interior. Indeed, Gray’s case is not the first one in which someone was injured while being transported in a Baltimore police van. In this case, it appears from what Mosby has represented about the contents about the autopsy, as well as a report that was released yesterday, that the injury to Gray that proved to be fatal occurred when his head struck something inside the van, but there also appears to be a suggestion that he was injured to at least some extent prior to having been placed in the van or possibly during one of the times that the van stopped on its way to the police station where it was ultimately found that Gray was unconscious and unresponsive in the back of the van.
Today’s developments come at the end of a rather interesting twenty-four hours in which a number of reports were released in anticipation that something might be announced today. The Baltimore Police held a press conference early yesterday morning in which they announced that they had completed their investigation and turned their findings over to Mosby, but there were many leaders at the time who were cautioning residents that it could take some time before the State’s Attorney decides how to proceed. At the same time, The Washington Post came out with a report supposedly based on a leaked portion of that investigation which said that another prisoner who was in the van with Gray for a portion of the trip to the police station told police that he could hear loud noises coming from the enclosed cell next to him, supposedly evidence that Gray was trying to injure himself. By the end of the day, however, a reporter for one of the local television stations had tracked this second prisoner down, and he made it clear that what was reported in the Post was heavily exaggerated and that he never heard any loud noises. Then, late last night, it was reported by a British newspaper that the man who had shot the cell phone video that originally led people to start asking questions about Gray’s death had been arrested for reasons that nobody seems to be able to figure out.
At least in the short term, this should go a long way toward calming things down in Baltimore and in the other cities where protests have popped up this week, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. To a large degree, it was the perception that the case was being swept under the rug that was driving the protests to begin with, and now that charges have been brought. At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that, as with the cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott, the issues raised by the death of Freddie Gray go beyond one single case and one single police department. The perception among African-Americans at all income levels that they are treated differently by police is one that is based in reality, and it’s something that ought to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, which as Conor Friedersdorf points out today, is the way that many conservatives seem to treat the entire issue of police abuse. Additionally, while nothing can justify the rioting that took place in Baltimore on Monday, the reality of what people who live in inner city areas like Baltimore’s is something that America rarely pays attention to until something like this happens. The conditions that led to what happened in Baltimore exist in many parts of the country, all that’s waiting is a spark to set them off. We can either figure out how to deal with those problems now, or deal with those problems when the explode in violence.
In any case, the State’s Attorney has acted appropriately in this matter. Now, we should let the legal system do what it is designed to do.
I see a lot of calls for BPD officers to walk off the job in protest. I am in 100% agreement. They absolutely should walk away, and open up positions to people who understand the flat out unsustainability of the current model.
I’ll just disregard the idiocy involved in protesting charges filed against authorities involved in, at best, negligent manslaughter.
Well, good ole El Rushbo was running with the Washington Post article yesterday, not quite saying that Grey’s injuries must have been self-inflicted, so this would be another example of the left creating a story of police violence where there is none. Expect the right to identify the charged officers as martyrs prosecuted on trumped up charges soon.
Doug left out that If the officer driving Freddie Gray’s van {Officer Caesar Goodson Jr} refuses to speak to investigators. But it is wrong to mention that because 5th.
Support the Federal Law Enforcement Bill of Rights.
@CB:
You’re forgetting the false imprisonment charge. False imprisonment is a felony. If someone dies in the course of a comission of a felony, felony homicide makes it murder even if you didn’t intend to kill them.
The one thing we need to realize is that this isn’t a few bad apples. We’ve had decades of governments looking the other way on police brutality, especially when it is visited upon black people. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people have been subjected to these rough rides or worse. The threatened walkouts and the responses of, “How DARE you question us” are a direct result of that. If a corporate culture were this sick, you’d fire everyone and rebuild the company from scratch. I don’t think we need to go that far, but firing a few folks isn’t going to fix this. Baltimore PD doesn’t need a bandaid; it needs major surgery.
This needs to be verified by a third party medical examiner immediately. I’m sorry but at this point anything that comes out of Baltimore PD or is associated with them professionally needs to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Pinning it on the “rough ride” and not the actions is the arrest is somewhat dubious; while you can certainly break your neck in a car ride, it seems somewhat unlikely that what was caught on camera did so little damage to Grey physically it warrants a “suggestion” of injury and was not listed as possible contributing factor.
It also has the added benefit of taking a measure of guilt off the officers in question. It removes the bloodstain directly from their hands and makes them inattentive villains rather then cruel tormentors. A great way to minimize what they can in this most blatant act of violence – no cameras on the ride gives plausible deniability and the whole “we didn’t know he was badly hurt!” crap.
@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker:
Actually, I’ve been encouraged by some on the right wing taking this seriously. Bill O’Reilly, of all people, called for a zero tolerance policy for police brutality. Their biggest problem is that they don’t grasp the diseased cultural norm that is at the bottom of this.
The allegation that Gray injured himself was real but ridiculous. It takes a lot to break someone’s neck, least of all severe their spine.
I haven’t really been paying attention to the details. When somebody told me about the “rough ride” stuff I thought they were making stuff up. Now that it’s confirmed, I’m completely appalled. Six officers contributed to this? Not one of them had the guts to stand up and put a stop to this?
I agree with CB … please go ahead and walk off if you can’t admit this was wrong. And don’t come back.
@Hal_10000:
Even if it is, don’t forget that the proverb “bad apples” comes from is “one bad apple spoils the entire barrel”.
Let’s not forget that his crime was making eye contact with an officer and running away. He had a switch blade on him, that is what led to his death. Allegedly having a switchblade on him became a capital offense.
@Dave D:
Except the police lied about the switchblade. It was a perfectly legal pocket knife:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/prosecutor-knife-switchblade-found-clipped-grays-pants-pocket-30729688
@Dave D:
It wasn’t a switchblade. The knife he was carrying is perfectly legal in Maryland.
But I see your point about it becoming a capital offense.
@Dave D:
And it wasn’t even a switchblade!
…D’oh. Stormy has it covered.
More than 30% of the arrests in Baltimore are bogus.
Including this one, which was for having a legal knife.
Even so…I got $20 says the cops get off, again.
@Paul L.:
Oh, so is this your new right wing hero? You must be so proud. Instead of swearing to “protect and serve” this guy thinks his job is to “swerve and project.” I hope you take a ride with him someday.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/01/police-union-influence-maryland-runs-deep/
Police unions play a significant role in Maryland politics, from campaign endorsements to influence peddling. According to public records, the largest police associations, including the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police, donated $1,834,680 to state politicians over the last decade and retained several of most prominent lobbyists in the state.
“Our people said that the committee leadership was worried about the police reaction,” explained Thomas Nephew, an activist with the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition, who was present at the March 12th hearing. “One of the legislative leaders said something like, if these bills go through, the cops will riot in the streets, which really tells you something.”
Police unions gonna Police union.
@CSK:
@CB:
@C. Clavin:
Hah! Nimble dragon claws win again!
Once again, this seems to be the most common link among all of the publicized incidents over the past couple of years. The level of provocation and/or justification behind the initial confrontation varies wildly, from “none at all” to “yeah, probably guilty as hell”. The absolute indifference to suffering and medical need is without exception.
@Franklin:
It’s actually worse than that. It wasn’t six officers — it was four officers, a sergeant, and a lieutenant. If that doesn’t scream “department policy” to you, it should.
@Stormy Dragon: I hadn’t seen that. This makes it so much worse. No wonder he was running from them.
Ho hum…. How ’bout them Cards?!
@Franklin:
As Frank Serpico discovered, police departments work on a “snitches get stitches” policy.
@Hal_10000: The thing was, not only was his spine 80% severed, his larynx was crushed as well. How does a person do both to themselves?
The Baltimore police seem to be acting like a protection racket: pay up or we walk off and hey, who knows, someone might break your windows or beat up your mother. And then you’ll stop questioning how we do our thing.
None of these cases have involved “bad apples.” When additional cops arrive on the scene and immediately participate rather than at the very least restraining fellow officers, it’s absurd to talk about bad apples. These are thoroughly rotten police departments, thugs in uniform.
What’s changed is cameras in cell phones. Suddenly decades of allegations of police brutality – inevitably dismissed – are demonstrated to be true. Police are out-of-control gangs hired to defend the wealthy and suppress the poor. No different that strike-breaking Pinkertons or the secret police in any number of repressive countries.
Police officials – including the idiots who run the police unions – need to get it through their heads that this sh!t won’t fly anymore, not in the age of cellphones. Juries watch TV, too, and people will be much more skeptical of cops in the future. The entire edifice of the criminal justice system (hah!) is crumbling behind overturned death sentences, new science about eyewitnesses, bogus FBI “science” and widespread police brutality.
Thing one: End the drug war. This all goes back to the drug war which, in terms of its impact, is a war on vulnerable minorities. Get cops off of hassling people on possession charges and low-end street dealers, and focus them on violent crime. Cops should be there to protect life and property, not public morals.
And it goes back to having a society saturated by guns, a frightened society, paranoid, which feeds both police paranoia and hair-trigger reactions.
@Dave D:
From the post above:
Ms. Mosby also said that the knife the police say Mr. Gray was carrying had not been a legitimate basis for his arrest. “The knife was not a switchblade, and it is lawful,” she said. She said the officers had “failed to establish probable cause for an arrest.”
Dude on Twitter was talking about how successful a cynical attitude is when it comes to making predictions about victims of police brutality receiving justice. Didn’t reply, but wanted to say that’s how society works: you keep doing the same shit all the time until someone starts a riot, then you make as few changes as possible until the next one. Been that way at least since the 1500s under less-forgiving tyrannies. The mob rules, and if you do crap stupid enough to get a mob on your institutional ass, you’d best make some changes before they kill you.
Perhaps we might grow soft enough one day that the mob’s worst threat against you is torching your house, and no one thinks of killing anybody to get a point across, but that is an illusion in our modern day too many people have.
It was fun to watch the press conference with the prosecutor, Ms. Mosby just for the open disdain she showed for the reporters at the end.
If she brings this home look for her in a Governor’s race somewhere down the line.
@michael reynolds:
THIS. A thousand times this. For the first time in history we can record almost anything when it happens. There is no need to trust authority to be honest because now we can see what they’re doing and hold them accountable. The thing about the Big Brother concept is he watches everyone. Potential eyes everywhere and citizenry that understand ht power of video means evil has less places to hide.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Nikon, Samsung and Apple are picking up the slack, apparently.
The city as well as the police leadership are just as guilty. They’ve got several multi-million dollar settlements for “rough rides”, yet they didn’t see the benefit of outfitting the transport vans with cameras and other sensors? Or make it a fireable offense to not follow proper securing procedures for restrained suspects?
If only the Democrats were permitted to run the city and African-Americans were in city government and the police leadership.
@JKB:
I was all set to thumb up that till you go and ruin it with the partisan crap at the end. Do you really need to go for a pointless cheap shot when you already have a valid point? Bad authority is bad, regardless of what letter is after their name.
@michael reynolds:
Yeah…probably not so much.
More likely states will simply make it illegal to record police activity. This seems unconstitutional to me…but so does using religious freedom as an excuse to force an employers beliefs onto their employees…and yet here we are.
It saddens that this tragedy has marred Socialist Massacre Celebration Day.
@KM: Something that most people don’t notice about 1984: the people under the worst scrutiny by Big Brother were members of what my HS English teacher called the Outer Party, the bureaucrats like Winston Smith and other government workers. As long as the proles (read: us) are fat and happy (read: not rioting), Big Brother was always more concerned with deviation from orthodoxy inside its own government machine.
What we have here is proles rioting, which means someone in the Outer Party (read: this time it’s the police, next time probably a garbage collector strike or something) really screwed up. Multiple times at least. Americans only get lazier with the passage of time: stirring up an American riot in 2015 is much harder than it was in 1999, or 1968. If you can get an obese population to get on their feet and say you’re a bastard, then you’re making Baby Machiavelli and Baby Talleyrand-Périgord cry.
@C. Clavin:
The courts have consistently upheld the right of people to record police activity, although some state rep in Texas wants to make it illegal there for a non-press person to film from a distance of less than 25 feet.
Prosecutors in states with strong laws about wiretapping and second-party consent to being recorded tried to use these statutes to prosecute people who filmed/taped/recorded arrests or other police activities..
@Franklin:
Since Mr. Goodson is black, I doubt the rightwing will put much effort into protecting him. Mr. Goodson is going to learn that black law enforcement have no friends.
@C. Clavin:
Nah, you can’t outlaw cell phones or taping cops. Unconstitutional, no way, no how do the Supremes allow it.
@KM:
Well, them plus Rorschach of course.
I hope this brings a halt to the violence, both public and private, that has rocked Baltimore.
I have my doubts that the police officers will be convicted on the charges. Based on published accounts it’s hard to see how the charge of 2nd degree murder in particular would stand. The defense that the original arrest was a mistake should obviate the possibility of predicate felony. If every mistake by every police officer is a possible felony, you probably won’t retain many police officers.
I also hope that these charges and arrests won’t bring an end to the refocusing of attention on the problems of our cities. The end of violence rather than be a good time to rest on our laurels is the perfect time to identify ways and means of remediation.
@KM: …and JKB is the only one you note throwing in a pointless partisan cheap shot at the end of a comment?
@Dave Schuler:
It may not have been a mistake. It may have been sadism or it may have been payback for some earlier interaction.
I suspect the reason for the top end charges is to push some of the cops to roll over on the others. The first to testify gets the best deal, and with their careers in law enforcement effectively over, they’ll start looking to their own welfare. Cops do not want to go to prison.
If you want quick remediation you need to reduce the friction between the police and the people, and that means pulling cops off lifestyle crimes and onto the crimes the community actually wants solved. They need to follow the lead of the fictional Baltimore Police Major Bunny Colvin and end the drug war. That single decision would move the ball halfway to a better relationship.
Jobs would be good, too, obviously. But first, stop arresting kids and their parents for drug use. Not every drug user is a terrible parent or worthless employee. An awful lot of great music has come from heroin addicts, a lot of great comedy has come from coke users. If we would cut through the propaganda of the drug warriors we’d see that enforcing drug laws does more damage than the drugs themselves.
Someone on Twitter noted that it took 12 days for the Prosecutor to charge the police in this case-whereas it has been 160 days since the drive by police shooting of 12 year Tamar Rice (recorded on video!).
Maybe Cleveland needs a riot? (for which, of course, there is quite obviously, no excuse.)
It does seem that the black community usually has to shout as loud as it can to get any justice at all in police brutality cases-and then often not even then (cough, Eric Garner?)
Michael:
Yes, and it’s also a key way of suppressing D votes. About a million black people can’t vote because they’re in jail.
And the person who built the most valuable company in the world was someone who said “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”
@michael reynolds:
My point was not that it was a mistake but that it can be claimed to have been a mistake.
@michael reynolds:
Seriously? The Roberts Court? You underestimate them.
@JKB:
Oooooh…someone has been watching Fox News again!!!!
@CB:
Seriously, no cop thought to have a drop blade? Rookies.
@michael reynolds:
The same thing happened here in NYC last Christmas after the Eric Garner protests. Cops stopped giving quality of life tickets and street cleaning tickets. As the NY Post reported, and probably being unintentionally ironic, the cops were having a slowdown and “only arresting people when necessary.” Arrests and tickets dropped a reported 93%.
Wrap your mind around that. Only 7% of the arrests in NYC are considered “necessary” by the police. The rest? Basically revenue collection for the city, hassling minority teens, and making people miserable because they were five minutes late moving their car for street “cleaning.”
Let the Baltimore cops walk off. Let the NYC ones as well. They’ve shown us that their jobs really aren’t as important to law and order as they pretend.
@Facebones: Drop blade? W. Bush was too dumb to take along a couple vials of anthrax to drop in Iraq. Is it fair to expect better planning from police than the president?
I’ve enjoyed talking to (most of) you folks over the years, but this commentary is honestly just too much for me to stomach any further. I’m out of here. I wish you all well in your future endeavors.
This seems kind of quick to have a thorough investigation. I am also not sure of a murder charge. They would have to prove intent. At best would be a manslaughter by negligence charge. But they need to have clear, indisputable evidence, not some trumped up conjecture, hypothesis, profile, theorem, guess work, feelings, some law professor’s theory, spin the wheel, or an effort to placate the crowd. This could easily wind up being another Casey Anthony, Zimmerman fiasco with a jury decision of not guilty or even thrown out by a judge.
There are other possible explanations: an accident, another prisoner did it, a mob hit, or previous condition.
I will admit openly that I do not have a lot of formal legal knowledge.
@Tyrell:
Not if the death occured in the commission of a felony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule
@CSK:
One of those states was, in fact, Maryland.
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/maryland/mddce/8:2012cv03592/221705/
@Hal_10000: And yet, Rush this morning described the charges laid against the officers as “the rape of justice and the rule of law,” at which point, one of the ditto heads called to ask if this incident was the latest step “the federalizing of law enforcement.”
I’m glad that some on the right are taking this seriously. It opens the possibility that thinking, rather than reacting, will start happening. The idea that the right will see the systemic elements that this type of event indicates is a bridge too far for me.
(And normally, I don’t listen to the right wingnut echo chamber, but I just got back from 8 years abroad rented a car for the week and couldn’t resist indulging myself as a guilty pleasure. The other highlight of the week was the assertion by Michael Medved that Hillary’s assertion about the US having 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the imprisoned of the world simply shows that the US is 5 times better at enforcing the law and bringing people to justice. WTF???!!!???)
@HarvardLaw92:
I will miss you and your thoughtful and reasoned style of arguing a point. Truthfully, it always seemed to me that you were out of place here.
@Another Mike:
I dunno. He couldn’t really point to that much that was factually wrong with most of the commentary, though, could he? He just…didn’t care for the tone. Oh dear.
I see this a lot with former prosecutors — they sort of get….emotionally captured, I suppose, by the police, and start to assume, whether conscously or not, that their job is to stand with the cops per se rather than with justice.
@Rafer Janders:
I think it’s more a road to serfdom thing. DA’s that don’t toe the police line get trashed as “soft on crime” in elections, so non-capturered prosecutors never get promoted and are eventually constructively dismissed. Eventually only the true-believers are left.
@HarvardLaw92:
Really? Out of all of the commentary that has happened here this is what did it for you? Why not make your case whatever that may be rather than leaving in a huff?
So we would hope.
I can’t remember the last gbcw here.
@Grewgills:
There is no case to make. This panel has determined its verdict long before today’s announcement of charges, and challenging the orthodoxy of what has increasingly become some sort of self-congratulating mental masturbation society / echo chamber just doesn’t interest me much any longer. To be frank, it never really has. I’m not sure why I stuck around as long as I did.
An HONEST discussion of this subject would by necessity involve a challenge to the blanket “cops bad / poor oppressed people good” nonsense that has been bandied about over the last few days, and it would involve facing some uncomfortable facts that I suspect this bunch of apologists would be incensed about being confronted with. I grew up in Baltimore, so I can speak to those uncomfortable facts from first-hand experience, but why bother? What’s to be gained at this point? They don’t want to hear it. In their own way, they’re every bit as closed minded as the right-wingers they excoriate.
In that light, let the echo chamber do its thing. I’ll be doing mine by volunteering my services pro bono to the defense.
A troll is “one who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.”
I remember when you said this:
“Present a pinata designed to cause you and others like you to react” is just a longer way of saying “deliberately provocative,” and I think what we’re seeing from you is just another deliberately provocative “performance.” You have already warned us that anyone who takes you seriously is probably “mistaking a performance for a position.”
@Stormy Dragon:
Case in point, the Baltimore FOP is already threatening the political career of City Councilman Nick Mosby for merely being married to a state’s attorney that dared indict cops:
An Open Letter to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby 5/1/2015
@ Jukeboxgrad
For example …
Riddle me this: Maryland, and Baltimore in particular, has some of the most generous welfare & assistance programs int the nation. A single mother living in Baltimore (of which there is a surplus, given the facts that 2/3rd of the city’s births are to unwed mothers, and 60% of the city’s households are headed by single parents) qualifies for a buffet of assistance. TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, Housing Assistance, Utilities Assistance, WIC, Emergency Food Assistance, etc. The list goes on and on, to the point where a single mom with 2 kids in Baltimore receives the equivalent of $18.35 an hour in benefits.
We’re throwing money at them, and yet nothing has changed in West Baltimore in my lifetime. Nothing has changed in Sandtown. We have the same shiftless, lazy people (which is what they are – uncomfortable facts …) sitting around on steps that we had when I was a child. We’ve thrown literally hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, and yet we’re worse off than when we started. You can’t expect anything different from people who expect nothing from themselves, and that’s just how it is.
Baltimore has a black mayor. A black state’s attorney. The bulk of the police force is black, as is the police commissioner. The fire chief is black. 8 of the 15 members of the Baltimore City Council (a majority …) are black. To assert that these people have no political power, that they are unrepresented, in the face of those facts is frankly bullshit.
Yea, I get slavery this, and redlining that, but you know, all that ended long ago. I’m fed up with the endless historical excuses that are offered up to excuse the fact that quite a large chunk of this community just doesn’t give a damn. They’d rather sit around and blame everyone and everything else but themselves for a problem that they do little, if anything, of their own volition to alleviate. They live in a hell of their own creation, and I just don’t feel sorry for them any longer. They’ve burned that goodwill up. My sympathy now is reserved for the people whose distasteful job it is to corral them and keep them under control so the rest of us can live our lives out in some semblance of order.
If you consider that to be trolling, you have bigger problems than being offended by me. I’d suggest spending a few weeks in West Baltimore as a remedy.
@HarvardLaw92:
And what of the above justifies arresting a person who’s broken no law and then bouncing them around the back of a van until their neck snaps?
@Stormy Dragon:
In other words “It is clear that the natives are going to take their anger out on your husband, given where his constituency is located, unless you throw them some white sacrifices to keep them placated.”
They aren’t threatening her career. They aren’t threatening his. They are not too subtly suggesting that she’s playing politics by pandering to her husband’s base, and given the short span of her “investigation”, I’m inclined to agree. Job number one at this point down on Holliday Street is to keep certain sections of the city quiet. In that reality, was there ever any doubt that, regardless of the circumstances, that these officers weren’t going to be charged with something?
@HarvardLaw92: Too bad you’re leaving. On every damn thing except “law and order” you’re an extremely interesting voice. I guess once a prosecutor, you never think anybody ‘gets’ the impacts of crime.
@HarvardLaw92: “In that reality, was there ever any doubt that, regardless of the circumstances, that these officers weren’t going to be charged with something?”
Yes, and as that I offer the last 50 years. Where were you?
@HarvardLaw92:
PS – The dramatically storming out in a huff thing doesn’t work if you keep coming back to see if people miss you yet.
@Stormy Dragon:
A known drug dealer with multiple convictions for narcotics trafficking standing in a drug-infested area who runs from the police justifies arrest, IMO. The courts have been clear on that point.
As for the bouncing around, you weren’t there. I wasn’t there. You’re assuming that it happened, I suspect because you dislike the police. I suspect that it didn’t. There’s enough reasonable doubt introduced by the testimony of the other passenger that he injured himself, and that’s all that I need to hear. Given the choice between 6 decorated cops and one drug dealer, I know who I’m, more likely to believe.
@Turgid Jacobian:
No, I’m just beyond fed up with apologists. Do I favor the police? Absolutely. It is what it is.
@HarvardLaw92:
I think you are reading things into comments if you think that is what is being argued. There are bad cops and there are cops and others protecting them. I think that is hard to deny at this point. There are certainly problems in the community, some from within, but some also imposed from without (redlining etc). I don’t think that is much in dispute either.
Seriously? It doesn’t seem to be disputed at this point (not even by the police involved) that Gray was picked up for a legal pocket knife, then restrained him and put him in the back of a van without belting him in for a ‘rough ride’. Following that he was not given medical treatment. That also is not in dispute. Why would you go out of your way to offer your services pro bono to officers who did this?
@Turgid Jacobian:
You’re missing the point. They could be utterly blameless and they’d still be charged with something to placate the hordes down in West Baltimore who’ve made a drug dealer into their latest hero du jour. That’s reality. The alternative is another riot.
@HarvardLaw92:
Except not. Running from the cops can establish reasonable suspicion (Illinois v. Wardlow), but arrest requires probable cause. Gray’s flight justified the police stopping him and searching him, but when the stop revealed no evidence of an actual crime, they were required to release him.
Instead they fabricated an imaginary switchblade to justify arresting him on bullshit charges.
PS – Am I the only one who notices that HarvardLaw92 never cites any actual cases for his legal opinions?
@Grewgills:
Gray was picked up because he ran, and between his arrest history and the crime-infested nature of the area, that’s sufficient cause to arrest him. The knife was discovered after he’d been apprehended.
The rough ride thing is disputed, and frankly, I just don’t believe it. Failing to provide medical assistance? Fine, I’ll accept negligence, but murder? Good luck …
Why would I go out of my way? Because I’m too familiar with the folks that live in West Baltimore, and I’m too familiar with Baltimore politics. I’ve decided that I believe they’re being railroaded in order to placate the natives, and they deserve a defense. Why wouldn’t I volunteer to assist?
(6 Posts later.)
Promises. Promises.
@HarvardLaw92:
I for one don’t think the guy was a “hero” – and I’m not sure anyone else does. Looks like he was a petty criminal who was not committing any crimes when he was arrested. He certainly still has rights even with an arrest sheet. It seems pretty clear that this was an end-to-end clusterf**k by the cops in question that ended with a man dying for no good reason that I can see.
I have no problem going to bat for a cop that is doing his job the right way. What happened here was wrong, wrong, wrong.
@HarvardLaw92:
Do you really think it at all likely that Gray crushed his own trachea and nearly severed his own spine, or do you just think you are a good enough attorney to convince a jury of that?
@HarvardLaw92:
The city’s paid out millions of dollars the past few years for doing it to other people and you still don’t believe. Funny how you’re willing to arrest Gray based solely on past behavior yet fail to suspect the police based on their past behavior.
@HarvardLaw92: Fair enough, man. I tend to be skeptical of them.
@michael reynolds: “An awful lot of great music has come from heroin addicts, a lot of great comedy has come from coke users.”
Yeah, let’s pump the breaks a bit. Heroin didn’t make those addicts musical and coke didn’t make those users funny. They did make some of them dead and even more complete wrecks.
It’s one thing to be against our disasterous drug policies. It’s another thing to be pro-heroin for pity’s sake. What’s next? Meth makes you a really alert security guard?
Mike
@HarvardLaw92:
Of course the cops deserve a defense. And Freddie Gray, criminal or not, deserved to live to see another day.
I’d be curious to see you case that these guys are being railroaded. Their behavior seems pretty egregious to me.
@Stormy Dragon:
Or they simply made a good-faith error about the nature of the knife. You have proof of this knowing and intentional fabrication? See where this is going?
Feel free to call up Marilyn Mosby and offer her your assistance.
@anjin-san:
They’re being treated like peasantry and being subjected to the same justice as everyone else. Don’t we know the King’s Men are susposed to be above the law?
@HarvardLaw92:
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Unless it’s actually your job to know the law. Then, meh! Whatever.
@Stormy Dragon:
The city settled lawsuits, which all cities do on a regular basis. You’re intelligent enough to know why they do that, and you’re intelligent enough to know that it doesn’t establish verification of the underlying allegations.
You want to believe that the police are bad. Knock yourself out. I disagree, so I’m volunteering to help defend them. Given a choice between 6 decorated cops and a neighborhood full of drug dealers venerating a drug dealer, it’s doesn’t even require a second thought.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’ll take that as “No, I do not have any evidence to suggest that this wasn’t a good-faith error”. Thanks for playing.
@HarvardLaw92:
and now it’s your contention that these decorated officers couldn’t tell the difference between a switchblade and a normal pocket knife? Seriously? Is that really the standard you want police held to?
@HarvardLaw92:
I think everyone here will stipulate that you are a talented attorney. But we are not in court. Do you believe that the cops made a “good faith error” regarding the knife?
I’m curious, are right and wrong important to you here, or do you just want to help your team win?
(btw, I was raised by a pretty fair attorney, so I know all about the will to win that drives good lawyers)
@HarvardLaw92:
Sounded pretty troll-y to me too. Sounded like Superdestroyer…
“It” didn’t end all that long ago. And its going to take more time that just yours and my lifetime to heal.
True change is only starting. There’s a long way to go.
Its honestly hard for me to believe you’re being serious.
@anjin-san:
Unless he injured himself, which is not outside the realm of possibility.
@PT:
It ended 50 years ago. Just how long do you think will be required for these people to step up and take responsibility for their own lives?
Or should we just double the amount we’re spending on them to no apparent gain?
@HarvardLaw92:
I was a drug dealer for a long time. I worked behind a bar, making drinks for some of the richest, most famous, and most successful people in America. But alcohol is legal, in spite of the hideous carnage it leaves in its wake.
The guy at 7.11 that sells you a pack of smokes is a drug dealer too. Cigarettes killed my father.
Are you so sure of the ground you are standing on when you make moral judgements about drug dealers?
@HarvardLaw92: I absolutely don’t agree with this. See, lots of us can go on fact-free excursions.
@anjin-san:
Truthfully? Yes, I do. More importantly, I believe that a jury will believe it too. It offends me that what passes for city government in Baltimore is likely throwing these people to the wolves in order to buy peace.
@Grewgills:
Both …
@Turgid Jacobian:
Have you ever lived in Baltimore? LOL
@HarvardLaw92:
Take that as “it doesn’t matter whether or not it was a good-faith error”. If someone was caught with a knife that was actually illegal, the fact they made “a good faith error” about what knives were allowed would not be a defense to a weapons charge in court. I merely expect the cops be held to the same standard as the rest of the public. If a general citizen is expected to keep up with the petty details of what knives are and aren’t legal, it doesn’t seem to onerus to expect the same cops, who are paid considerable somes of money to keep up to date on such matters.
@HarvardLaw92:
Sure. It’s possible he crushed his own larynx and severed his own spine.
It’s also possible that I will have a threesome with Ashley Judd and Sandra Bullock. Possible but not very likely.
@HarvardLaw92:
Ha, now I’m sure you’re trolling.
@anjin-san: @anjin-san:
Given the nature of his convictions (it wasn’t marijuana he was dealing), yea, I am. I have no use for, nor will I mourn the passing of, a heroin dealer.
@anjin-san:
Point of order, I don’t. We have no actual evidence he’s a lawyer at all, much less a talented one. I certainly haven’t been impressed by his legal arguments.
@PT:
Why? Because you don’t like the question, or you don’t have an answer to it?
@HarvardLaw92:
Legality aside, how is heroin worse than alcohol? Please be specific.
@Grewgills:
Sometimes, if you can’t get a taxi, you have to leave in a huff.
@Stormy Dragon:
The good-faith error sanitizes culpability with regard to having made the arrest. You know what I’m arguing here. Don’t go off on tangents just because you dislike the argument.
Top five police departments you probably shouldn’t go out of your way to defend:
1. New Orleans
2. Baltimore
3. L.A.
4. Philadelphia
5. NYC
@HarvardLaw92: How many good faith errors are they allowed per dead black guys?
Knife? Sure, why know, I don’t know what an illegal knife looks like except when I’m charging them.
Unrestrained cuffed guy in back? Sure, I mean, it’s against policy and stuff but whatever.
Asked for medical attention? Eh, may be faking, forget that guy.
How many stops did we make? Three, definitely–after all a police report is a legal document! Oh, wait, yes that one we forgot… um, never mind that. Sure, we’d arrest a “civilian” for that kind of thing…
@HarvardLaw92:
They. Those people. Singular. As though they were an undifferentiated mass all moved by a single will.
These are individuals with individuals stories, individual beliefs and individual struggles. I’m reminded of the story of Lot. Are there no righteous men and women in Baltimore? Are they all shiftless and lazy? Are they to blame for their problems? Is each of them to blame? Every last one of “them?”
Tell me, if you’re 19 with a baby in your arms, where do you get to live in Baltimore on the minimum wage you earn at Burger King? It’s not in the better neighborhoods, is it? It’s in the ghetto. And once you’re there, making your minimum wage, spending two hours a day on a bus, begging child care from your relatives and neighbors, always terrified that social service will take your kid, terrified of the crime all around you, just what do you do to “fix” Baltimore?
We have street gangs funded by the drug war lording it over decent people. The police meant to protect the people are down in Harborplace protecting tourists, protecting the source of revenue. You can be hardworking and determined but you’ll still live your life trapped and helpless between gangs and criminals and thuggish police. What exactly are those millions of “they” supposed to do about it?
Give me your three point plan for how an unwed mom making minimum wage in Baltimore is supposed to fix any of this?
What do you think marginal people, people with no power, no money, no time, are supposed to do to fix the corrupt, impoverished mess that is Baltimore? The people who should be doing something – people with power and money and resources and time – are busy trying to keep their taxes down and have zero interest in ensuring that the poor are safe or fed or well-policed.
I don’t think you understand or have much sympathy for the poor. You don’t understand how radically different their lives are from yours. These people live their lives from birth to death in quicksand, and you don’t get it.
I would be sorry to see you bail. You’re highly intelligent and logical – and we’re not overburdened with folks like that. But this is not about logic, it’s about emotions – fear, hopelessness, worry, despair. The best analogy I can suggest is that you think back to the last time you had a bad flu. Think about how difficult every single little thing was when you had fever or chills. That’s a taste of what poverty feels like.
We’ve tried moral condemnation, and we’ve tried ignoring the problem, and we’ve tried paternalistic outside intervention. Nothing is going to work unless we get people jobs, or failing a job some meaningful function to perform in society. We have an ideological objection to that in both political parties. We need to rethink that ideology, because joblessness is likely to get worse and stay worse. We need a different paradigm because the old bootstraps thing is clearly not working.
Personally, I think the era of small government is over. Whether it’s Baltimore or the Appalachians or California’s Central Valley, we are splitting ever more clearly into haves and have-nots. Pretending that the have-nots are going to be able to pull themselves up is sheer fantasy. We need a different approach.
@HarvardLaw92:
It strains credulity. Honestly, how possible and how likely do you really think it is that Gray crushed his own larynx and nearly severed his own spinal cord?
@anjin-san:
You can’t excise legality. That said, which would you rather do, one drink or one hit of heroin?
Now that you have posted 11 times after your alleged self imposed exile I suspect it might have something to do with, what did U call it?
@HarvardLaw92:
Neither, I’ve been clean and sober for 26 years.
@Grewgills:
Who’s to say what he did to himself inside that box? We have the statement of another prisoner who asserted that, at a minimum, he was violent. I see no evidence that it occurred during the arrest, and I see no evidence of “rough riding”. I see a lot of allegations that serve to validate people’s predetermined conclusions, but I’m not seeing a lot of evidence.
@ernieyeball:
That opinion hasn’t changed. Frankly, this place has become more or less the left-wing equivalent of Freeperland IMO. Same devotion to orthodoxy and dogma, just at the other end of the political spectrum.
@MBunge:
No, and that wasn’t my point, although I wrote it carelessly so I can understand your reading of it. I was just making the point that we should not assume every guy with a drug problem is a dead loss to humanity.
@HarvardLaw92:
Heien v. North Carolina? (Again, why is the non-lawyer the one coming up with all the case law?) Again, that ruling only applies to the reasonable suspicion necessary for the initial stop, not the probable cause necessary for the subsequent arrest.
@michael reynolds:
Like I said before, nothing and nobody can help people who refuse to help themselves. West Baltimore today is populated by the same type of people it was populated by in the 1960s. They’re still where they are, despite hundreds of billions of dollars having been thrown at them, and you can not delete their lack of self-responsibility from that outcome.
I’m sympathetic, but I also know that what we are doing isn’t working. It will never work as long as these people prefer to maintain their status quo.
Bullshit. Maryland offers some of the most generous benefits and assistance programs in the nation. A single mom with 2 kids can bring in assistance worth over $18 an hour in addition to working minimum wage.
But – and this is the salient point – why would she when she’s being paid a healthy subsidy? Unemployment in Sandtown is 50%. Do you really think that’s entirely because there are no jobs for these people to do?
@HarvardLaw92:
You took the “maybe he broke his own neck” story with a straight face?
Good god, you really are a lawyer.
@HarvardLaw92:
As much as you are accusing others here of reacting emotionally and without evidence due to their biases, it seems pretty apparent at this point that you are allowing your dislike of “those people” guide your decision making more than any of the evidence that we have thus far.
@Stormy Dragon:
Again, why is the non-lawyer the one coming up with all the case law?
Probably because this @HarvardLaw92 is James P appropriating his name. The arguments are too “non-legal” and frankly dense to be the real guy.
@HarvardLaw92:
I think it’s worth noting that I was practicing alcoholic drinking from the very first drink, and that the stuff damn near ruined my life. Do I think that heroin is more dangerous than alcohol? Nope. And a lot of the individual and societal problems associated with heroin use are downstream consequences of it’s legal status.
@anjin-san:
I think we’re being trolled by James P. @HarvardLaw92 argues with law and precedent and a scalpel. This guy is about 30 IQ points south and too emotional.
@HarvardLaw92: Sorry to see you go. I am surprised that you find the charges so incredible, but that’s what a trial is for. People are always going to have opinions based on their experience and what is currently known, and in my opinion it doesn’t look good for the officers at all. Sorry if you don’t like that opinion.
As for the rest of your complaint, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there’s a cultural problem in many places. I don’t know what the solution is, either.
@michael reynolds: Crap, and I just replied to him. You may be onto something there.
HarvardLaw92:
I said you’re a troll because you said you’re a troll. You warned me that if I took your remarks seriously I would be “mistaking a performance for a position.” You said your goal was “to cause you and others like you to react,” and now you’re doing it again. Please proceed.
@michael reynolds:
No. It’s me. Live in Rye. Three kids. Partner at a white shoe in M&A.
You seem thrown by the fact that I could feel this way. Point blank? These people tried to kill my nephew Monday night, so whatever sympathy or goodwill they might have had with me is gone. Done. Over.
Anything I can do now to return the favor, I will do. If that involves helping defend these cops, then so be it.
Stormy Dragon:
He did this before. Link. More of the same.
@HarvardLaw92:
(1) Why are you taking the word of a criminal as gospel? Didn’t just go off earlier about how untrustworthy drug dealers are and wouldn’t take their word for it ? Why is this one suddenly acceptable? How exactly was he “violent” according to this person, what actions was he taking (kicking, screaming, banging head, etc) that lead to the incident?
(2) The medical examiner would have stated if it was self-inflicted. Seriously, the angle, force and pressure to serve a spine and fracture a larynx are pretty frigging distinctive and the direction of the break/severance would be obvious. If the handcuffed, shackled, unrestrained man managed to stand up in the middle of moving vehicle and hurl himself against something to incur such injuries instead of being caused by the police or the actual ride itself (since he couldn’t snap his own neck with bound hands and would have been free-sliding around too much to use a bench deliberately), don’t you think the ME would have put it forth to exonerate the officers? Or is he/she in on it too?
@michael reynolds: I don’t know–earlier on, he said his kid was a B’more firefighter who’d been out among the chaos. So, emotional reactions are pretty understandable.
Nephew.
@HarvardLaw92:
Wow. The mask slips, doesn’t it?
This is flat-out racist talk, and nothing else.
@HarvardLaw92:
For what crime? Cite it.
@HarvardLaw92:
Actually, it’s now 6 accused felons.
@Rafer Janders:
How can it be racist if it’s also accurate? Have you ever spent any time in West Baltimore? I have. I speak from experience …
Is any accurate criticism leveled at people racist, or is that simply your go-to pejorative for someone who’s saying something you dislike – but don’t seem to be trying to refute.
@HarvardLaw92:
Bullshit. A lie. It may be reason to detain him, but for an arrest, you need an actual crime. Avoiding the police (a reasonable tactic given their thuggery) and having a criminal history are not, in themselves, crimes.
Again: what crime was Gray arrested for? Cite it.
@Rafer Janders:
We’ll see how that one pans out. The last I heard, money was already pouring in for their defense, and if I can do anything to help get them off, I will. Murder is a reach, and I suspect you know that.
@anjin-san:
Easy on that “everyone.” Having gone to the same law school as him, I will, however, stipulate that he is an attorney.
It seems that the witness has stated that what he told the police had been exaggerated http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/04/30/wjz-exclusive-the-other-man-in-the-van-with-freddie-gray-breaks-his-silence/
Rafer Janders, you noticed that he said this:
Which is no surprise, given what he has said before. Link:
On the other hand, he later said that these words of his were just “a perfomance.” Link. So keep in mind that you are dealing with someone who is into “perfomance.”
@HarvardLaw92:
So it has absolutely nothing to do with the facts of the case and whether or not you think the cops gave him a rough ride that ended in his death. It is all about your emotional response and your desire to get back at people that you feel threatened a family member. Justice be damned, if getting these cops off hurts the people that tried to hurt your nephew then that’s good enough, huh?
You seriously need to step back from this a moment and think about your positions rather than letting your anger about what happened to your nephew and your visceral dislike of poor people in Baltimore guide you.
@Rafer Janders:
Thuggery? You spend a day in those damn neighborhoods and then get back to me about thuggery.
They threw a concrete block at his truck. He was just trying to help them and they tried to kill him. THAT’S thuggery, friend.
@HarvardLaw92 :
And I am truly sorry about that – I suspect no one here wishes you or your family ill. We do enjoy your commentary and losing a poster makes this corner of the internet a little bit quieter. Being a firefighter is a tough gig and requires a special kind of person to keep going back day after day.
But you’re getting completely out of whack here. If this were the courtroom, you’d need to recuse yourself before the judge tossed you out. You are clearly flustered and emotional to the point you blinding siding with a group that’s opposite to those you feel hurt your family and waiving away facts in favor of bias. You have no problems throwing your lot in with police who have very little evidence backing them up solely based on your current emotional state. Please stop, put the keyboard down, take a deep breath, and think on this:
The nameless They you keep referring to? That’s how they may have viewed your nephew Monday. Not a person but a cog in a machine. Part of the problem, not a tear shed if something happens to him. It’s a terrible feeling, no? That your loved one is considered evil solely because of a stupid association some makes and acts out on it, putting them in danger and making their lives hell.
I don’t care what Gray did before hand; this was a BS arrest, regs were clearly broken and a life was lost. Something went wrong here and we owe it to the citizens of Baltimore and every good cop out there to get rid of the bad ones. Good cops and firefighters do not deserve to be tarred and feathered because there are azzholes in the department. You want to protect them? Then stop with the blind loyalty and get rid of the poisonous influences within. Dirty cops don’t deserve protection from good cops and prosecutors – a criminal is a criminal, after all.
@HarvardLaw92:
That’s true, he probably left the house with a severed spine and a crushed voice box.
It took the cops one hour to transport Gray a distance of six blocks, during which hour they made at least one extended stop. After that one hour ride, Gray, who had walked into the van, emerged from it with a severed spine and crushed voice box. But no, there’s no evidence of it…..
@Grewgills:
It will have to be. Where’s the justice for my nephew? The animals who tried to kill him and his fellow firefighters will never be brought to justice. Why are people so up in arms about one person who contributed nothing to society, but they seemingly couldn’t care less about firefighters? Hell, these people would probably defend and excuse their actions as well.
@HarvardLaw92:
I lived in poor African-American neighborhoods for several years. Hands down, the most aggressively thuggish were the cops.
Like I said: flat-out racist.
@HarvardLaw92:
I do feel for you about what happened to your nephew. My brother is a fire fighter and my mom was a prosecutor. I grew up around police, prosecutors and judges, then later city attorneys and other public servants in an area of the deep South that has pretty much all of the same problems Baltimore has and a worse history. I had a fair number of friends in the poorer part of town (coincidentally also the West End), so none of this is at all foreign to me.
Your nephew and his fellow fire fighters weren’t injured from what you said. What justice do you think he deserves at this point?
@Rafer Janders:
Which proves exactly what? Suggestive? Sure, but I think you know that you and I both can come up with a lot of suggestions about what happened that are equally plausible. I’m seeing a lot of circumstantial evidence, but you know where this one ends. The same place it always ends – in the jury box.
Juries don’t care about justice. They want to assign blame, and you learned that the same place that I did.
@Rafer Janders:
So it’s fair to say that your attitude towards cops is biased by your life experiences then. Mine are as well.
Like I said: not when it’s accurate.
Number of comments he has posted since saying “I’m out of here:” 22. I think he meant ‘I’m out of here until I post my next comment.’
@Grewgills:
Because African-Americans are simultaneously super-human and super-villain. They are expected to be happy in ALL circumstances, saintly in ALL interactions, and if they are not, they acquire supernatural abilities such as hulking up to run through bullets, shooting themselves in the head while cuffed, and snapping their own neck and larynx through sheer demonic willpower alone.
The myths of blacks in the US needs to be torn down. They are not controlled by a black Hive-mind, they do not lust for every white woman they see, they are not uncontrollable rage-machines that can break a cop in two with their bare hands, they are not solely motivated by greed and pleasure, and not all of them use drugs.
But America believes this because America is still scared shitless of black people. More than anything, that’s an admission of racism and white guilt right there.
@Grewgills:
I didn’t say they weren’t injured. I said they eventually made it home OK.
What justice do I think he deserves? It seems to me that cutting a working firehose when men are inside a fire and throwing a concrete block at a moving fire engine with firefighters inside certainly satisfies the elements of attempted murder. I’m more likely to be named Queen of England …
@HarvardLaw92: What justice did the dead man receive?
@michael reynolds:
Plot twist: they are the same person.
Moderators, I’m stuck in the spam filer. Only one attempt should be freed.
Note: just for what it’s worth, they caught one of the guys who was cutting firehoses. Know what Miss Crusader for Justice Mosby charged him with?
Obstructing firefighting operations, malicious destruction of property and reckless endangerment. Three GD misdemeanors. Seems pretty pale from where I’m sitting. I suppose drug dealers are more important to her than firefighters …
@Turgid Jacobian:
If he did it to himself, which is plausible, what justice does he deserve?
@HarvardLaw92:
How do we know your nephew didn’t try to kill himself? It’s certainly within the bounds of probability. Maybe he cut his own firehose….
@HarvardLaw92:
Oh no! That sounds dangerous! If it had hit him, it maybe could have severed his spine or crushed his voice box!
@Rafer Janders:
You mean besides the doer having been caught on video slicing the hoses? Nice try …
I suppose it’s certainly plausible that he teleported himself out of the truck up onto the bridge, tossed the concrete block, then teleported himself back into the truck.
No, wait, that was captured on video as well.
You have video of what happened inside that van that we don’t know about?
@HarvardLaw92:
Some prefer Scotch, some vodka, but me, I like nothing better than a fine whine…..
@Rafer Janders:
If you think that I’m going to entertain your suggestion that the life of a scum drug dealer matters more than the life of a good person like my nephew, you can go to hell.
Did he somehow “oppress” them too? Spare me …
@HarvardLaw92:
Where’s this video? I don’t see any video.
@Rafer Janders:
I see. You think it’s appropriate to target firefighters, put their lives at risk, and subsequently be charged with a misdemeanor.
Were the firefighters in your poor neighborhood thuggish and oppressing you too? Is that why you seemingly don’t value their lives, or at the least value the life of a drug dealer more?
@Rafer Janders:
https www youtube com/watch?v=S8W9iw6gx40
@HarvardLaw92:
Well, again, you SAY they were targeted, but I think you know that you and I both can come up with a lot of suggestions about what happened that are equally plausible. I’m seeing a lot of unsubstantiated claims about chunks of concrete and cut firehoses, but you know where this one ends. The same place it always ends – in the jury box.
@michael reynolds: I certainly agree that drug users should not be arrested and there should be decriminalization of drug possession. There should policies that take away the street profit. Then you can put the dealers out of business. Those who are serving time for possession or using drugs should be released.
As a child I held the F.B.I. in awe. I read about their agents and had great respect for Director Hoover, who personally went out on arrests of dangerous gang members. I thoroughly enjoy the “Criminal Minds” tv program which delves into the minds of the violent criminals.
In my life I have known policemen who were well respected members of the community, respected by all races. Why was this ? They took seriously their duty to serve the people. Most of them never drew their gun! They knew many of the citizens by name. They did everything from helping ladies cross the streets to rescuing cats. In summer they would get the fire depts. to turn on the hydrants so kids could cool off in the summer. I also remembered the time a policeman gave a ride to an older lady who had bags of groceries. They patrolled on foot. They did not wear all kinds of riot gear or military stuff. That was the police I grew up with.
@Rafer Janders:
What other plausible explanation can you offer for cutting a firehose when firefighters are clearly inside a burning building?
The thug felt like he needed a shower? By all means, impress me.
@HarvardLaw92:
You have video of them inside that burning building?
@HarvardLaw92:
It’s becoming pretty clear you don’t want justice – you want blood. Vengeance is not justice. Bitterness does not lead to truth and two wrongs don’t make a right. You are a reasonable adult – you know this.
That rage your feeling is what Gray’s family is feeling right now; someone hurt someone they love and the law is doing little about it. I’m sure Gray’s family is wondering why murder one isn’t on the table while you’re angry assault or higher isn’t in the cards. Can they prove, in a court of law in front of a jury that you previously stated only wants to cast blame, anything higher then what is currently charged with knowing they might skate if overcharged? How will you feel if they walk when a jury doesn’t agree it fits the criteria of attempted manslaughter?
I totally understand your anger and frustration. I’ve had my wrist broken in the line of duty at a previous job with absolutely nothing done to the offender – a goddamn knife fight I broke up to my detriment and several police reports. Dangerous jobs are hard on loved ones and it’s incredibly irritating to this day I never got the resolution I needed and eventually I just got a new job.
But Harvard? I lived. Your nephew lived. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. Breathe. Have a drink. Do some yoga if that’s your thing. Go spend time with your nephew or give him a call. The ass will do time, maybe not as much as you’d like, but something is better then nothing. You’re starting to see enemies here where there are none. Rafer’s needling you because the arguments you’d been making up-thread can be easily turned on you, trying to point out your feelings are clouding your debate. Parroting your own words back to get you to see what you are actually saying. That you’re falling for it is a sign it might be time to call it a night…..
@Tyrell:
so tell me, what did aunt bee’s pie REALLY taste like…
@Rafer Janders:
I suppose the firehose just drug itself inside the building?
Still waiting for that video of what happened inside the van, or is asking for it somehow “oppressing” you?
@HarvardLaw92:
No proof, fellow.
But, at a minimum: not to be left unrestrained in a dangerous moving vehicle, for starters. They have a reason for their policy. Violating their policy is knowingly subjecting someone in their power to EASILY AVOIDABLE AND POTENTIALLY MORTAL avoidable danger.
I guess that’s too much for you to ask of the brave men in blue?
@KM:
Say again? Six officers have been charged in his death, at least one of them with murder.
@Turgid Jacobian:
I’d call it negligence. Perhaps even reckless disregard. I might even call it manslaughter IF the prosecutor offered it up as a deal. I wouldn’t call it murder.
I have my doubts that the jury will either. This will almost certainly not go to trial in Baltimore City.
@HarvardLaw92 :
Murder in the second is the highest.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the charges – I’m saying the family is probably wondering why murder one isn’t on the table since they, like yourself, want the max sentencing done for the highest charge possible.
@KM:
It’s actually unlikely that he’ll serve any time, given the statutes in question, which is why it is such a slap in the face.
Why are you suggesting there was more than one cutter? Why are you suggesting that more than one hose was cut?
@KM:
I’m sure their lawyer can explain 2-201 to them. I’m capable of reading 2-206 on my own.
@ jukeboxgrad
Because hoses were slashed all over the city, and I can produce as many firefighters as you’d like to attest to that fact. Having been on scene, I think they’re probably reliable witnesses – and juries love them.
@HarvardLaw92: I basically agree with you on that if the defendants are private citizens, and expect you’re right that murder charges don’t stick. But morally I expect those who have real power to inflict violence and death in my name to be held to a higher standard.
That immunity standards exist to render their civil responsibility less than that of the average person offends me deeeply.
I have no idea why y’all continue to attempt rational argument with “they’re all thugs” hardboard law guy. Anybody who is willing to believe “maybe he crushed his own larynx while handicapped in the back of the van” is just too stupid to argue woth
Citation needed.
Any number greater than zero would be a good start.
I’m pretty sure this promise is as solid as another one you made recently: “I’m out of here.”
Some of you may consider this off topic, but the conditions in Baltimore (and many other urban communities) remind me of my days of working with the general population on the Indian Reservations in southwestern South Dakota.
80% unemployment, poor schools, crushing dispair, and little hope for their future, a tribal police force that was feared because they were bullies. It was better to sit at “home” and drink yourself to death. For teenage girls, they would intentionally get pregnate, not so much to get whatever governmental assistance was possible, but to have some (baby) who loved them unconditionally and the child would establish their self-worth. For the guys, they would join gangs, for the purpose of proving some self-worth.
You can claim that “we’ve wasted millions by pumping aid” into Baltimore (just as is done on the Rez), but it’s all for naught because it’s not what was really needed.
@Turgid Jacobian:
The standards regarding civil liability don’t so much subject them to a lesser penalty so much as they require a higher standard of proof. I think that’s fair, given that without them we’d essentially have no police forces at all. Nobody would do the job.
@Bob @ Youngstown:
What is needed?
@Cd6:
What is your preferred term for people who loot stores, burn down buildings, set vehicles ablaze, throw concrete blocks at firefighters and rocks at cops, slash working hoselines and generally engage in mayhem? Misunderstood?
Thugs seems accurate enough to me, but by all means please let me know what the PC term is for these people so I might avoid offending your delicate sensibilities.
@HarvardLaw92: Okay, interesting: thanks.
Paul L.:
When even someone like Jenos notices that you cited a parody with a straight face, then you are in special territory.
You will have to try harder if you expect to get as much attention as our more prolific troll.
@HarvardLaw92: Maybe you should try that Cornell Law professor guy’s blog. Very intelligent commentary there. Check it out. He even spells out the name of his blog phonetically. (And he makes me ashamed that we are in the same profession).
@Cd6: He’s a genocidal racist, after all “they” threw a rock at his “nephew” don’t ya know.
@ Jukeboxgrad
It really burns you that not everybody is falling over themselves feeling sorry for these rioters, doesn’t it?
Typical bleeding heart crap. You aren’t doing these people any favors by paternalistically patronizing them to assuage your own sense of guilt. But hey, why not I guess.
Nobody being responsible for anything seems to be the way of the world these days, so I’ll play along with you. Yes, they live in poverty while largely doing nothing of their own volition to change their situation.Yes, they exist in what seems like a permanent bubble of feelings of entitlement stemming from wrongs few of them ever personally had to experience. Yes, they make choices that perpetuate their cycle of poverty while being generously supported by the state.
But none of that is their fault. They’re blameless, because blaming them for anything offends Jukeboxgrad’s sense of propriety, right?
I think “troll” has become your new term for “someone who says something that offends me”.
I’m underwhelmed …
@M13:
So I should just look askance and say “tsk tsk, yes, they tossed a concrete block at my nephew’s fire truck and slashed his hoseline while he was in a burning building, but they’re misunderstood and they have been “oppressed” (WTFever …), so it’s OK if they blow off a little steam. If he gets hurt, well that’s just his bad luck. He should have ducked.”
Is that how it works?
One more time: I said you’re a troll because you said you’re a troll.
I am aware of one cutter cutting one hose. Is pointing out that you like to make shit up enough to get you to finally make good on your promise to disappear?
Still waiting.
You presented a video of one cutter cutting one hose. Your nephew happened to be in that exact building?
HL92 proves Conor’s point.
@ Jukeboxgrad
As I said, many hoses were slashed. Firefighters make excellent witnesses in court.
Interestingly, that’s exactly one more video than you’ve produced (i.e. zero …) of what happened inside that van – but you’re SURE about what happened in there because – well, why are you so sure about what happened in that van. .
Remind me how again? Do you have ESP? Did you see it via osmosis? 😀
Except that HL92 pretends to not be a conservative.
You said this:
I guess you meant to say ‘I can produce them but I won’t.’
@Anonne:
I do take them seriously. I’m just tired of them being held up as a banner which the cop haters of the world use to indict the system as a whole.
I’m also, despite being center-left, not all that fond of bleeding heart save the world types. They annoy me.
Both seem to have showed up in abundance on these Baltimore threads.
@ Jukeboxgrad
To you, anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders is a conservative. You’ll excuse me if I’m not interested.
Anonne thinks you are a conservative, and I pointed out correctly that you claim you are not. Two minutes later, you confirmed what I said. I’m sorry this annoys you.
It appears that one person cut one hose. Who else gratuitously turned that into plural, besides our friend HL92, based on no evidence whatsoever? Twitchy (“protesters”), People (“rioters”) and CNN (“rioters”). That darn liberal media.
But not even Breitbart, Twitchy or Rush is claiming that “many hoses were slashed.” We only hear that claim from the person who just described himself as “center-left.” Interesting how that works.
@Rafer Janders: Bravo!
HarvardLaw92:
I’ll wait patiently while you cite my comment where I made a claim about “what happened inside that van.” Once again, you are making shit up. That’s what you did when you said this:
You have a pattern of making worthless statements. But my favorite one is this:
@ Jukeboxgrad
I claim to be what I’ve always claimed to be – center-left. I’m sorry if I don’t pass your purity test, but frankly, as I said, I couldn’t give any less of a shit.
I have been told by my nephew, and others working with him, that multiple hoselines were slashed. I have no reason to doubt him. We’ve already established that slashing occurred, so what is it with you? Putting firefighters at risk is only meaningful if it happens at more than one location? Are you asserting that it’s OK since it was (in your mind) “only” one hoseline?
Now, back to that question you keep avoiding – You’re convinced that you know exactly what happened inside that van. On what evidence do you base this sense of certainty? You’ve certainly seen no video of what happened inside it – as none exists.
So we have me asserting that hoselines were slashed, and the video backs up my assertion that slashing occured. Jukeboxgrad asserts that aggressive driving broke Gray’s neck, but has no video to back up the assertion.
Note: anytime you want to admit that this is personal with you and involves nothing more than your sense of dislike for me, that’d be ok too.
But you still don’t know what happened inside that van. I’m betting this gets shipped out to Howard or Harford for trial. Three guesses as to which one of our viewpoints those jury pools have more in common with?
And that’s why there are this many media reports “that multiple hoselines were slashed:” zero.
Why is it that your “nephew, and others working with him” are giving this important information only to you, and to no one else? Maybe they think no one in the press would have any interest in hearing this important information?
One more time: I’ll wait patiently while you cite my comment where I made a claim about “what happened inside that van.”
Where did I do that?
@ Jukeboxgrad
So what is your theory about how Gray’s neck got broken? By all means, lay it out.
You said this:
I can’t find the part of your comment where you explain why you said I said something I never said.
@ Jukeboxgrad
So you are calling my nephew a liar?
Where’s your proof that it didn’t happen? The media has largely been falling over themselves sniffling about the poor oppressed rioters. I’m not surprised they don’t seem to care about reporting anything that discounts that narrative.
But, again, as we have seen, slashing DID occur. Are you prepared to state with certainty that only one hose line was slashed? If so, on what evidence do you base this?
We had a multi-car pileup near my town the other day. No media reported on it. Does that mean that it didn’t happen?
@ Jukeboxgrad
No, you seem certain that the police deliberately broke Gray’s neck / caused it to be broken. If that is inaccurate, then mea culpa, but as I requested, lay out your theory of the events in question. If you believe that mine is wrong, then supply your own. You’ve made it clear that you dislike both me and my proposed sequence of events, so supply your own. Do something besides whine about me being a meanie.
And remember, my guys are presumed innocent. I don’t have to prove anything. That’s Mosby’s job. All their legal teams have to do is put Gray on trial – which will be considerably easier once the cases get moved out of Baltimore City (as they almost certainly will).
You said this:
Your video shows one cutter cutting one hose. Your claim that “hoses were slashed all over the city” is fiction. You are a prolific bullshitter.
I’m calling you a liar. Here’s an example of just one lie you told recently:
Making shit up is a habit of yours.
I’m surprised that Harvard never taught you anything about the concept of proving a negative.
Yes, there is no such thing as a right-wing media that would be drooling over a credible report that “hoses were slashed all over the city.”
@ Jukeboxgrad
So, should we take the above as “I have no theory of the crime” or “I simply refuse to lay out a theory of the crime because I’m more interested in attacking someone I dislike”?
As I said, even if only one hose line is slashed, does that not bother you? Are you prepared to go on record stating that you believe it was wrong, and the person(s) who did it should be charged with attempted murder and belongs in prison?
Or are you one of those people who believes it was justified, and the person(s) who did it should not be charged. (I have actually heard this argument from people …)
Christ man, take a position that amounts to more than you disliking me. You’ve more than made that clear. Make a fricking argument …
Neither, but I understand that you just can’t stop trying to put words into someone else’s mouth.
I did. You said this:
You lied.
@HarvardLaw92:
You are disparaging an entire community of tens of thousands and a protest that was for over a week entirely non violent made up of thousands over the actions of a few hundred. You have repeatedly called 10s of thousands of people shiftless and lazy based on your personal prejudices. You have repeatedly characterized thousands of people as thugs based on the actions of 10% or less of their number.
It is crystal clear at this point that you have absolutely no interest in justice for Gray, for the protesters, for the people of West Baltimore, or for the police that are supposed to serve them. Your singular concern is vengeance for the act of a few people that may have put your nephew at risk. You seem to want that with such passion that you could not care less if anyone else receives anything approaching justice. You simply don’t care what happened to Gray or if the officers deliberately gave him a ‘rough ride’ that led to his death. You do care that getting the officers off will be a poke in the eye to the community that you have a visceral hate on for right now. That is the “justice” you want. I hope that after some reflection that you will realize that this has been a low point for you.
I see no reason to believe that he actually has a nephew. I also see no reason to believe that he has actually stepped foot in either Baltimore or Harvard Law School.
@HarvardLaw92:
You made a positive claim that fire hoses were slashed all over the city. As evidence you provided a youtube video of exactly one hose being slashed. If you were on the other side of this debate you would rightly point out that is a laughable attempt at proving the first assertion.
this is getting good.
@michael reynolds:
Nope, he’s just so mired in his own emotions that he is arguing like mr p.
Yes, but probably not more laughable than this:
Or this:
Anyway, laughter is appropriate. After all, he said that what he does is “a performance.”
@Grewgills:
No, I am making two points.
1) Rioters are thugs. They deserve no compassion, no consideration of their grievances and no quarter. Baltimore handled this sort of thing better in 1968. This latest episode was about SRB getting herself reelected and trying not to look bad on television.
2) West Baltimore, among many Baltimore neighborhoods, is populated by people who are far removed from slavery, far removed from redlining, far removed from segregation and far removed from Jim Crow. They enjoy one of the most generous assistance packages available in the country and live in a city with one of the highest spending per pupil rates in the country. Despite these facts, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars having been expended on their welfare over the last 50 or so years, they remain mired in poverty. They still have a 67% unwed birth rate. They still have a 60% single parent household rate. Parts of Baltimore have a 50% unemployment rate.
At what point does responsibility for those outcomes begin to attach to them? At what point do we accept that throwing money at the problem has done nothing but grow the problem? At what point do we dare demand that they accept some degree of responsibility for their own futures?
I have respect for anyone who works hard to better themselves, and there are many in those neighborhoods trying to do so. Them I’ll help in any way I can. What I do not respect is people justifying laziness by holding up the umbrella of racism and calling themselves oppressed.
Immigrants from other countries come here and face the same disadvantages, if not more, and yet they thrive. They aren’t burning down their own GD neighborhoods. It’s just one group. Why is that?
Blah, blah, blah. You said this:
You’re a liar.
@HarvardLaw92:
They again. One fuc/ing person allegedly threw a piece of concrete at a fire truck. Another one person cut a hose. Now they, which apparently means either all of West Baltimore or all of the protesters, tried to kill your nephew. The entire community are thugs. The entire protest are thugs intent on killing fire fighters.
Throwing a rock at a truck is attempted murder. Cuffing a man, sitting him on a narrow bench, failing to belt him in* is at worst reckless disregard in your world. The latter is ok though because… thug and drugs.
Jesus man, can logic reach anywhere inside your head at this point?
@HarvardLaw92:
On point one, you have not until this post distinguished between residents of WB, protesters (the vast majority of whom are and were peaceful), and the rioters. You have had nothing but insults to cast in their direction.
*in direct breach of policy because it can end in seriously injured or dead people
@Grewgills:
It’s many things. I’m enraged about the attacks on firefighters. No argument there. Given the opportunity, I’d cheerfully throw the switch myself. The fact that the people responsible for this will likely never see the inside of a cell is beyond comprehension.
I’ve also been getting progressively more and more annoyed of late about the direction of the discussion around here. Far left wingers, especially the smug paternalistic variety, annoy me as much, if not more, than far right wingers. Cop haters positively infuriate me. Consider this sort of my way of flipping them off.
My position on that one is call a Crip when your house is being robbed – see how that one works out for you. These people do a job that none of us would do – and face things that no one should see – on a daily basis. They deserve more than this baying for their blood mentality that is oozing up from the ground.
I can tell you this much – convicting all six of these officers won’t change a single thing about West Baltimore. It’s beyond fixing at this point.
@HarvardLaw92:
Oh ffs. Bye already.
@Grewgills:
Not allegedly. https /www youtube com/watch?v=9G6bJp53L2g
Not according to Marilyn Mosby …
@PT:
Nah, I think I’ll stick around and voice a more dissenting opinion than I have in the past from now on. This mutual masturbation society needs a little shaking up.
Until the next time you say this:
We’ve seen this movie before.
@HarvardLaw92:
That’s fine my man. But next time your opening move shouldn’t be announcing your exit. It opens you up for deserved ridicule. And then there’s the hateful racist stuff. But by all means … Dissent.
@PT:
I honestly wouldn’t have returned, but this:
pissed me off enough to come back. I still think it’s a losing proposition and this place is unavoidably an echo chamber at this point, but at least it might be amusing.
Again, since when is making accurate, but uncomfortable, assertions racist? Know what I think is racist? The paternalistic attitude towards these people displayed by many on here which presumes that they have to be helped because they’re incapable of doing anything for themselves.
I’m pointing to 50 years of failed policies, dramatically failed policies, and saying “the emperor has no clothes”. It’s time to try something else. The folks invested in the emperor’s garments don’t like that. They’d rather buy him more invisible cloaks so they can congratulate themselves on their magnanimity and feel swell.
The problem is that he’s still naked …
@HarvardLaw92: Re: all your contributions on this thread:
I grew up In Israel. Between the time I turned 18 and the time I turned 28 and emigrated ,the following things happened, in rough chronological order:
* A youth hostel I was staying at was hit by a rocket shot from Lebanon.
* My best friend from junior high was killed in a bus bomb.
* So did the brother of an ex-girlfriend
* And a brother of another close friend
* My parents house was hit by another rocket, which would have killed my sister if she was not out working.
* My brother got hit by a bullet that ricocheted off his helmet in Gaza.
This doesn’t make me unique in any way: in fact, as Israelis go, I am lucky, having lost no close family or friends.
Doe this mean that, like my fellow Israelis, I should have voted for Bibi and his “kill the brutes” coalition partners?
If not, why not?
@HarvardLaw92:
No quarter? Seriously, you are basically advocating for policing much more brutal than the American army did in Iraq- or the Israeli army in Palestine?
I think I’ll just leave The Case for Reparations here.
I was going to quote the last bit about how the subprime financing crisis hit Baltimore pretty bad due to how they marketed subprime loans to black people (even if they would qualify for prime!), but I’ll not bother and link the whole thing
After reading this thread, fairly certain either none of you are lawyers, or you’re all horrible lawyers.
@humanoid.panda:
No, I am saying that the proper response to a riot is not to stand back and let it happen. The proper response is to bring it to an end as quickly as possible and as forcefully as necessary. That was not done until it was far too late, primarily IMO because Baltimore’s mayor was more worried about how she’d look on TV than she was with doing her job.
When you have an active riot and you dodge calls from the governor for 2 1/2 hours, as she did, you are playing politics. That was inexcusable.
That’s hilarious, because when you “returned” (shortly after saying “I’m out of here”) you proceeded to post roughly 60 comments that neglected to reference the comment that supposedly “pissed [you] off enough to come back.” It pissed you off so much that you forgot to say anything about it.
Another lie from a serial liar.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Your little tiff with me is getting boring. You don’t like me. I assure you the feeling is mutual. Move on …
I suppose The Baltimore Sun and Maryland’s governor are lying now as well?
@Tillman:
Caveat emptor.
The Baltimore Sun did not make a claim. The Republican governor made a claim, and his claim is unsupported, and even his claim is not a claim that the mayor was ‘dodging’ his calls.
But surely you also heard this from your nephew, right?
You’re confused. The one who promised to leave is you.
@ Jukeboxgrad
So we can chalk that one as “Jukeboxgrad believes that the Governor of Maryland is a liar too”.
Is that how it works? Anybody who disagrees with you or says something that you dislike is a liar? I imagine you must spend a great deal of time attacking people.
Or perhaps that’s why you spend so much time here – you like echo chambers.
I know – maybe she was in the bathroom for 2 hours! Maybe none of aides told her that the governor was calling – repeatedly. I mean, it’s just the governor, right? Nothing important … 😀
You’re a piece of work …
@n Jukeboxgrad
Consider that rescinded. At this point I’ll cheerfully stick around just to be a personal pain in your ass and see how long you can keep up this tantrum.
Oh, and just for kicks – you know who’s responsible for people getting crappy mortgages? The nimrods who signed them. Feel free to explode.
The liar is you, because the claim he made is not the claim you made. You also need to explain why you said “the Baltimore Sun” supports your claim. They don’t. They only reported what the governor said.
Earlier you said this:
If it’s plausible that a man wearing handcuffs figured out how to break his own neck, then it’s also plausible that “none of aides told her that the governor was calling.”
@HarvardLaw92:
If this is really you then I’m disappointed. When I was in my 20’s my wife was pistol-whipped by a black man in an attempted rape. I went a bit ape shit for an hour or two but then I got a grip. And I was a 25 year-old waiter not a middle-aged lawyer. And I didn’t see it on TV, or hear about it later, I heard her scream and saw the blood.
Is this really the worst sh!t that’s happened to you?
This is an overreaction on your part and I suspect you’ll be sorry for it when you pause and reflect. Because I have to tell you, you are subverting your own case. You’re denigrating people who’ve generally experienced far, far more trauma and fear in their lives than you have in this unfortunate incident. You’re coming off like a sheltered rich kid who never took a fist in the teeth before, while sneering at people with a tenth of your resources and ten times your bad breaks.
You’re not making sense, you’re not arguing rationally, you sound fwcking drunk. Not only are you irrational, you’re flailing, you’re missing facts, you’re making logic errors and having holes poked in you by people you’d normally handle. You’re coming off weak.
Now I’m a simpleton and a non lawyer so I could use some help here.
Is Harvardlaw92 really saying that he believes that Gray intentionally injured himself in an incredibly painful and fatal manner? IF so could someone explain to me why someone would do such a thing when they weren’t high out of their mind on pcp?
Also is Harvardlaw92 really advocating that we should not care because Gray had a prior criminal record? That we should wait till the police kill an upstanding member of society before doing anything?
It’s not complicated. He’s a troll. One way we know is that he said so.
Interesting. Most people would think that when she “did not return his repeated phone calls for more than two hours”, she had a reason.
So the Baltimore Sun is in the business of repeating unsubstantiated rumors? Earlier you were holding media coverage up as a surety. Now you are asserting that it can’t be relied on. Which is it?
Because his head and his body were restrained and completely immobile, right? As you have admitted, you have no video of what happened, so it’s possible that he slammed his own head against something in a fit of rage.
I’d be more likely to believe SRB if she wasn’t also refusing to respond to the governor’s assertion. Could that be because she knows she’d get thrown under the bus if she tried to lie?
@Matt:
No, he is saying that it is POSSIBLE that Gray intentionally injured himself, and that possibility introduces reasonable doubt if you can sell it to a jury. Remember, Mosby has to prove her case. All the defense team has to do is muddy the water and put Gray on trial. This is especially relevant given the overwhelming likelihood that the cases will be moved to another county for trial. Helpful hint – those counties are quite different demographically from Baltimore City.
No, he isn’t. He’s saying that the victim wasn’t a choirboy, and at least one person on the jury is likely to care about that. Maryland requires unanimous verdicts by constitutional mandate unless waived by the defendant (which none of them will be dumb enough to do), and you only need one.
Except that we don’t actually know that she “did not return his repeated phone calls for more than two hours.” We only know that the Republican governor made this claim, and that the claim is unsupported. And even if it’s true that she “did not return his repeated phone calls for more than two hours,” we don’t know that the reason is ‘dodge,’ because that’s not the only possible reason.
They are in the business of reporting what people say. They reported what the governor said. You claimed they did more than that. That’s because you’re a liar.
@HarvardLaw92:
Society, in its infinite wisdom, decided Wells Fargo was at fault to the tune of millions of dollars they had to provide to defrauded signatories, but whatever. Your views are well-known.
@HarvardLaw92:
What I saw in that video was something being thrown at the truck that turned into a cloud of dust as soon as it hit the front of the truck. Have you seen cinder blocks before? Have you seen cinder blocks hit with force before? Here is a video of a cinder block being hit with 5000lbs of force. Note how it doesn’t disintegrate into a puff of powder. What was thrown at that fire truck was not a cinder block. Even if that were a cinder block (which by appearances it was not) the most damage it would have possibly done to a speeding fire truck would be to either damage the front grill and perhaps the radiator or spiderweb part of the windshield. It would not have penetrated the windshield. None of the firemen in that truck had their lives put in danger by that thrown whatever it was. It was a bad act worthy of condemnation, but it was not attempted murder. The fact that you said you would gleefully throw the switch (kill) the person who did this is not indicative of someone looking for justice. The officers you want to defend pro bono at a bare minimum recklessly disregarded department policy by cuffing the hands and feet of Gray and placing him on a thin bench in the back of a van without strapping him in before driving at least 30 minutes back to the station. The fact that you want to work to get them off with no punishment doesn’t speak to a desire for justice. This all speaks to either a profound lack of empathy and the desire for blood from anyone who you feel did you or yours wrong or of another ‘performance’ to rile up people you don’t like. Neither of those speak well of you. Alternately you are just too emotionally tied up in this at the moment to be rational. I’m hoping for the latter.
@HarvardLaw92:
So you’re appealing to emotion with that and since those on the jury are human there’s at least one person who it’ll effect and thus the case is “won”. That’s a fascinating piece of information. I keep getting summoned for jury duty so I guess at some point I’ll see this in person.
I find it disheartening the way you slander whole areas of people for the actions of the few. I’m in a poor area that seems to be in a similar vein to your descriptions. I along with quite a few other people here are currently trying to pull ourselves out of this poverty. It just saddens me that despite all my effort and my good record all it takes is one or two idiots on my block to get me hit with the same brush.
@Tillman:
Wells agreed to settle. Society decided nothing. Wells decided that it was cheaper in the long run in terms of financial cost and its public image to make it go away.
You’re correct though about my views. Nobody in this subprime mess signed a mortgage with a gun to their head. If they’re guilty of being stupid and gullible, whose fault is that?
You have to love people who ostensibly can afford a mortgage, but can’t afford a fricking attorney to explain to them what they are signing. The last I heard, Legal Aid is free …
@Matt:
My job is to defend the interests of my clients regardless of their guilt. If I know they are guilty, it limits what I do in pursuit of that defense, but that’s it. Justice is a consideration for the jury.
I’m simply asking difficult questions which these folks do not like. Is everyone in West Baltimore et al lazy? No, but I’ll wager it’s a larger percentage than these good folk here want to admit to themselves. As I said, I’ll gladly help anyone who is trying to help themselves, but I have no use for someone whose purpose in life is to game the system in order to avoid having to accept responsibility for their own life. I grew up in Baltimore, and I can say with some specificity based on that history of direct observation of and experience with the city that the latter category of people is also a larger percentage than the good folk here want to admit to themselves.
I’m willing to draw that distinction. The folks here seem offended by the suggestion that anybody there be held accountable for their own failures, and frankly, that offends me.
@HarvardLaw92:
Earlier I asked
To which you responded.
You have said more than that it was possible. You said it was likely and that you could convince a jury of that. The latter seems much more important to you and from your commentary here the past couple of days it seems the reason is spite. Spite is what is driving you, not any sense of justice or decency. You are acting like a spoiled child hurt for the first time. On the bright side whenever anyone asks what unquestioned privilege looks like I can point them to you in this thread.
@Grewgills:
Again, the video is what was available. I have no reason to believe that my nephew either doesn’t know what a cinder block looks like or has any reason to lie to me about his truck having been hit by one. I’m really not going to debate that point any further.
I suspect they’ll be convicted of something (although an exoneration is entirely possible), but it won’t remotely be murder. I’m fine with that. Again, justice is a concern of the jury. I think they are being made out to be scapegoats with charges that are disproportionate to whatever they may have done, ergo I’m going to (if they indeed desire my assistance) help them.
The Gray side of this equation has more than enough empathy to go around. I think it fitting that these officers, and by association all the other officers and firefighters who have to deal with the crap reality of Baltimore’s situation day in and day out, deserve some empathy too. In any case, they’ll be well represented regardless of who ends up driving.
Grewgills:
Expecting him to tell one story is expecting too much. The stories keep changing. There are many examples, but the simplest one is this:
When someone makes it clear that they don’t expect to be taken seriously it’s a mistake to take them seriously.
@HarvardLaw92:
When I lived in San Anselmo, one of our police captains retired with full disability from “job stress” – I mean living in San An is kinda like living in Disneyland. Stress from being a police captain in a hamlet with pretty much no crime broke this man’s health?
Two weeks later, he had a press release in the local paper announcing that he had stared a security business. Guess he was not quite broken after all. Still, he was happy to cash the disability checks.
@Grewgills:
Perhaps, but it’s not worth quibbling over. I think perhaps the long list of abuses that police officers suffer on a daily basis evens out the moral scale on this one, but I’ll do what I do in this regard for my own reasons. I don’t require your moral approval to do it. Yet again, justice is the concern of the system. Of the jury.
Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pretty good attorney. I could convince a jury that day is night – or better put – I can sure convince one of them anyway, and one is all that I need.
@anjin-san:
If you feel like hopping a plane, I’ll be glad to point out to you to whole blocks of people in Baltimore doing the same. It’s an endemic, parasitic way of life passed down from parent to child. I once heard it put like this by a teacher in Baltimore: “When they are five, they have dreams. Once they hit 10, they have a plan.” I’d wager your average 12 year old in West Baltimore can tell you more about welfare eligibility than your average attorney can. It’s a sad, sickening truth – the cycle perpetuates itself because they learn grift as a way of life.
While I disagree with what he did, at least your guy contributed something of value in his life.
Which is what you said before. Link:
And then you said that this statement was not your actual “position,” but was rather just “a performance,” and that it was “designed to cause you and others like you to react.” Link. And now we are being treated to a repeat “performance.” Why not just suggest that we reread the earlier threads? Think of all the innocent pixels that could be saved.
@HarvardLaw92:
Your nephew was in a highly stressful situation in a truck speeding through a riot on the way to a fire. He doesn’t need to be lying to be wrong.
I’m surprised that you actually still think that he actually has a nephew.
@HarvardLaw92:
My quibble was with your earlier claim that you wanted justice. If you are willing to admit that this a a performance for the sake of spite rather than you giving two sh!ts about justice I can let it drop.
@Grewgills:
Why are you determined to believe that he is? Doesn’t fit the narrative?
Look, I think this has been worn out. If you want to support these people, knock yourself out. I’ll be doing everything I can to defend the officers. If that means actively defending them, so be it. If it means writing a very large check, then so be it. Whatever it takes.
Spite? Desire to help them? Belief that they are being railroaded?
Probably all of the above, but like I said, I don’t require your moral approval.
Grewgills:
He already did that. When he made the same statements before he stated explicitly that he was just putting on “a performance.” Maybe he’s doing it again because he expects applause this time.
@jukeboxgrad
Whether he does or not doesn’t effect my argument and I give people the benefit of the doubt when it is about something as personal as family. No matter how much I disagree with him HL is a person with family he cares about just like the rest of us and I’m not going to piss on that.
@ Jukeboxgrad
The fact that it was aimed at pissing you off in that prior thread does not indicate that 1) I do not believe it or 2) that it was in any way inaccurate.
You can continue to rant about me all you like. This thread has run its course. If you feel the need, send the Gray family a check. At least they won’t be paying his legal fees for the open charges he was facing at the time of his death, but I suspect they’ll still take your cash.
Grewgills:
Generally a good idea, but also a bad idea when it’s someone who says things like this:
@HarvardLaw92:
I watched the video that you said showed his truck was hit with a cinder block, if what hit that firetruck was a cinder block I’m visiting from Alpha Centauri. If a cinder block lobbed in front of a fire truck speeding through an intersection can break through the windshield then they are making fire trucks in Baltimore much less sturdy than they do out here in the middle of the Pacific. You claimed that act was attempted murder. If the act of throwing whatever it was has no real chance to seriously injure, much less kill, anyone in that truck then your assertion is false. Your assertion that you would gleefully kill (flip he switch) the person that threw whatever is not the statement of someone in the least concerned with justice.
Your statement was this:
So I shouldn’t think you “do not believe it,” which suggests that you do “believe it.” But even though you “believe it,” it’s not actually your “position.” Thanks for clearing that up.
Thanks for admitting, again, that you are a troll.
@Grewgills:
At no time did I assert that was his truck in the video, did I? He says it happened, his peers back him up and I believe them. That’s all that needs to be said, and as I said earlier, I’m not going to debate their honesty. You can believe as you choose.
As far as justice, no, I am not concerned with it. Justice would be the kid who slashed hoses burning up in a fire. Justice would be the kids throwing cinder blocks getting their heads caved in by one. I’m generally an easy going guy, and I pay the taxes that support these parasites without complaining (much), but when you endanger the life of someone I love, especially when he’s putting his life at risk trying to save you from your own stupidity, then all bets are off. You become the enemy.
If that offends you, well, I’m sorry that it does, but that’s your issue, not mine. if it comes down to his life or the life of everybody in West Baltimore, well, it’s not even a choice.
@ Jukeboxgrad
In other words, I offend you. Go pound sand, you effete bleeding heart asshole. I couldn’t care any less.
Wrong. I don’t know why you would think you are important enough to offend anyone. You make me laugh. You are proving that this statement you made recently:
Has as much credibility as the one you made a long time ago:
@HarvardLaw92:
So I gathered a while back, but good of you to cop to it.
Now I understand what you mean when you say justice. If you shoot a gun in the air and the bullet lands in someone else’s yard, justice would be you being shot in the face. If you run a red light and narrowly miss running over someone then justice would be you then being T boned by a semi. Am I getting this right now?
Wow! You would prefer over 50,000 people dead to 1 member of your family and it isn’t even close. What about 100,000 would that be a close call? A million? How many of these lazy, shiftless thugs would you sacrifice for one of your own?
No, I just have an overdeveloped sense of SIWOTI and I would rather argue than grade papers at the moment. Tomorrow is another day and I suspect I will have less time to procrastinate.
I hope your family comes out of this fine and I hope you rethink some of your arguments here when you have cooled down a bit.
@michael reynolds:
Possibly all true. Rage is an exceedingly ugly thing, and it brings the resentments that we ALL carefully hide away in order to function in society out from behind their masks. Baltimore is a complicated place, with a lot of resentments bubbling just below the surface. I’m a child of Baltimore – my bubbie was the sweetest lady imaginable but she didn’t like the schvartza, and she wasn’t remotely unique in that regard, either as a Jew or as a Baltimorean, but especially not as a Baltimorean Jew. That particular divide goes back for a LONG time in Baltimore …
It’s one of the reasons I get annoyed when people who don’t live there, who’ve never lived there, rattle on as if they know the dynamics of the place. West Baltimore has been a cesspool populated by the same sort of people for decades, at least since the mid 1950s.
Maybe I should be more sympathetic, but I’m just not any longer. Not defending that or bemoaning it – it just is what it is. I’m fresh out of empathy by this point, and this little self-congratulating dogooder army, certain members in particular, is just so saccharine it makes my teeth hurt. I normally keep that sense of contempt to myself. Tonight, I didn’t. Sue me.
@JKB: I would think as a self-identified conservative you would empathize with a day marked by the murder of peacefully striking Chicago workers being murdered by agents of the state.
@HarvardLaw92: I can assure you so long as you’ve commented here, never have you kept contempt to yourself. Indeed a smouldering hatred for others appears a primary component of your existence. So do not think yourself under some obligation to attempt congeniality or restraint — one should not hold another responsible for what lay beyond ability.
@Ben Wolf:
I assure you that I have. That I engage you, for example, at all and attempt to do so congenially, given your particular brand of politics (which I find odious) is a prime example of that effort at tolerance.
Don’t confuse hatred with contempt. I hate very few people, but feel contempt for a somewhat larger set. To hate someone, you have to care about them on some level. Contempt doesn’t require that degree of emotional involvement. I’m sure that you, of all people, understand that concept well.
@Ben Wolf:
Interesting way of putting it, given that the mayhem began when striking workers attempted to rush the gates in order to attack strikebreaking workers who were being protected by the police (due to prior and ongoing harassment of these workers by the striking workers).
Or that the massacre the next day was triggered when anarchists threw a bomb at the police. Interestingly, more police officers died that day than workers.
Interesting which parts of history get remembered and which parts get (conveniently) forgotten …
I see that when you said “this thread has run its course” what you meant by that was ‘I’m not done posting comments.’ Which is also what you meant when you said “I’m out of here.”
Your comments make perfect sense once it’s understood that what you say tends to be the opposite of the truth.
I suppose I should be flattered by your obsessive personal focus on me, but to be honest it’s a tad creepy stalkerish. You really need to get some new material. You’ve worn out what you’re (trying to) work with at this point.
Or you could just refer to my last comment to you. It’s still valid.
I’m sorry you’re still so confused. You said this:
That’s a lie, and it’s a lie that is both important and transparent. Also both important and transparent is the way you doubled down on your lie after you were caught. Pointing out liars isn’t “creepy.” It’s necessary.
You making so many other statements that are also divorced from reality (like “I’m out of here,” in a comment which you followed with about 80 subsequent comments) is just icing on the cake.
“As far as justice, no, I am not concerned with it.”
This is weird to me because I could have sworn that you once said you were steeped in tikkun olam.
Man, when I saw the number of posts to this I had no idea how it was going to turn out. My father was a cop. My uncle was a cop. I grew up around cops all my life. I like cops. I don’t trust a single one of them. Just my opinion from my own experiences.
@Turgid Jacobian:
I am, to the extent that the mitzvot do not constitute misukan for those they are intended to serve.
In court, my job is not to seek justice. It is to vigorously defend the interests of my client to the best of my professional ability. Justice is the goal of the overall system.
@ Jukeboxgrad
I’ll be focusing on everybody else’s comments. Yours are just the same protracted personal gripe repeated over and over.
But hey. if beating that dead horse gives you your jollies, you just knock yourself out there, Sunshine 😀
Promises, promises. I wish this one wasn’t worthless, but your track record indicates that it is.
Of course there’s nothing unusual about running into a troll, but trolls rarely announce explicitly that trolling is their intention. So it’s helpful to notice that you said this:
And this:
And this:
What you do is “a performance,” and a “game,” and we can’t claim you didn’t warn us.
Do you have any idea what you sound like?!? It’s embarrassing.
LOL, he’s predictable …
Something for you to grouse and grumble about:
The cases will almost certainly be moved out of Baltimore City to one of the surrounding counties for trial. That means one thing: largely conservative, law & order type majority white juries.
Maryland is a compulsory unanimous verdict state, by constitutional mandate, so it only takes one juror voting to acquit for these guys to walk. I wonder how those juries I described above are going to weigh out a convicted felon heroin dealer with a lengthy sheet for burglary, assault, destruction of property, multiple counts of trafficking of narcotics (in his case heroin and crack), etc. Hell, the guy was facing charges again when he died. He was a career criminal.
In other words, the guy was a poster boy for everything that these jurors will despise and revile.
And it only takes one of them to acquit. I wonder which one it’ll be?
You’re in for disappointment.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled horse beating. 😀
@Folderol & Ephemera:
Do you have any idea how little I care about how you think I sound? Feel free not to read it.
Junkie the original internet troll
As Baltimore burns, rioters slash fire hoses
notice the “s” at the end of hoses…..it makes it pural ie more than one hose
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/baltimore-burns-rioters-slash-fire-hoses/nk4tr/
@anjin-san:
As someone with a family history of this problem i would like to congratulate you on your recovery. Too few actually get from where you were to where you are. It is an under appreciated accomplishment.
I realize you are too stupid to bother reading the article you cited:
I already posted examples of the so-called liberal media using plural for no reason. Thanks for providing another example.
More words that are divorced from reality. You already told us you care, because you have said repeatedly and explicitly that your statements are specifically designed to provoke. Which means you are a troll, by definition.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Keep on beating that horse.
I predict that Jukeboxgrad will respond again with the same personal attack in 4 … 3 … 2 …
Whether hl92 is really hl92 or a troll seems entirely irrelevant at this point. He/she has done a magnificent job of getting you all tied up in your panties.
Another day, another worthless thread.
@HarvardLaw92: @HarvardLaw92: Typical ignorant HLS bullshit.
The day is remembered not because of who threw the bomb (probably one of the anarchist factions, but accusations it was police agents have not been disproven) but because a number of moderate labor leaders were rounded up, given trials that clearly did not meet due process, and promptly executed.
Within a few years the executed men were given post-mortem pardons due to the outrageous actions of prosecutors and political leaders.
I some damn-fool HLS prosecutor had been in place in Baltimore the place would be a war zone by now. No damn sense or the intellectual humility necessary to learn a damn thing from anyone else as wonderful as you, I guess.
It’s becoming apparent that you don’t seem to care how your writing may be perceived. But it really doesn’t make you look any better if you rebut an observation of your embarrassing behavior with the most petulant “I don’t care!” rejoinder possible (with the standard “If you don’t like it you don’t have to read it” nonsense).
But feel free to continue destroying whatever was left of your pseudonym’s reputation here. You had a good run!
@DrDaveT: “Once again, this seems to be the most common link among all of the publicized incidents over the past couple of years. The level of provocation and/or justification behind the initial confrontation varies wildly, from “none at all” to “yeah, probably guilty as hell”. The absolute indifference to suffering and medical need is without exception. ”
Yes. For example, in the SC murder, one of the officers knelt on the head (I’ll bet it was actually the neck) of a man who’d been shot multiple times, for several minutes. The police rendered no first aid for several minutes.
It was an organized ‘finishing off’ of an injured man.
It’s not exactly a difficult prediction because I never said I wouldn’t. You’re the one who said this:
I said your promise to ignore me was worthless, and you promptly proved that I was right. I look forward to your next worthless promise. I’m sure there will be many.
@Dave Schuler: “I have my doubts that the police officers will be convicted on the charges. Based on published accounts it’s hard to see how the charge of 2nd degree murder in particular would stand. The defense that the original arrest was a mistake should obviate the possibility of predicate felony. If every mistake by every police officer is a possible felony, you probably won’t retain many police officers.”
First of all, f*ck all lying arguments about the police quitting, or not applying for the job. When that happens we’ll worry, but it never has before.
Second, f*ck you for lying about what happened. This was not a ‘mistake’, this was the murder of a prisoner, pure and simple.
@Xenos:
Not to ruin a good rant, but the executions took place more than a year after the original trial, and only then after the defendants had completely exhausted their appeals process (in which they enjoyed the services of no less than 4 competent attorneys) to both the Supreme Court of Illinois (which upheld the convictions) and the US Supreme Court (which denied certiorari).
Just how much due process do you think was denied them?
@Folderol & Ephemera:
This is a collection of strangers on the internet. You might want to consider getting some degree of perspective.
@Dave Schuler: “My point was not that it was a mistake but that it can be claimed to have been a mistake. ”
No, you’re statement was about it being a mistake, but thanks for admitting that you’re lying.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Of course you will. Like I said, you’re nothing if not predictable.
This is a collection of people that includes people who are sincere as well as people who are insincere. Thanks for doing such a good job of letting us know which category you’re in.
@HarvardLaw92:
At 9:08 am on 5/2/2015 you refered to Gray as:
Could you please tell us when Gray was convicted as a heroin dealer?
@Tyrell: “This seems kind of quick to have a thorough investigation. I am also not sure of a murder charge.”
First, it’s been close to two weeks. Second, the investigation needed only to establish cause and evidence to indict, not to convict.
And finally, the police loaded a guy into a van, and delivered him dead. What part of that do you not understand?
@Barry:
Murder requires intent, which is why the one officer charged with murder is actually being charged with what actually amounts to criminally negligent homicide. The title of the statute is a quirk of Maryland law, but it’s not actually murder in the sense that we legally define murder.
Even then, the likelihood of a conviction on that charge is remote.
Predicting that I’m going to confront lying liars who lie is not exactly hard, since I’ve been doing it here and elsewhere for a long time.
@Bob @ Youngstown:
Sure.
January 14, 2015: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance, possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute
December 31, 2014: Possession of narcotics with intent to distribute
April 13, 2012: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute, unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance, violation of probation
July 16, 2008: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance, possession with intent to distribute
March 14, 2008: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to manufacture and distribute
August 29, 2007: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute, violation of probation
July 16, 2007: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute, unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance (2 counts)
Note those are just the trafficking charges. His record includes several others besides those.
@ Jukeboxgrad
You did alliteration! Well done 😀
Keep toiling. The horse might not be dead yet? 😀
@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker: “I’m glad that some on the right are taking this seriously. It opens the possibility that thinking, rather than reacting, will start happening. The idea that the right will see the systemic elements that this type of event indicates is a bridge too far for me. ”
Frankly, the overwhelming majority of the right supports this. The only time they’ve had trouble is when the police use force – even, or especially, reasonable and prudent force – against right-wingers.
The most that we’ve ever seen is a very, very few individuals having problems, and almost all of them recant once it’s clear what the right-wing line is.
@HarvardLaw92:
Commenter, heal thyself.
@Stormy Dragon: “Eventually only the true-believers are left. ”
IMHO, true-believers in their own power. Corrupt prosecutors in conspiracy with corrupt police wield a lot of power.
@Grewgills: “Really? Out of all of the commentary that has happened here this is what did it for you? Why not make your case whatever that may be rather than leaving in a huff? ”
It’s weird, since he seemed to be more reasonable recently.
@HarvardLaw92:
Sorry, that’s an arrest record, not a conviction record.
According to Balt Sun and LA times, the drug possession with intent arrests were for MJ, not heroin.
Can you come up with a conviction?
@Folderol & Ephemera:
At this point I am just having fun. The topic is long since exhausted.
HarvardLaw92:
You said this:
What you cited is a list of charges, not convictions. Since you don’t understand the difference you should ask Harvard Law School for a refund.
You will show proof that he is “a convicted felon heroin dealer” at roughly the same time you show proof for this lie you told:
I guess “convicted felon heroin dealer” is something else you heard from your imaginary “nephew.”
@Bob @ Youngstown:
Sorry, in Maryland, arrests for marijuana are listed as marijuana. CDS means a controlled substance. They distinguish between the two.
You should feel free to examine his disposition records here if it interests you.
You’ll want to look for CDS:POSS W/INTENT DIST: NARC, and CDS:POSSESS-NOT MARIJUANA, among others. Those are the headliners though.
The burden of proving a claim rests with the person who made the claim. That’s you. You’re refusing to support your claim because it’s another lie.
@HarvardLaw92: Everything that you said is a lie, pure and simple:
“There is no case to make. ”
There is an excellent case to make – a prisoner was delivered dead by violence.
“This panel has determined its verdict long before today’s announcement of charges,”
We get to do that, especially when the evidence is overwhelming – and remember that the BPD has had almost two weeks to leak any exculpatory evidence, which they have not.
“… and challenging the orthodoxy of what has increasingly become some sort of self-congratulating mental masturbation society / echo chamber just doesn’t interest me much any longer. ”
There are multiple lies in here, which I’ll unpack.
First, about 40% of the American people like and want corrupt, brutal, and illegal police who are a law unto themselves, so long as the police target the people the right dislikes.
Second, liberals don’t and do not treat all cops as being evil. We consider evil cops to be evil, along with those who aid and abet them.
Third, we are not a self-congratulating orthodoxy – we are a faction which is against the prevailing orthodoxy of power.
Fourth, don’t be so full of yourself – you’ve participated in many debates here; the only reason that you’re leaving in a fraudulent huff is that you have an opinion which is factually wrong and morally indefensible.
@HarvardLaw92: I thought that you left in a huff, Mr. Harvard Lawyer.
Don’t you even have the self-control to wait until tomorrow, and to come back in another thread?
@Stormy Dragon: “PS – The dramatically storming out in a huff thing doesn’t work if you keep coming back to see if people miss you yet. ”
I did expect at least better acting from a Harvard lawyer.
@< Jukeboxgrad
Case # 108213015, Baltimore City Circuit Court. Pleaded guilty to CDS: POSS W/INT MANF/DISTR/DISP, 4/23/2009. Sentenced to 4 years.
There are others.
Would you like to continue?
Believing that he’s actually an actual “Harvard lawyer” is about as wise as believing that he was sincere when he said this:
I’d like you to help me find the part that says “heroin.”
@HarvardLaw92: “As for the bouncing around, you weren’t there. I wasn’t there.”
His neck was broken, *and* ‘rough rides’ are a known thing.
BTW, we know better than to accept a stupid and dishonest argument ‘you weren’t there’, and the implication that we can’t make reasonable inferences.
” You’re assuming that it happened, ”
He’s dead. That’s not an assumption.
“I suspect because you dislike the police. ”
You don’t have a single thing to support that.
“I suspect that it didn’t. ”
You suspect that he’s not dead?
“There’s enough reasonable doubt introduced by the testimony of the other passenger that he injured himself, and that’s all that I need to hear. Given the choice between 6 decorated cops and one drug dealer, I know who I’m, more likely to believe. ”
First, the testimony of a man in the custody of those who want certain testimony is not reliable; if you had actually gone to law school, you’d know that.
Second, the ‘testimony’ states that a many broke his own neck by slamming against the wall of a vehicle, while bound hand and foot. That’s clearly a lie propagated by the murderers, and you are clearly lying in their defense.
@Barry: Oh, and for somebody who stormed out in a huff, you still seem to be here.
@Barry:
Let me be a little more blunt with you then:
Your evident moral outrage aside, the likelihood that these guys walk is quite high. In fact, I’d say it’s overwhelming if the cases are sent to another jurisdiction, which is also quite likely.
I’m having a difficult time caring that a career criminal is dead – because he was a career criminal – and I assure you that there will be at least one person on the juries who’ll feel the same way. There always is …
One is all that it takes in Maryland.
@HarvardLaw92: “No, I’m just beyond fed up with apologists. Do I favor the police? Absolutely. It is what it is. ”
Again with the lies. You are not fed up with apologists – you are one yourself. And almost everybody here favors the police – what we don’t favor is corrupt police, and their dishonest apologists.
@HarvardLaw92: BTW, didn’t you just ‘storm out in a huff’?
@Barry:
Feel free to make your argument to the court. I’ve made up my mind about this one, as have you. Neither of us is interested in hearing what the other has to say on the matter.
@HarvardLaw92: “They could be utterly blameless and they’d still be charged with something to placate the hordes down in West Baltimore who’ve made a drug dealer into their latest hero du jour.”
They are not utterly blameless. That’s the whole point, which you are quite deliberately missing.
@HarvardLaw92: Still waiting for the door to close behind your storming-out-in-a-huff-@ss.
@Barry:
See previous comment. One dead lowlife isn’t worth six cops. There’s really nothing more for you and I to discuss.
@Barry:
LOL, oh no, at this point I’m staying. I’m just not going to be as nice as I’ve been in the past. You can take that for what you believe it to be worth (which I assure you doesn’t interest me either).
@HarvardLaw92: “The rough ride thing is disputed, and frankly, I just don’t believe it. Failing to provide medical assistance? Fine, I’ll accept negligence, but murder? Good luck …”
Still waiting for the huff-storm.
As for disputing the rough ride thing, explain the broken neck.
And do you think that we’re dumb enough to take ‘is disputed’ as meaning anything except that criminals and their defenders will lie?
@Grewgills: “Do you really think it at all likely that Gray crushed his own trachea and nearly severed his own spine, or do you just think you are a good enough attorney to convince a jury of that? ”
Answer the question, Harvard.
HarvardLaw92:
You said this:
The relevant statute is here. “CDS” is a large category which includes many substances that are not “heroin.” So the “heroin” part is something else you heard from your imaginary “nephew,” right?
Barry:
He already told us Freddie did that to himself.
@Barry:
Really? Seems to me that until they are convicted, which for reasons stated above is unlikely to ever happen, they are innocent of all charges against them. I’m not deliberately missing it. I’ve made a conscious decision that I do not care.
Unfortunate things happen all the time.
@HarvardLaw92:
Thank you, because it does interest me…..however the link that you provided is DEAD !
My understanding is that the only conviction with jail time was when he was 18, and he spent 2 years in jail. It’s not clear that he was dealing heroin.
Providing a dead link is not helpful.
@HarvardLaw92: “Or they simply made a good-faith error about the nature of the knife. You have proof of this knowing and intentional fabrication? See where this is going?”
First, for somebody who’s making a big kerfuffle about knowing what people are thinking, perhaps you should shut up (and you know – storm out in a huff).
Second, we’re aware that you are quite deliberately and quite dishonestly not mentioning the whole ‘murdered a prisoner’ thing.
@Stormy Dragon: “They’re being treated like peasantry and being subjected to the same justice as everyone else. Don’t we know the King’s Men are susposed to be above the law? ”
Thanks for point this out. HarvardHuffn’Puff here is claiming that ‘not being above the law’ is somehow a bad thing.
@Barry:
I’m not sure you get how this works.
My guys are innocent until proven guilty. I don’t have to prove ANYthing. That’s the job of YOUR side of this argument.
All I have to do is attack the victim and put him on trial, which I assure you is what will happen in court.
And all I need is one. Maybe he’s a closet racist. Maybe’s he knows someone whose life was destroyed by drugs. Maybe he just likes cops.
It doesn’t matter to me. All I need is one …
You, on the other hand, need all of them. Best of luck …
@HarvardLaw92: “I’ll take that as “No, I do not have any evidence to suggest that this wasn’t a good-faith error”. Thanks for playing. ”
Coming from a guy who still hasn’t even acknowledge a killing, that’s rich.
@HarvardLaw92: “Unless he injured himself, which is not outside the realm of possibility. ”
Stop lying. I’m amazed at your ability to rebuke everybody here for prejudging things, while looking at a dead prisoner, and finding doubt, when that doubt fits your prejudices.
@Barry:
Murder requires deliberate intent to effect death. You have evidence that these officers sent out with the intent of causing Mr. Gray’s death?
Bob @ Youngstown:
A link that works is here. Follow the instructions and enter the name. You will see cases that reference “CDS,” which is a large category that includes many substances that are not heroin. So our friend’s “heroin” claim is yet another lie from a serial liar.
That’s why he’s ignoring your questions.
@Barry:
I acknowledge a death. The circumstances of that death, from a criminal standpoint, are yet to be determined by a jury.
and I only need one juror. I only care about one juror.
Let me be frank with you – I do not care. His life, such as it was anyway, isn’t worth destroying 6 cops. Baltimore is a better place without him in it. If that offends you, feel free to go off on some emotional rant. I’ve had mine already. I’m back to cold now.
@ Jukeboxgrad
No, from his bail bondsman:
REID: He was accused of being a heroin dealer.
How long do you intend to play this game? I’ll need some coffee if you’re really off on one of your righteousness tangents, so let me know.
@HarvardLaw92: “It ended 50 years ago. Just how long do you think will be required for these people to step up and take responsibility for their own lives?”
Bullsh*t. That’s not even a new lie.
@HarvardLaw92: “It offends me that what passes for city government in Baltimore is likely throwing these people to the wolves in order to buy peace. ”
Where the alleged Harvard lawyer equates ‘police officers not being above the law’ to ‘throwing people to the wolves’.
Honesty is no more your strength than actually huff-storming-out’ing’ is.
I know “he was accused of being a heroin dealer.” You said he was convicted. You said that because you’re a liar. Find a child who can help you grasp the difference between “accused” and “convicted.”
You have problems that won’t be solved by coffee.
@Barry:
You didn’t answer the question, I notice. You guys never seem to want to address that one.
if it hasn’t been long enough, in your considered opinion, how long do you think will be required before we can begin to legitimately expect these people to carry at least a portion of their own weight? 50 years? 100 years? Next week?
@HarvardLaw92:
Example of high-minded officer of the court. Proof or truth be damned, all I need is one member of the jury to be persuaded by ANY means, even if it has nothing to do with the testimony presented at trial.
I see that as “win at all costs” even if the cost undermines the “overall goal of justice for all”.
@Trey:
LOL, knock yourself out. Have fun.
@Bob @ Youngstown:
It will be testimony presented at trial. It’ll just be testimony concerning Gray and his activities.
Are you asserting that these officers aren’t entitled to advance whatever defense they feel is useful to them?
I see it as having made a value judgment. You’re free, of course, to make your own. I’ve made mine.
Bob @ Youngstown:
Nothing new about this. He already said this:
So he admitted that he’s no different than the people he condemns. Link.
@HarvardLaw92:
Actually, not necessarily true, only first-degree does. Second-degree, for example, can be a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender’s obvious lack of concern for human life. The van driver cop in Baltimore was in fact charged with second-degree depraved-heart murder, where “depraved-heart” means that the suspect held a reckless disregard for another person’s life.
For a charge of felony murder, you don’t even have to have committed the murder yourself — if someone is murdered in the commission of a felony, then everyone involved in that felony, not just the killer, can be charged with the murder. No intent is necessary.
@ Jukeboxgrad
It warms my heart to know that you are willing to spend your entire day scouring my postings in pursuit of something that I don’t care about in the least.
What do you think the outcome is going to be? People are going to dislike me? Well, helpful hint, they probably already do now. Whoopee … Strangers on the internet, remember? How will I ever survive if strangers on the internet dislike me? Whatever will I do?
Beginning to see how utterly ridiculous you’re acting? You’re pursuing a goal that your opponent doesn’t care if you achieve. Is this seriously how you spend your days?
@Rafer Janders:
Second degree murder in Maryland requires intent. Depraved heart murder is a misnomer that is more akin to depraved indifference. Different elements, different sentencing guidelines.
That said, I think I’ve been more than clear about why a conviction on that charge in this case, which only one officer is facing to begin with, is exceedingly unlikely. Are you disputing the procedural analysis?
You thinking that I care whether or not you care is yet another example of how stupid you are.
I have spent many days deconstructing clowns like you, and for many good reasons.
For the benefit of those just tuning in, here’s a quick review of a couple of your most colorful lies. I like this one:
I also like this one:
It’s interesting to notice your consistency as a liar. In both cases you are exaggerating the truth (one hose was slashed, and Gray was a convicted drug dealer, but the drug was not necessarily heroin). In both cases, when caught you doubled down on the lie. In both cases, you pretended to show proof even though your so-called proof did not support your claim. In both cases, you tried to change the subject after your phony ‘proof’ was challenged.
Please proceed.
LOL, you must, else why do you keep toiling away? For that matter, why do you keep responding?
Such as? It sounds to me like you need to get laid. You’ve got a bad case of SIWOTI that is being used against you
@HarvardLaw92:
The name of the charge under Maryland law is “second-degree depraved heart murder.“
@HarvardLaw92:
Absolutely not, but even you should recognize that attacking the victim is not always a good tactic.
No doubt that the defense will be counting on using Gray’s past, but it will be up to a judge to determine if his past is probative to the present case.
As for myself, I’ll wait till the trial and the testimony before I pass judgement.
Have a blessed day.
For reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not you care. By the way, the word for a person who asks questions while refusing to answer them is chutzpah.
@Rafer Janders:
Big deal. He’ll never be convicted of it, and I suspect you know that already. She’s showboating for the benefit of the natives.
In fact, I suspect that a broad majority of these charges will not withstand the jury room. The bar for conviction in Maryland is just too high, and none of these guys is going to waiver unanimity.
@Bob @ Youngstown:
No, but when your victim is a black drug dealer, your defendants are cops and your jury pool is largely conservative and majority white, it’s a pretty great one – especially in a compulsory unanimity state.
His past directly affects their decision to effect the stop in the first place and to pursue. It’ll get in.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Well, ok, if it’s what gives you a chubby.
By the way, the term for a person who spends hours toiling away on the internet when he’s too dumb to grasp that he’s being toyed with for someone else’s amusement is SIWOTI.
I don’t take you seriously? Haven’t you gotten that yet? You’re amusing because you take me SO seriously, so much so that you must defeat and expose the stranger on the internet!
Like I said, you desperately need to get laid. The sooner the better. Since I suspect that is also unlikely to happen, please saddle up that donkey and charge away, Don.
LMAO … rme at the freaks you meet on the internet …
@HarvardLaw92:
Welcome to the Republican Party.
You thinking that you are not a source of amusement is a source of amusement.
@Jack:
I used to be a Republican. If it weren’t for their ridiculous obsession with everybody’s sex life and the bible thumping, I’d still be one.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Like I said, if it’s what gets you through your evidently sad little day, saddle up the donkey and charge away.
You thinking I need your permission is yet another source of amusement.
Hilarious, coming from someone who just said this:
Self-awareness is not exactly your strong point.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Dapple, away! Charge the windmill!
ROFL … freak 😀
Wow, this is some thread. I have two questions:
1) When did HarvardLaw92 become such an angry racist asshole and WATB? Or is that just James P or superdestroyer using his name?
I mean – “shiftless, lazy people”? Seriously? You misspelled “ni**ers”, dude.
2) Since he has apparently already admitted that it nothing more than a performance specifically intended to get reactions from the crowd here (i.e., trolling), why has he still being allowed to post dozens of additional angry, racist trollposts?
Okay, that’s actually three, I know
@ Jukeboxgrad
Have fun toiling. I think I’ll get some golf in since it’s such a lovely day.
I’ll check back in later to see how you’ve progressed though, OK? I wouldn’t want to to think I don’t love you any longer. 🙄
😀 *doubled over with laughter* 😀
That clears it up, thanks
Good idea. Oops, I almost forgot. You said this:
When you said “I can produce,” did you mean on this planet? Did you mean during this century? Because so far you have managed to “produce” this number: zero. So when you “check back in later,” will you finally manage to “produce” what you said you “can produce?” Or will it be just be more of your fascinating commentary about my “chubby?” Just curious.
@HarvardLaw92:
Gee, I’m impressed by your unique life experience in Baltimore. Why do that when I could just hop in my car and drive to 73rd Ave. in Oakland, where I lived about half a century ago?I don’t think you have anything going on there that I could not find here.
My family has deep roots in Oakland. When I was little, we had paper drives, science fairs, and father/son spaghetti dinners where the dads (who all affected the astronaut look) listened to Roger Miller Records, and talked about Johnny U and “The Pack”. (Hey, I had a Tyrell moment!)
Things have changed for sure, and not for the better. Yet I manage to go through my days without despising the poor people that live in my old neighborhood.
So, rationalize the systemic abuse of disability retirements by police if you must. I’m sure you could do the same for billionaires who game the system for profit.
Is the guy who has been ranting in here the real you? If it is, I can only feel sorry for you.
@Ken:
No, I meant what I said. Shiftless, lazy people, irrespective of race. Do you dispute that there is a healthy serving of shiftless, lazy people living in West Baltimore?
If so, go visit. You’ll change your mind on that topic. I grew up there, so no need for me to visit again. Nothing much ever changes there. Same people sitting on stoops drinking or shooting or smoking their lives away.
Jukeboxgrad is recycling old posts from a long ago thread into this thread, for reasons known only to him but which apparently help him make it through his day. I’ve always been exceedingly pro-cop. Is that something that you’d honestly find to be that surprising?
@anjin-san:
I do not “despise” them. I just do not feel sorry for them any longer. I will say that I’m pretty ill with the ones that burn down buildings and loot stores. Those folks I do have contempt for, but they are a subset of the larger problem. That having been said, their lives are the product of their own bad choices, and at some point the responsibility for those outcomes has to fall at their own feet. For me anyway, that point has arrived.
I used to believe they could be saved, but then I came to the conclusion that they probably do not want to be saved. They want to be supported, while simultaneously railing about the indignity of being supported, and that hypocrisy was just too much to stomach, so I exited the room.
January is not “long ago,” and what you did then is relevant because it’s blindingly obvious that you’re doing precisely the same thing now. What you said today:
What you said in January:
So when you said that then it was just “a performance,” but now it’s not? More hilarity, please.
Yeah, sure – your nonstop references to “these people”, the “shiftless, lazy” “thugs” “whose purpose in life is to game the system in order to avoid having to accept responsibility” is about *everyone*
If “white people can be ni**ers, too” is the best you’ve got, color me unimpressed
@HarvardLaw92:
In other words “a jury of your peers”……
@HarvardLaw92:
The language you have been employing on this thread suggests otherwise.
@Bob @ Youngstown:
Jury pools have to reflect as much as reasonably possible the racial makeup of the jurisdiction from which they are drawn. In all of the likely candidates (Howard, Anne Arundel, and Harford, IMO) that is far and away majority white. It’s just the nature of the beast under the best of circumstances. With compulsory unanimity thrown in, it becomes even more pointed, because only one holdout is required to derail the conviction.
@anjin-san:
If so, mea culpa. I suspect that is to some extent because we’ve been discussing multiple sets of a population, and to another extent because people who are offended read their own issues into commentary, which colors it to fit their outrage.
I don’t think the majority of the folks there are bad people. I do think the looters are bad people who belong in prison. The rest I think have mostly made bad choices and now they have to live with them. That doesn’t make them bad people, but it does at some point have to make it their problem.
Until they have an interest in solving it, it’ll never get solved. You can’t help people who seemingly refuse to help themselves.
@Ken:
It IS about everyone. In the context of this discussion, it’s blacks, but i feel exactly the same way about a white single mother in Mississippi engaging in the same behaviors. A culture of dependency isn’t defined by race. Neighborhoods are defined by race. Dependency is an equal opportunity disease.
@HarvardLaw92: Your wikipedia history is showing. Workers peacefully protesting approached the gate and were immediately fired upon by police, killing several. Do leave these complex issues to others, you seem unsuited to it.
@Ben Wolf:
That’s the funny thing about history – you have to read multiple versions of it to get anywhere near the truth. If you want to select the ones that fit your preferred narrative and disregard the rest, be my guest.
The striking workers had been harassing strikebreakers at the McCormick plant for several days. Why would they suddenly peacefully approach them, at the very time they were leaving the plant, on this one particular day? Did they suddenly have an interest in witty repartee? In tea with the boys? The cops were there in the first place to protect the strikebreakers precisely because they had been previously harassed.
I notice that you didn’t dispute the assertion that the cops were attacked first the following day, or that more of them died than civilians.
@HarvardLaw92:
And where were you on the George Zimmerman trial?
@HarvardLaw92: used to be a Republican.
@Jack:
This has zero to do with George Zimmerman. There’s no fight, no conflict, no threat, no ambiguous situation. It’s about six officers who carted around a shackled prisoner, and who, according to the prosecutor, knew he was unresponsive and did nothing about it. Have you ever come across somebody, asked them a question, found them unresponsive, and then ignored it?
“Hey Jack how are you?”
(Jack lies face-down, silent, motionless.)
“Well, have a nice day.”
5 of 6 officers gave statements, it looks like. I’m guessing they basically issued their own guilty verdicts and probably put the worst words and actions in the role of the driver, who did not cooperate.
Long and interesting thread.
Most of you know that I am no fan of heavy handed police tactics nor the current state of law enforcement as we know it today. But,I must say, I agree with HarvardLaw92 on this. There will be no conviction anywhere close to homicide or manslaughter.
FACT: Gray was alive when he entered the van.
FACT: He was unresponsive (not dead) when they went to pull him out.
FACT: Something, which must be proved, but to which no one can offer evidence, happened in the interim.
6 officers have been charged. If they all stick together, which is very likely, at most you will see a conviction for negligence or misconduct.
There is no proof that any one officer can be blamed for Gray’s death. You cannot point to any one person and say “He caused Gray’s death”, and make it stick.
The officers cannot be forced to testify. So all there will be is supposition.
What many people want to do is simply say, all the officers are to blame, and be done with it. But, that’s not how the justice system works. As long as the defense can argue that many other things might have happened during transport, none of which were attributable to the officers, caused Gray’s injuries.
Thus, there is reasonable doubt.
Something happened. Yes. But until someone can say specifically what happened beyond any reasonable doubt, this will not result in any jail time for the officers…and thus, more rioting and looting by those that loved and cared for Gray so much that their only recompense is to riot and loot.
@Modulo Myself:
But, you are wrong. The officers that chased Gray will say he fought and resisted arrest (fighting and ambiguity).
The arresting officers will say he was combative as they tried to get him in the van (fighting and ambiguity).
The driver will say he was injured before being transported (ambiguity).
Everyone will point to someone else and no one will be held accountable because no one person is accountable because police, as is designed, are unaccountable–unless they confess to it.
@Jack: Probably without meaning to, you have eloquently explained why a portion of the country feels that rioting is the only way to be heard.
@Jack:
FACT: He was more than “unresponsive” when they went to pull him out — his spine was severed and his voice box was crushed.
So a healthy though handcuffed man enters a police van with six police officers. Since he’s in their custody, they have a responsibility to keep him safe. The police take an hour to drive him six blocks, during which time they make several stops. When they eventually get out of the van, the man emerges with a severed spine and crushed larynx.
One wonders what could have happened…
The troll told us: Freddie did it to himself.
@Jack:
I’m afraid you’re confused as to what “reasonable” doubt is. Gray was in their custody and control, and as such they were responsible for his safety. They had custodial responsibility. Almost anything that could have happened in that van, other than a ghost floating in and killing Gray, is attributable to them.
@Rafer Janders:
According to the video I saw, your above state could easily be disputed.
@Jack:
What do you mean ‘will say’? Apparently, they have already spoken to the prosecutors:
At the second arrest site, Goodson and Porter again inspected Gray, this time with Sergeant Alicia White. They “observed Mr Gray unresponsive on the floor of the wagon”, yet did not act. White “spoke to the back of Mr Gray’s head” and when he did not respond “she did nothing further despite the fact that she was advised that he needed a medic,” said Mosby.
“She made no effort to look or assess or determine his condition,” said Mosby. Gray, laid out on the floor of the wagon and not answering, was ignored.
“Despite Mr Gray’s seriously deteriorating medical condition, no medical assistance was rendered or summoned for Mr Gray at that time by any officer,” said Mosby. He was once again not restrained with a seatbelt in the back of the van as Goodson made the last leg of his journey to the police department’s western district headquarters.
Unless Mosby just made this up, this sounds like the officers have spoken. It doesn’t matter if Gray resisted arrest or if he was complaint. The minute they did nothing when he was unresponsive that’s it. There’s no situational debate here. If he had been injured falling while they chased him they were still responsible for his upkeep. That he wasn’t injured falling, that nobody can explain how the injuries happened, makes it a million times worse. Regardless, unless there’s a mythical law-and-order place where people believe that the police have the right to torture and say f— your breath for eternity (and there probably is) these officers are not going to be able to play up the unknowable.
@Jack:
Well, unless he left the house that morning with a severed spine and crushed larynx, he either sustained those injuries (a) when illegally assaulted and arrested by the police, in which case they are at fault, or (b) when in the van in which they put him handcuffed and shackled by the feet, and where he was left without medical attention for an hour, despite the police station being only six blocks from the scene of the arrest. In either case, his injuries and death are directly attributable to their actions.
@Tony W:
@Modulo Myself:
Yeah, but they won’t be able to get the trial moved to Texas.
@HarvardLaw92:
I don’t think that’s a general condition, I think it’s mostly just you. I don’t go around barely restraining my rage against the untermenschen. I’m not Bruce Banner barely keeping it under control, most people aren’t. If rage is this big a thing for you you should consider the possibility that you’ve got something going on in your head that is not about politics.
In any case you shouldn’t let your rage push you into embarrassing yourself as thoroughly as you have done in this thread.
@Modulo Myself: Again, that’s not murder or homicide.
I said there will probably, though no guarantee, convictions for negligence and misconduct.
Except that the rioting did get them heard. You think this story would have attracted just as much press if there had been only peaceful protests?
Someone who thinks like you recently made this point, inadvertently. Link.
@Rafer Janders:
But which police officer(s)…names do you attribute to any of those possibilities. You cannot say officer A was 10% responsible and officer B 40% responsible and officer C 30% responsible. You cannot attribute a name to the specific action that caused his death because you cannot state which action caused his death.
@Jack:
Again, under Maryland law, the police van driver was charged with “second-degree depraved heart murder.”
@Jack:
You don’t have to. Under felony murder, a murder committed by any one member of a group of criminals during the commission of a felony is 100% directly attributable to each of them. As an example, if one member of a four person gang shoots the teller during a bank robbery, they’re all guilty of the murder, even the getaway driver who never entered the bank or held a gun.
@Jack:
Every officer participating in an arrest is 100% individually responsible for the health and safety of the prisoner in his custody until such prisoner is otherwise delivered into the custody of another. “Hey, I dunno, I thought it was the other guy’s job” is not a defense. They each have an individual affirmative responsibility to monitor their prisoner’s health and safety.
@Rafer Janders:
A charge which they cannot substantiate. A charge which bypassed a grand jury because the prosecutor knew it wouldn’t make it through the front door.
@Jack:
They can substantiate it pretty easily if it’s determined that Goodson knew Gray was unresponsive and did nothing at all after learning this information. You’re at the point of arguing that in no way can we know if being unresponsive is in any way indicative of a person’s health being in peril.
It’s amazing how fast the conservative law ‘n order guys start hiding behind legal technicalities and any kind of excuse for criminal behavior as soon as the victim is black and the murderer is white, isn’t it…?
@Jack:
And this is where the comparison to Zimmerman or to Darren Wilson totally breaks down. Dangerous or not does not equal in peril or not. That you guys have taken to relying upon uncertainty even in the face of basic sense is telling.
@Rafer Janders:
How many stories have you seen of people dying in police custody/jail? I’ve seen a lot. And yet, I’ve never seen a murder/manslaughter charge stick against any of them.
I’m being a realist here.
@Rafer Janders:
The police are basically armed bureaucracy. Conservatives have always loved daddy-style bureaucrats. The ones who aren’t such disciplinarians turn them off, but that’s just taste.
@Rafer Janders:
At least three of the officers charged in Gray’s case are color deficient.
@Jack:
Well, are those cases where there is an instant visceral attack on the prosecutor? I don’t think so. She’s being called reckless and influenced by the mob, and yet as far as I can tell, she’s got the goods on these officers.
@Modulo Myself:
Wrong. A person does not have to be armed to be dangerous or life threatening.
Here’s my token two cents on all of this:
If what the State’s Attorney alleges is true as to the knife and the lack of seat belt, and I have no reason to believe it is not, then the policemen involved should have been charged. However, some of the charges against most of them are vastly over inflated. I can see neglect, for the failure to buckle Mr. Gray up in the van, and I can even see false arrest if the knife was in fact legal. I could even stretch it to thinking involuntary manslaughter would be an appropriate charge against the driver of the van. But second degree murder? That seems like purposefully overcharging.
I was pretty much with Ms. Mosby up until the end of her speech announcing the charges, when she started talking “No Justice, No Peace”. and went on from there. At that point, she was just injecting politics into something that’s supposed to be above politics and ceased to treat it as a legal matter.
@Modulo Myself:
If you believe that…
Tell you what, get back to me after the trial, I think you will be disappointed to say the least.
@Jack:
There’s subjectivity in relationship to the danger one feels one is in. There is no subjectivity in relationship to discovering a prisoner comatose in the back of a police van. We don’t need to be present with those officers in order to understand what was going on when Gray was found unresponsive.
@Modulo Myself:
No. I’m arguing that you cannot blame a specific person for the injuries that lead to Gray’s death.
As far as failing to provide needed medical attention, you then have to prove that if attention was immediately sought that he would have lived.
Again, negligence and misconduct may be the only charges that lead to a conviction.
@Jack:
As far as failing to provide needed medical attention, you then have to prove that if attention was immediately sought that he would have lived.
Lol, my god–do you even realize how crazy this sounds?
Micheal was right. Until all officers have on body cameras that must be on, the blame game will continue unabated.
Officers make stuff up to harass people and arrest them all the time.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/video-nypd-caught-arresting-man-reason-i-pulled-over/
Police need to fight real crime and not look upon the populace as a ATM machine to cover overwhelmed city budgets. Alas, police take orders from the city and cities take their cue from the federal government…civil asset forfeiture, IRS stealing money for supposed “structured deposits”, etc.
Unfortunately, there is no money in solving murders, rapes, and burglaries.
@Modulo Myself:
Crazy or not, that is how the system works.
If the defense can submit that no amount of medical assistance would have saved Gray, or that they presumed he was already dead, or that they thought he was on drugs…or whatever, true or untrue, it leads to reasonable doubt.
Once the prosecutor sees that she cannot get beyond a reasonable doubt on the top charge, she will be forced to try and get them to all plead to something…negligence or misconduct.
@Rafer Janders:
And you believe your typical police officer…in Baltimore or anywhere else…is capable of making that particular medical diagnosis and should act accordingly?
@Jack:
You seem to be taking on the entire charge itself, i.e. you find that there is reasonable doubt to think that it’s possible to act with callous disregard for human life. Otherwise, the evidence that you imagine being submitted makes the officers sound like sociopaths.
@Modulo Myself:
No. I am saying that the prosecutor cannot prove there was a callous disregard for human life. It’s the prosecutors burden to prove that. She cannot. Period.
@HarvardLaw92: For those of you who don’t folllow the wing nut echo chamber, HL is channelling Rush from Thursday and Friday. I expected better?
BTW: Why haven’t you left yet?
@HarvardLaw92: And Ironically enough, this argument is the same one that is discounted (legitimately enough IMO) when the left makes it about blacks encountering police. Hmmmmmm…………………
I can see why you went to M&A: less need to be intellectually “light on your feet,” as it were.
@HarvardLaw92: Years ago, I was called to appear on a jury where the defence’s argument and opening remarks to the jury (chosen by “Phil Donahue method”) was “as the jury, you have the right to simply refuse to believe the prosecution’s case no matter how good it is, we will be asking you to exercise that right, because innocent until proven guilty is the centerpiece of our justice system (emphasis in presentation).”
Didn’t work well for that guy. I’d advise that you drop that train of thought and return to something closer to the usual rules of cause and effect.
@HarvardLaw92:
As I am now pointing out for the third time, you’re forgetting the felony murder rule. If the death results from the commission of a felony (in this case the false imprisonment charge), they only have to prove the intent to commit the underlying felony and it becomes murder even if the death itself was unintentional.
@HarvardLaw92:
Which is why you would trade all 50000+ people of West Baltimore for your one nephew and it would be an easy choice. At that point you might as well have called them cockroaches and been done with it. You, however, kept on with your I’m not a racist I’m just telling you uncomfortable facts about shiffless, lazy, thugs, whose only intellectual accomplishment is learning how to game the system. Apparently Gray broke his own neck to game the system and get on that ‘rough ride’ gravy train.
Well it looks like Mike NiFong landed on his feet and got a job in Maryland.
This persecution, er I mean prosecution, is 100% entirely motivated.
When you give into the thugs it only encourages them. How in the world are these police officers supposed to receive a fair trial when the thugs are threatening to burn down the city if they don’t get the verdict they want.
This woman is an absolutely disgrace. She needs to be disbarred. This isn’t justice – this is capitulating to the mob. It will just make them hungry for more now that they smell blood in the water.
Freddie Gray was a thug. Freddie Gray is everything that is wrong with this country – he is Obama’s base. Obama only won because he got the dregs of society like Freddie Gray registered to vote. I wish Rudy Giuliani were mayor of Baltimore – he would have turned the water cannons on the riff raff.
@Stormy Dragon:
He is confident he can convince the jury that the police are idiots that can’t tell the difference between a pocket knife and a switch blade. The fact that a typical 12 year old can do so after a rudimentary inspection apparently doesn’t matter.
I am for some reason reminded of this.
@HarvardLaw92: Did someone hijack your profile?
I’m absolutely shocked that I am largely in agreement with you.
I suppose I can chalk it up to the broken clock theory that anyone can be right once in a while.
You’re right (for the most part on the law) but you miss the mark in that you don’t assign blame on the victimhood culture that libs are peddling.
Baltimore is a city exclusively run by liberals. This is a mess entirely of their creation. This does not happen in areas governed by conservatives.
It is community organizers ginning this up – if BHO weren’t in the White House he’d likely be throwing Molotov cocktails at the police whilst “liberating” Jim Beam from the captivity in the package store.
@michael reynolds: You really do enjoy playing amateur psychologist. Either that or you fashion yourself a mind reader. In either case you are manifesting hubris.
You should stick to your day job – you’re not very good at it. 95% of what you said about me was wrong and you’re wrong about this.
@Jack:
Which should be enough to make sure none of these cops holds a gun or a badge again.
I’m fine with reasonable doubt. But you should not be a cop if your suspects mysteriously die from trauma on you and you can give no reasonable explanation other than pleading the 5th . You really shouldn’t.
Reading this nails home for me the kind of carousel feeling I’ve been getting around this topic.
Baltimore must be the first city with riots not rooted in actual grievances, just haters hatin’ and burnin’. This reminds me of that time the lieutenant-general of Bordeaux was beaten to death by a mob in 1548 over such a minor thing as salt taxes. It’s a negative example of dependency on government: after all, they had grown dependent on the government not taxing their salt. 😀 Perhaps it’s some odd association with sports riots. Those could rightly be said to be over nothing of importance.
@James P:
It worked for those guys who killed Tristan de Moneins. The king of France decided, quite wisely, not to continue the salt taxes after his representative in the city was brutally murdered over it.* MLK did say the riot was “the language of the unheard” for a reason. If official channels don’t give you opportunity for redress (which, since this is police brutality we’re talking about, accusations against the primary tool of the state, the likelihood is against), what’s left but to riot? Roll over and die? Watching HL92’s reaction suggests rolling over and dying is what they should be left with due to, and I’m paraphrasing, conditions entirely within their own control. (They riot because they can’t free themselves of dependence, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.)
But none of our opinions really matter too much in the end, since history is the ultimate judge of who is right and who is wrong when it comes to riots. Given our centuries-removed perspective on the riots in Bordeaux, it’ll mostly be dismissed as idiots unable to effectively govern their own cities. To be fair, history knows those idiots didn’t have modern telecommunications and thus had the excuse of ignorance or arrogance.
* Granted, this was after a three-year period in which he sent another representative with enough troops to utterly destroy Bordeaux in to pacify the locals, and the reign of terror and persecution that followed such. Hey, France in the 1500s is in the running for Worst Place to Visit With a Time Machine.
@James P:
I don’t know why people keep posting this. It was fairly obvious from however frickin’ long ago HL92 was a law-and-order-over-all type. (Not a pejorative observation.) Just because he decided to flense your sorry butt rhetorically for a few days a couple months ago didn’t make him into a rational person, just more rational than you.
It’s also pretty common for people to save family members in catastrophes while leaving other innocent people to die, so I don’t get the reproach about saving his nephew over fifty thousand strangers. I mean, I get it, but I don’t get the sincerity of the reproach I suppose.
@Jack:
There’s actually many ways to prove that. These rely upon the difference between what should have happened when Freddie Gray entered the van and what did happen. You are saying basically that there is no reasonable way for it to be the case that Freddie Gray should have left the van conscious, and that the responsibility of the officers was not at all involved with keeping Freddie Gray conscious and ultimately alive while he was their prisoner.
@HarvardLaw92:
This pretty much encapsulates what HL has said. He feels contempt for a rather large set of people that include pretty much all of West Baltimore, poor people, people he decides are bleeding hearts or too liberal, people that he feels are too conservative, people who don’t give him enough deference, the list goes on.
Well, that and I’m a super awesome lawyer blah blah blah and you are all the self congratulatory mental masturbators.
@Grewgills:
I like that a guy with a name HarvardLaw92 who lives in Westchester and works for Cravath Swaine & Whatever tees off on ‘effete liberals’. Now that’s rarefied contempt.
@HarvardLaw92:
Did I missunderstand, or did you just indicate that winning is more important in this case than justice? If I didn’t misunderstand, why are you confused and outraged at the rioters? If you “sow the whirlwind,” should you not expect to “reap distruction?”
Reynolds is right, you’re better than this. Or, maybe not…
@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker: No no no, the system taken as a whole is supposed to generate justice for its constituents. It’s not the lawyer’s responsibility, it’s not the jury’s, it’s not the judge’s, it’s not even the police’s. Rather, all of them working together, in concert, fully exploiting diffusion of responsibility; this creates justice.
And some are bemused that a reasonable person could end up indicting the whole system on such grounds.
@Modulo Myself: We were certainly willing to accept his credentials when he was busy flaying JP without commenting on the moniker. 😀
@Tillman: “We were certainly willing to accept his credentials when he was busy flaying JP without commenting on the moniker. ”
The reason that people are wondering is that his arguments are so bad. One boiled down to ‘any possibility, no matter how small = reasonable doubt’.
In addition, we don’t have respect for intellectual dishonesty, lawyer or non-lawyer. When somebody use a PD leak about having a prisoner who will testify pleasingly to the PD as actual evidence of anything except a corrupt newspaper, that’s dishonest.
@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker:
I submit that every criminal defense lawyer and prosecutor would take that position. It’s kinda their job.
@Tillman:
I’m not doubting his credentials. I was just noting how much he fits the stereotype of your standard liberal elitist. The stereotype is also, in my experience, the go-to device for somebody intelligent arguing badly for less compassion or tolerance.
@James P:
I have a theory. It goes like this: @HarvardLaw92 is Orthodox. He will not spell out the word “God” but uses the “G-d” dodge common to Orthodox Jews. I did a quick check back through threads that would interest him and I was not able to find examples of him posting after sundown on a Friday and the appearance of stars on Saturday.
I think you hijacked his persona.
Even emotional, even in the throes of rage, he’s not stupid enough to have written the words, “Shiftless and lazy.” Just way too stupid, way too stupid for way too long in this thread. That much stupid of that specific type, gotta be you, dude.
Fortunately there’s a way to test the theory. If when three stars appear in the sky this evening “@Harvard” remains the clueless, racist aszhole we’ve seen in this thread, them I’m wrong. Easy peasy.
@Tillman: Your comment reminds me of a passage in Cry, the Beloved Country where the narrator notes that the court produces justice because it is the only thing it can produce.
8:37 PM in New York, Sabbath ends.
@michael reynolds:
I have to congratulate you on your calm. I stayed mad a lot longer for less happening to my wife. The mango tree in my yard was the major beneficiary of my anger. It might have ended up a little over pruned, better that than what I wanted to do at the time though.
@michael reynolds:
Reform, not Orthodox. Enough with the “is it him? Is it not him?” nonsense.
I used those words. I’ll own them. If you want to supply a more appropriate term for people who largely do not work and spend their days hanging out on stoops & street corners, slowly dying of poverty, I’ll gladly take it up, but shiftless seems ideally suited. I mean apathetic might work, or indolent, maybe even slothful or unambitious. We’re probably in agreement with regard to how we view their situation, but I suspect that we’re 180 degrees apart with respect to where we assign responsibility for that situation. You noted that you grew up poor. I did not, so perhaps that’s where the disconnect lies, but it’s just how I feel about the matter. To some degree, the problem has to be laid at the feet of the people who do nothing to change their situation.
Take Sandtown, just as an example. 50% unemployment. Now, we can’t credit that to single moms having no one to care for their kids while they work, since Maryland will pay for that for her. We can’t credit it to having no car – Baltimore has public transportation and she can apply for a waiver card so the state will pay for that for her as well. The list goes on and on, so even allowing for the elderly, even allowing for the disabled, you’re still left with a sizable population of people who probably could be working, but simply don’t. People like the victim, just as an example, who spend their days (judging from the extensive arrest record) hustling for a dollar, stealing, dealing drugs, etc.
I’m honestly just tired of the whole “oh how they have suffered, no one understands them, nothing is their fault because they are victims” monologue. At some point, responsibility has to revert back to their own poor choices and apparent lack of ambition. I’m not trying to be racist, although I suspect that anything short of rending garments and expressing outrage will be characterized that way. I’m just tired of seeing untold resources wasted on a situation that never changes. West Baltimore today looks exactly like the West Baltimore I remember from my childhood. It’s populated by the same people with the same problems living the same subsistence lives, and I’m pretty convinced that if my son goes there 30 years from now, it’ll be populated with the children of today’s residents mired up in the same subsistence – because what we are doing simply is not working. But somehow, I’m vindictive and cruel and mean for pointing that out. Go figure …
@Modulo Myself:
No. I am not saying that. Show me anywhere I said that.
I don’t doubt something happened to Gray while in that van that caused his injuries. But until the prosecutor can prove what that something was and which officer performed that act, she will never get murder or manslaughter charges to stick.
@Just ‘nutha’ ig’rant cracker:
What, pray tell, is justice to you in this case? Some feel justice would be killing all 6 cops in retaliation for something no one can prove. Many in Baltimore unless at least 1 cop is convicted of murder and sent away for life.
Is it justice to overcharge in the manner the prosecutor has? I think it is an injustice to overcharge simply to quell the masses. Once a jury decides nothing more than negligence and/or misconduct with a slap on the hand or probation, justice is served. But is that enough justice for you? For those in Baltimore that will riot because of it?
Next the “Justice” department will step in and find, again, that there were no civil rights abuses or they will try to retry these officers and still not be able to prove anything. Will thaqt be justice enough? No?
Please explain, in detail, your version of justice.
@Grewgills:
Well, I did grab a guy I thought might be the guy, threw him up against a wall and interrogated him. But I got past that pretty quickly. I’m not an emotional person. Sentimental, sometimes, but generally emotions are something to be indulged once everything that can be done has been done, and by then the heat is cooled down.
Well, since they’re hanging out on porches, maybe you could come up with some descriptive term based on that?
@Barry: It’s also realist. I certainly didn’t lose any faith in our judicial system when HL92 laid out the means by which these particular cops could escape official sanction.* Then again, I didn’t trust it to be impartial and pursue the lofty goal of justice either. I live in the South: we know (or at least vehemently deny) justice ain’t served on a regular basis.
As for the intellectualism of the arguments here: my take was people were essentially talking past each other, then criticizing outspoken positions down to the gritty, almost-pointless details (something jukeboxgrad of “the article mentioned Iraq eleven times” fame is noted for), and then utilitarian folderol about how horrible we are to prioritize small numbers of family over larger numbers of strangers. Insofar as anything intelligent has been said, it had to do with legalities beyond my, uhh, many bailiwicks, so I didn’t bother judging.
His arguments aren’t that bad. They don’t quite strain relevance the way Jenos is fond of, or credulity the way superdestroyer often can. Maybe that’s why no one believes HL92 isn’t his pod person right now.
* That’s another thing: the system probably won’t convict these guys, but who the hell thinks they’ll have great lives after being the subjects of this media storm? George Zimmerman’s doing peachy nowadays based on his biannual appearances in the tabloids. I have a pet thought that media storms are picking up the slack where the judicial system falls short, for good or bad. I’m sure someone’s already had that pet thought and expanded it into a book I should consider reading.
An article about ISIS is inherently an article about Iraq (and this is reflected in the way that word was used in the article). I don’t think that’s a ‘pointless detail,’ but of course you’re entitled to your opinion.
His claim that “hoses were slashed all over the city” doesn’t strain credulity? Another odd opinion. And maybe you think that’s another ‘pointless detail,’ but threads like these are essentially a collection of such allegedly “pointless details.” Someone willing to lie about the details that make up the big picture is someone who is willing to lie about the big picture.
In context I think it was pretty clear that he wasn’t just saying ‘I value him more because he’s kin.’ He was saying ‘I value him more because he’s not one of Those People, the vermin.’
Michael:
Yes, that’s a good example of him being stupid, but I think there are better examples.
Barry:
Yes, exactly. Just my opinion, but I think the obvious dishonesty is even more stupid than the obvious racism. ‘Stupid’ is a good word for someone who thinks this is a place where one can get away with transparent fabrications like “hoses were slashed all over the city” and “convicted felon heroin dealer.” Those fibs are roughly in the same class as ‘I have a PhD from LSE.’ And just to be clear, I’m not saying they’re the same person. I’m just saying they’re equally dishonest.
Aside from stupidity and dishonesty, another remarkable quality is the stunning lack of self-awareness. HL92 has correctly treated James P’s obvious lies as an important problem, and yet also goes out of his way to expose himself as an obvious liar. The irony is priceless.
Like Ferguson, Missouri?
@Tillman:
I can accept and even agree with his calculation about what will happen to the cops, it is his desire for that unjust outcome that I find repugnant. If he was simply their attorney and looking for any means to get them off including using racist attitudes of jurors, that is one thing, wanting that to happen to get the cops off out of spite is another. He wants that outcome to the point that he is willing to contribute either time or money to help achieve it.
It isn’t the prioritizing family over strangers that I was primarily concerned with pointing out, it was the outright contempt he has shown for an entire community and many others like it and his not so thinly veiled bigotry that I meant to highlight. I can understand prioritizing family over strangers, preferring the death of an entire community over a family member not even being a close call may have just been hyperbole in a fit of pique and desire to troll, but it fit his contempt of ‘those people’.
@michael reynolds:
When I changed email a couple months ago, the moderation filter noticed the change and stopped me from commenting until James manually let me through. So if someone did hijack HL92, it was someone who knew the unpublished email he uses to comment.
I think it’s more likely anger caused him to reveal a side of himself he usually keeps hidden.
And as I have pointed out a few times, the mask has also slipped before.
@Tony W:
Justice Sutherland–Berger v. United States 295 U.S. 78 (1935)
The American Bar Association
The problem is that is rarely the mentality of a prosecutor, including former prosecutors.
What many have failed to realize is that all that has happened is the SA filed a Probable Cause Affidavit (PCA) for the sole purpose of getting an arrest. The PCA got an arrest. There is still no indictment.
After the arrest the SA then has 30 days to bring an actual indictment, or she can change/drop the charges. Within the 30 days she has to take this to a Grand Jury to create the indictment.
Most likely the actual indictment charges, if any, will be far different on an indictment sheet (if at all) than the PCA claims she is basing the arrest upon. Meaning, with almost virtual certainty, what’s going on now is pure theatrics.
@Jack: “I don’t doubt something happened to Gray while in that van that caused his injuries. But until the prosecutor can prove what that something was and which officer performed that act, she will never get murder or manslaughter charges to stick. ”
So a guy goes into the van alive, comes out dead – by trauma, and so long as nothing can be pinned down………?
@Barry:
No one goes to jail for murder.
@PogueMahone:
That’s why “My Cousin Vinnie” is, against all odds, taught in law schools as an example of the system working as it should. There are no bad guys, only people on opposing sides of the law doing their jobs.
I’ll say that I agree with Jack that there are issues with overcharging. But I’m not a lawyer, and know next to nothing about the intricacies of how it works. I also only got to about comment 250, because, wow, is there a lot going on here.
@HarvardLaw92:
Fine, it’s you.
1) You use the word “shiftless” though you are certainly smart enough to know that it’s racist code since forever. When questioned you suggest “indolent” instead. How about this word: realistic.
How many jobs are available in Baltimore within a bus ride of Sandtown? Would that be few or none? What would those few jobs pay? Maryland minimum wage is $8.25 an hour, times 40 hours a week – if you can get it – that’s $330 minus FICA.
You know what $330 dollars is? It’s a decent dinner out for you or me. Right? Maybe a car payment if you got a lot on your trade-in? $330 is basically nothing to either of us, it’s what I spend on tips in a week when I go to New York. That’s an annual income of 17k for rent, food, clothing, transportation, utilities, phone, child care.
What do you think you have left of that 17K? Fifty cents? What if you get sick? What if your kid gets sick and you have to stay home from work? What if you miss your electric payment so now they want a cash deposit to keep the lights on? Do you have a credit card? Nope. Bank account? Nope. Rich parents who’ll front you the downpayment on a mortgage? Nope.
Do you figure some single mother has enough spare resources after putting in your 40 plus the 14 you spend commuting to attend a lot of informational meetings about your kids’ school? Or to bone up on the issues so your vote will magically transform the city? Attend trade school?
Can you count, you entitled dick? Are you capable of imagining what life is like on minimum wage?
Just what fantasy do you think someone like that is supposed to be pursuing with energy and ambition? Getting a ten cent raise after a year? What do you think the ceiling is for someone like that with no skills, no education and a kid?
My wife and I can barely deal with our two kids and we have just about every resource short of a butler available to us. People who are middle class making 60k or 75k a year are hanging on by their fingernails, and you think someone making a quarter of that is supposed to jump up one day, bang out a B.A. and throw themselves into improving the community?
It’s not shiftless and it’s not indolent, it is realistic. They are doing the math. They’re doing the math you refuse to do because if you did the math you’d have to confront the hopelessness of the situation rather than getting your rocks off sh!tting on people who don’t have two cents to rub together.
Poor people are not behaving irrationally, that’s the goddamn tragedy of it, they’re behaving reasonably given the cards they were dealt.
2) You justify your screed by pleading stress and the rage that follows.
Jesus H. Christ, this is where I started thinking it couldn’t be you because when you’re not indulging your inner Republican you’re too smart to hand defense council an obvious counterargument which goes like this: Gosh, I wonder if poor people living in a crime-ridden sh!thole ever experience stress and trauma? I wonder if they ever feel rage? I wonder if maybe that rage explains why a small number of them started rioting?
Now, of course true stress and true justifiable rage are the birthright of any six figure-earning, Ivy-league educated, BMW-driving white male lawyer, but I wonder if occasionally even the little people who don’t have to worry about picking up their dry-cleaning or whether to buy the organic apples and instead have such trivial stresses as, “I wonder if the gangs will take my son?” and, “Gosh, the bus is late, I wonder if I give my manager a hand job he’ll let me keep my job?” ever experience similar emotions?
3) I like you, I’ve resisted the urge to be blunt with you because I don’t think you’re a malicious moron, but man, you are a pampered, spoiled, privileged, clueless dumb-ass of a rich white male. You know dick about anything outside the land of privilege. You have enough money to get a shrink and work through your rage issues and you ought to think seriously about it, because when people who like you start thinking you’re a moron like James P, that’s a pretty good indication that you have slipped off the track at some point.
Goddamn, dude.
@michael reynolds:
“Burn the 1%” said CB, with love.
@michael reynolds:
Medicaid, provided for you by the State of Maryland.
Daycare and Medicaid, also provided for you by the State of Maryland.
Utilities assistance, also provided for you by the State of Maryland. Seeing a pattern here?
Not to point out the uncomfortable again, but whose fault is that? Whose bad choices created that reality? You can’t approach these folks with this paternalistic attitude and then wonder why they never step up to the plate. Why would they, when you’re effectively telling them that they can’t and touting a solution that, over the last 50 years or so, has given them no incentive to try. That, in fact, robs them of the incentive to do anything but continue to collect aid.
Know what the greatest motivator in the world often is? Necessity. The fact that I pointed out earlier remains – despite living in a city in which their elected representatives hold the bulk of political power, in which they are a distinct majority, in a state in which Democrats hold overwhelming power and in a city in which they have held it for generations, despite truckloads of cash having been devoted to the problem – NOTHING HAS CHANGED FOR THEM. NOT ONE SINGLE THING, so what you’re doing is not working. You can excoriate me all you like, call me entitled or arrogant or whatever other intended pejorative that amounts to “I don’t like what you are saying because it offends my worldview”, but you can not get past that simple fact. It is not working. Beyond not working, it is failing, in spectacular fashion.
Now, for the most obvious point – you , by your own assertion, grew up in the same sort of environment, but you are no longer there. What caused that change in circumstances?
@HarvardLaw92:
Wow, I find the transformation of HL 92 almost surreal. Oh well. I guess a conservative is a liberal whose family member had something got thrown at him. Hey guess what, HL -I’ve been mugged-not a family member, but me personally. And I’ve lived in Baltimore. Heck, i’ve even practiced law in Baltimore. Somehow, none of this turned me into a person who somehow believes that the people in West Baltimore are all living in a lush government provided cradle, and somehow aren’t facing a legacy of slavery , Jim Crow and continuing racial discrimination( or maybe you believe that racial discrimination also stopped 50 years ago). The reality, of course, is that West Baltimore is a poor, jobless, crime and drug ridden neighborhood with the worst schools in Maryland. Nobody there is getting any kind of easy ride. Just run this thought experiment. Exchange how you grew up for the life (and skin color) of a child in Sandtown Winchester. Would you do that? I kind of bet you wouldn’t-despite your glowing description of all the advantages of someone who grows up black and poor in West Baltimore.
As to what will happened, I’m damn glad the justice system did move to prosecute those cops-and also to prosecute the few rioters. Seems to me justice is being done-for everyone and not just for any one side. Apparently, you object to that- because of something that happened (or almost happened) to a family member. I find your lack of objectivity here sad. Understandable, but just sad. Oh well, my faith in humanity takes another dip.
The problem of West Baltimore is the same problem of the Brazilian favelas or the French banlieues: it exists primarily as a concentration of low income people. If someone that´s born in West Baltimore manages to climb the economic ladder, she/he is not going to work to improve West Baltimore, he is going to live anywhere else. In fact, that´s the first thing that´s he/she is going to do.
If you are going to treat the people of West Baltimore as a “these” people, that´s not a good beginning.
@CB: Heh heh. Yeah, I can’t believe I read most of it. This is what happens when I’m sober and have nothing better to do.
@jukebox:
The argument that strained credulity on his part was positing Grey killed himself to somehow screw over the Baltimore police, or that the possibility he did it would constitute reasonable doubt. The fire hoses brouhaha was a vague generalization he claims to have heard secondhand, already several steps removed from truth. Note HL92 only starts referring to hoses in the plural the second time he brings it up, and takes prodding to double-down and claim hoses were cut all over West Baltimore. Frankly the claim he could get several firefighters to attest to it (on an Internet comments section?!) was the giveaway that it probably wasn’t meant seriously, but then it evolved into a much bigger deal than it really is.
I call them “pointless” because they don’t contribute to the big picture. The big picture here is not our thread talking about the riots in Baltimore, it’s the riots in Baltimore. The detail you were hammering him on was over a side story to those riots at best, and it was only brought up in the thread since it was anecdotal info he heard from a relative. It seemed pointless to me because you could substitute wondering if a rioter stole the shelves out of the CVS before burning it for cutting fire hoses and it’d have the same relevancy to the riots as a whole. But I’ve been wrong before.
@Grewgills: Point taken. Perhaps I did minimize that a bit much.
Well, if lawyers were interested in the truth, they’d be philosophers and make far less money. 🙂
@HarvardLaw92:
I’m curious – how much time have you spent with poor people in their homes in the last few years?
@HarvardLaw92:
This is very true. It is what drove my parents and it rubbed off on all us kids. It was also why FDR was such a big hit. He took away some of their necessity, and folks never forgot that. That is why my parents voted Democrat all their lives, that is, they did up until the Democrat Party became the party of abortion.
Here is an article by Karl Denninger from yesterday that sort of ties in and points the finger of accusation at both parties:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3378176
Tillman:
I think you’re missing the point, and in a big way. About a week ago Kylopod made an exceptionally important point. His 43 upvotes indicate that I’m not the only one who thinks so:
You say you’re concerned about “the big picture.” Kylopod correctly described “the big picture:” that we’re dealing with a major party that’s infested with liars, from top to bottom. Making any progress requires seeing this, and it requires being able to notice when you’re dealing with a liar.
Earlier you said this:
You were addressing James P, who had said he has a PhD from LSE. HL92 figured out that this is a lie, and he made a big deal about it. Did you ever think, or say, that this was “pointless,” and a “side story?” In a way, it is, because James P’s education is irrelevant. But what’s relevant is that he’s a liar, and that’s why HL92 was correct “to flense [his] sorry butt.”
When I first challenged him, consider all these different ways he might have reacted:
A) You’re right, I don’t actually know how many hoses were cut.
B) What I said “wasn’t meant seriously.” It was hyperbole.
C) That’s what I heard from my nephew, but on further reflection, it’s odd that there are no media reports other than just one, so maybe I misunderstood him.
But he did something quite different, which was to double down. And this is precisely what he did with other factual lies, like “convicted felon heroin dealer,” and “dodge calls from the governor for 2 1/2 hours.”
It’s important to know when you’re dealing with a closet racist, and this thread was an eye-opener for a lot of people. It’s also important to know when you’re dealing with a closet liar; I think this is understood by Kylopod and the 43 people who upvoted his comment.
I’m surprised that you still think that he actually has a nephew.
No, it was not “only brought up in the thread since it was anecdotal info he heard from a relative.” It was brought up in the thread because it’s a claim that supports his central argument: Those People are scum. If it really was just a ‘pointless detail,’ he would not have defended his lie so vigorously. He would have been more willing to say ‘maybe I misheard my nephew; I’ll get back to you after I check with him.’ If it was really true that “hoses were slashed all over the city” then this really does add a lot of support to his claim that Those People are scum.
Notice that he also said this:
So he wasn’t just saying “hoses were slashed all over the city.” He was saying ‘hoses were slashed all over the city and the media’s failure to report this is proof of their bias.’ This is an even bigger lie, and definitely not a “side story.” If it was really true that “hoses were slashed all over the city” and the media was suppressing this information (which is what he claimed), that would be a big deal.
Notice also how this resembles a painfully stupid argument used regularly by conservatives: ‘lack of evidence is proof that the conspiracy is real; it shows that the conspirators were powerful enough to hide all the evidence.’ This came up in the WMD story: ‘UN inspectors fail to find WMD; this proves Saddam is really good at hiding them.’
No, “the big picture” is not “the riots in Baltimore.” The big picture is that we’re dealing with liars. This problem is bigger than the riots in Baltimore. I think this is the point Kylopod was making.
HL92 is not just a liar, but a skilled and accomplished liar. I think it’s important to identify people like this, and I think it’s helpful to highlight and analyze the methods they use. I’m sorry you don’t agree.
@HarvardLaw92:
See, this is what it comes down to for you and for most people. You see all this as a moral question. I was born into the classic ghetto set-up: teen-aged mother, no father. I don’t recall making that choice. Where was my moral choice? Did you choose to be born into what I’d guess was an upper middle-class family with all the privileges?
You’re asking why a kid born with nothing failed to 1) Discover motivations no one taught him, 2) Find means to succeed that no one gave him, 3) And find opportunities he’s seen literally nowhere in his immediate environment. And you’re condemning as morally lacking millions of people who were not born on the starting line, but were born clear the hell off the track.
And who’s asking? A rich Jewish kid with plenty of smarts. Because who would understand better than a person with no direct experience and a sense of entitlement. You know who you are? You’re my kids. My kids are rich kids – great schools, great home, two parents both working at home, camps, tutors, computers, access to everything, including my credit cards.
I just flew my 18 year-old to London to attend a web development conference. Think maybe that kind of thing gives him a leg up in terms of skills and more importantly, contacts? Hey, Sandtown kid, why aren’t you competing against Michael’s son for jobs? Hey, Sandtown kid, why don’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and compete against the kid with everything? Wait, you don’t have the latest Mac computer? You don’t have high speed internet? You don’t have professional level software and any app you want? Your daddy doesn’t fly you to WebDev conferences? Well, you just keep your nose to the grindstone, Sandtown kid and if you work hard in school, and don’t get dragged into a gang, or enticed into drugs, you can probably get a minimum wage cooking hamburgers for Michael’s kid. Yay!
Now, I made it despite my start in life, and you could say, well, look at you, Michael, swanning around all successful. But I’m white, the rest of my family beyond my birth father was intact, my mother remarried to a soldier when I was four and I had the extraordinary good luck of having a stepfather who was a real father to me. And I have some talent and intelligence. But I don’t recall arranging any of that. It was just luck. I was lucky and made it, my son was lucky and had the world handed to him. The people you’re trashing were not lucky.
You were born on third base and you’re demanding to know why people who were born in the dugout can’t score a run. I’ll tell you why: because it’s really hard. Life is really hard, and it gets harder when your skin is not white, and it gets harder when you are poor, and it gets harder when you have no family. It’s harder when you have no education and when you are surrounded by crime. Obviously some people make it out of the ghetto, but most don’t.
I know you have some respect for my intelligence, so I want you to consider that what I’m telling you is not politics but personal experience. I have personally been at both ends of the spectrum. I have been a fugitive felon living under a freeway overpass, and I’ve been a rich and respected author. You know how I accomplished that? Pure fwcking luck. My DNA gave me talent, I managed to meet the right woman, and because of the way I look I was not arrested on a fugitive warrant with all the consequence that would have entailed. I got rich and made all my problems go away. Did I work hard? Sure. So did everyone I ever waited tables with or cleaned toilets with. But none of them went on to have my life.
You got lucky and I got lucky, and that’s why we are where we are. You did not choose to be born where and how you were born. You get zero credit for that. You are not a better person for having the world handed to you on a silver platter. You did not pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You’re just lucky. I actually did pull myself up by my bootstraps but I paid attention while all that was happening, and I’m honest (nowadays) so I know it was no moral wonderfulness on my part. I just got lucky.
People who win the lottery do not get to lecture everyone else on wealth formation. People who win the lottery do not get to lord it over other people.
Well, it took two days – but I finally made it through. Posting this just because I felt a need to be a witness to such a gut-wrenching epic downfall as demonstrated by HarvardLaw92.
It’s sad to see someone who I used to admire fall so far so fast into a bitter, hate-mongering racist. Whether it was there all the time and I just missed it, or whether he concealed it exceedingly well, I’m not sure – and it’s probably not critical.
It’s sad … just terribly, terribly sad.
@Dave D: with his rap sheet he should not have been among the free.
is this a record breaking thread now- closing in on 500 comments.
Michael:
As usual, you’re getting to the heart of the matter, and you’re putting your finger on something that’s much bigger than riots in Baltimore. Conservatives (a category that includes HL92, with regard to this issue) really do despise the poor. They think the poor deserve to be poor. This is a core concept of conservatism, and it has religious, historical and psychological roots that I explained a while ago.
@jukeboxgrad:
This belief in a moral universe and free will, and the rejection of randomness, is so American and so deeply-ingrained that people don’t even see that it’s just one of numerous possible cosmologies. Even atheists and agnostics tend to accept the underlying assumptions.
It’s a triumphalist ideology in a way, great for successful folks who rather than merely crediting luck get the opportunity to strut around like moral paragons claiming it’s all hard work and self control. So wealth = virtue.
It was all perfectly understandable prior to the discovery of DNA. But since then, and since subsequent discoveries related to DNA and other factors beyond our control that really lay down the foundations of our lives, it’s become a dishonest, or at very least willfully ignorant point of view. I mean, you cannot understand the effects of DNA, or the effects of lead and other environmental factors, or the growing body of knowledge on microflora in the human system, and so on and on, and still cling to the self-flattering notion that we are each the results solely of choices we make.
The core American cosmology was always superficial but now it’s just factually wrong. It’s just not true. Scientifically, provably, not true.
Well, nine more after me for an even 500.
Just skimming the thread, HL2, you’re arguing not for a legal presumption of innocence, but an actual finding of innocence w/out adjudicating. Disappointing. Or is this stand just a shuck again?
Helping reach 500. Hang in there HL92.
Steve
Michael:
Yes. Link:
Link:
Link:
Poverty alters DNA, and the consequences are transgenerational.
@jukeboxgrad:
You can see why all this is so difficult for people. It’s like pouring acid all over the Bible and Aristotle and Freud all at once. It’s revolutionary. It’s like quantum physics for humans: everything you thought you knew about free will and morality and responsibility? It’s all wrong. As with any revolution it takes a longer time than I think it should to sort of percolate up, but I’m very impatient.
If both vice and virtue are baked into your genetics and early upbringing/environment, then what happens to those concepts of vice and virtue? How do we respond as a society? This means it’s also potentially very dangerous stuff because we’re making an argument for a type of eugenics – say, eliminating fetuses that carry a predisposition to violence. We’re laying a basis for a very intrusive state that checks your DNA and responds to you not just by what you do, but by what you are likely to do.
There are humane and rational ways to adjust society to all this, but I imagine we’ll first have to get through a century of denial and stupidity and half-assery first.
@jukeboxgrad: And I’m sorry you consider a liar on the Internet a bigger picture than riots in Baltimore.
@Tillman:
I think you’re misinterpreting what he’s saying here. This one liar, in and of himself, is nothing. He’s worthless. But he’s emblematic of a much, much bigger culture of dishonesty and lunacy that has captured one of the two major American political parties and that is infesting every policy approach that they advocate. You can’t run an economy, you can’t run a country, with a conservative wing that maintains that the answer to “2 + 2” is “orange.”
This one liar on the internet is roughly comparable to one rioter in Baltimore, not “riots in Baltimore,” so you’re going out of your way, again, to miss the point.
This one “liar on the Internet [is not] a bigger picture than riots in Baltimore,” but the phenomenon of a political movement that is infested from top to bottom with liars is indeed “a bigger picture than riots in Baltimore,” because those riots and all sorts of other problems cannot be addressed without facing the reality that we are dealing with a movement of liars. Sometimes those liars have to be dealt with, one liar at a time and one lie at a time. That’s what I did in this thread. You seeing this is as a problem is something I can’t comprehend.
And now I see that Rafer said it better than I did, but I’ll post this anyway.
Michael:
Yes, what you’re pointing out about DNA and behavior is revolutionary, and it’s going to take a long time to adjust. What is similarly revolutionary is the point you have made elsewhere about how machines are taking our jobs away, and how we therefore need to find ways to distribute income to people whose labor is superfluous in an automated world. This is something else that is “like pouring acid all over the Bible and Aristotle and Freud all at once.”
Skipping all the side issues — don’t the police have a responsibility to protect the people in their custody? The police failed spectacularly at this, assuming they tried at all.
And their story, that the man broke his own neck and crushed his own trachea just to spite them, is so implausible that they should hang their heads in shame. It’s embarrassing.
I don’t care if the man they arrested shouldn’t have been arrested, or whether he was complete scum, or even if Baltimore is a failed experiment and should just be torn down, police brutality is inexcusable.
@michael reynolds:
Sure, but who is making such an argument? To me it is just a question of what hand life dealt you, and how you played that hand. Dr. Ben Carson was dealt a bad hand and played it very well, just to give an example.
@michael reynolds:
Well, that’s the hypothesis anyway. I will be looking for the proof. Why not write a book about a world where everything you are and everything you will ever be, is determined by your DNA. Be the George Orwell or Aldous Huxley for the next generations.
@Another Mike:
That is not the argument and I suspect you know it. Your lot in life is not predetermined nor are your decisions, but your opportunities are bounded by where you start. People generally still tend to think of genetics in simple Mendelian terms with single genes responsible for expressed traits. The reality is much more complex and we are discovering more complexities at a pretty rapid clip now. Traits for things that matter as far as academic and economic success go are polygenetic and are effected by a variety of environmental factors. Some of those environmental factors are epigenetic and will make long term or even permanent changes in gene expression. Maternal nutrition and health matter for both epigenetic reasons and reasons as simple as necessary vitamins or other nutrients necessary for optimal development. Those environmental factors continue into childhood. An extremely simple example of this can be seen in the heights of people born in Western Europe before, during, and after WWII.
@jukebox:
Wait, so when you wrote:
…you implied taking down liars on the Internet was your version of taking down rioters in a city? 🙂 That’s roughly equivalent to you?
By the way, in your quest to rid our politics of lies, try not to flog that bandwagon fallacy so often.
@Rafer Janders: Ah, so it’s the symbolic victory over the liars you’re looking for. You make one dude on the Internet (and then the next, and then the next) into representatives of an entire movement and excoriate them. I guess eventually you either run out of lies, liars, or life in that scenario.
Have fun with that, guys, for what it’s worth. I think it’s counterproductive, but that’s (very obviously) just me. Think I’ll go back to lurking for a while and observe how this works out.
@michael reynolds:
I think that overstates it a bit. Genetics opens and closes some opportunities. In utero environment opens a shuts more. Early childhood development opens and shuts some more. This process continues through adolescence and into early adulthood. Poverty and its attendant stresses closes off a lot of opportunities and makes others more difficult to access. Wealth opens a lot of them and makes opening others easier. My wife and I aren’t particularly well off, but we are both well educated, both are or have been educators, have a solid support network, and have managed to schedule things where we have a lot of time with her. With all of those advantages I’m pretty confident my little girl will get a solid start. If I were out of work or working a few minimum wage jobs to make ends meet and we were less well educated I would have considerably less confidence in that.
Tillman:
Depending on what the two are doing, a one liar on the internet can do more damage than one rioter.
Nothing I have said or done has anything to do with the bandwagon fallacy. So you’re either misunderstanding me, misunderstanding that fallacy, or both.
Movements are made up of individuals. If you’re not dealing with the individuals who make up a movement, then you’re not dealing with the movement.
We already had one gbcw in this thread.
@Another Mike: @Grewgills:
Let me start by saying that true philosophizing is above my intellectual pay grade. I don’t have the focus or the will or the education to do that stuff.
But as a practical working view of h. sapiens I see us all as living within a sort of Venn diagram of DNA, environment, free will and random chance, with the understanding that each element is interconnected and not cleanly differentiated.
I do go back to poker as the metaphor. You’re dealt a hand: DNA. The other guys at the table are the environment – outside elements having an effect on your game. The deck is random chance – maybe another ace turns up, maybe it doesn’t. And how you bet, what you keep or discard, that’s free will. The four elements can’t be disentangled. Randomness permeates all of it, but so do DNA and environment. Is free will separate and apart, affected by but not dictated or determined by the other three factors, or is it an illusion? Damned if I know, but since we are not capable of believing we lack free will and inevitably act as though we do, I accept free will as a thing.
Each new difficulty added – poverty, minority status, ill health, bad looks, whatever – increases the odds of failure. Every plus – wealth, education, stability, beauty – increases the odds of success. People insist on turning that into a morality play, as though you dealt yourself the cards and did it from a deck you rigged. As if you cleverly arranged to be born rich. Or alternately that you chose to be born to a teen-aged mother in a ghetto. It’s really indefensible thinking.
Once you accept that most people are where they are not because of either virtue or vice but because of randomly-shuffled cards, you come to recognize that penalizing, stigmatizing or dismissing the unlucky is really distasteful and inappropriate. Put simply, if people can’t feed themselves, then we should feed them.
In honor of HarvardLaw I’ll avoid obvious New Testament references and go to Deuteronomy 15:
I don’t see talk there of how a person came to be poor, just that the poor are a fact of life, always with us, and we have a moral obligation to help them, and neither obligation nor standing to condemn them. It’s a position taken up by just about every religion there is. And I have yet to see any moral authority suggest that we should equate poverty with unworthiness. The lucky care for the unlucky.
@michael reynolds:
I think we’re pretty much on the same page. Genetics, epigenetics, environment and chance all combine to determine the opportunities available to us. Free will is how we navigate those opportunities. People with a wide array of opportunities and advantages that give them a head start on those opportunities work hard to make the most of them too often see their success only through the lens of the hard work they put in. At the same time they tend to minimize or ignore the advantages and opportunities dealt to them. Those same people tend to look at the poor through that same lens without any real knowledge of how much hard work ‘those people’ are putting in. The puritan work ethic that our culture is steeped in only serves to magnify this privilege blindness.
@Another Mike:
Well, let’s look at that example. Dr. Carson did play his hand very well, but at various points he had help.Sure, he was born to a single mother, but then that single mother maintained herself through welfare payments. That’s government help.
He was born and grew up in public housing. That’s government help.
He was fed with food stamps. That’s government help.
He went to public schools. That’s government help
He was kept healthy through Medicaid. That’s government help.
He received eyeglasses when young by applying for SNAP benefits . That’s government help.
He then got into college and medical school through affirmative action programs, financed his college education with Pell Grant and federally guaranteed student loans, and helped pay for medical school with a grant from USPHS.
Other than that, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
See how that works?
If you look at the lives of most black conservatives, you’ll find that at least one point along the way, the government helped ( and it’s often at several points). That’s so for white conservatives too, like Paul Ryan or Ayn Rand.
With HL92, the situation is different in some ways. I suspect that due to the accumulation of human capital generated by several generations of his Jewish ancestors, he was born a few miles from the finish line of a marathon( to use a sports metaphor). He still had to run the last few miles and run it well. But that’s different from being born at the start, shackled to a few heavy weights, with no map of the course, and with people sniping at you along the way.
For another and better metaphor,it’s time to dust off the John Scalzi links again.
What HL92 doesn’t want to own up to is that he was born with the easy setting turned on by default. The kid in Sandtown Winchester? Hard core. The best that government help can do is to move the difficulty setting down by one, and even then most average kids aren’t going to be able to level up.
@michael reynolds:
Yes, but some who have been dealt the same rotten hand manage to play it better than others. Maybe it was hard work, positive attitude and ambition, or some combination of good traits, that takes the person to higher levels that their similarly situated neighbors.
I think HarvardLaw’s point was that we, the taxpayers, have given and given and given for 50 years and have failed to improve lives in a meaningful way. We still have riots, looting and destruction and hundreds of cases of black youths beating up and assaulting white people just for kicks, or so it seems. Does it ever end?
With one hand politicians are doling out money, and with the other hand they are outsourcing jobs and robbing people of their means of livelihood. See the Denninger Market-Ticket link I posted above. Now here is from today: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230091
If government doesn’t slack up soon, we will all be Baltimore.
Wow. Just…..WOW. And we end up discussing genetic’s interaction with free will. Wow.
* blows the dust off for a moment *
@Another Mike:
The issue with this is to take a single individual and use their accomplishment as an opportunity to castigate an entire grouping of people.
It would be like saying “Look at what Einstein accomplished, clearly there is no anti-semitism.”
The challenge that we face here is the intersection between nature and nurture, personal responsibility and social responsibility. There is no clear answer, but we have ample evidence to support that just because an *individual* got lucky (both in terms of their intellectual capacity and in the opportunities that were presented to them and their ability to take advantage of them), it doesn’t mean that *all* individuals in that same community are equally lucky.
Of course, this view point is also deeply embedded within a Weberian model where success and morality/goodness are fundamentally intertwined. In other words that some how the successful *deserve* their success (in a moral sense) and the unsuccessful *deserve their punishment.*
Questioning this doesn’t remove responsibility from the individual, but it also doesn’t absolve the effects that intergenerational social structures have on their lives and opportunities.
@Another Mike:
But things have gotten better, which is where I part company from some liberals that assert that things are as bad as they have ever been. They’re not. Things are much better for black people and poor people than they were in 1965. ( check the help that Ben Carson got, for instance-help that mostly wasn’t there pre 1965). But things aren’t yet equal. We have to finish the job.
Part of the problem is that liberals underestimated how difficult it would be to transform a racial caste society into a society of true economic opportunity for all. Liberals thought it could be done in a few years with a “War on Poverty” like WW2-a few years of spending, followed by total victory. In fact, it’s turned out to be an intergenerational project-a project that would have gone better without conservatives fighting and whipping up racial hatred against minorities every step of the way.
As for riots, guess what, AM -don’t like riots ? Don’t engage in or defend riot-causing behavior, like the police indiscriminately killing blacks for no good reason at all-for jaywalking, or for looking at police the wrong way, or for suspicion of selling illegal cigarettes, or for playing with a toy gun, etc, etc, etc.
@Another Mike:
Any or all of those could play along with luck and/or an exceptional teacher or other mentor to help them along.
@michael reynolds:
Granted, and I give more than my share to charity for precisely that reason.
But, again, think through what you are saying. It’s essentially “the folks in Sandtown are incapable of helping themselves”. No matter what they do, they are doomed by virtue of having been born into a bad situation to remain in that situation forever.
I just don’t buy that. I’m a pretty liberal guy, but this is one aspect of the dogma that just infuriates me – the paternalism.
You’re saying “they don’t because they can’t.”
I’m saying “In many cases, they could, but they don’t because they won’t.”
I think many of them (and by many I mean more than anecdotal examples like Carson) are capable of overcoming their situation. You evidently think they’re incapable of it. I can’t think of anything that more expresses contempt for someone, anything that is more pernicious and paralyzing for an individual, than telling them they are (and will remain) helpless, but somehow I’ve become the guy on here who ostensibly despises poor people. . Go figure …
@michael reynolds:
If we had free will, it would include the ability to believe that we don’t. Therefore, no free will. (actually, I’m sure there are people who believe that they do not have free will, and that these people are also often insane and a danger to everyone around them).
@Another Mike:
No, Ben Carson is a good illustration of the problem: he was born in Detroit, he managed to climb the economic ladder, and then he left Detroit. Anyone that was born in West Baltimore wants to live anywhere else, and anyone that can leave will do so.
That´s in part an adverse selection problem, that create huge problems for these communities, that concentrates the losers of the society. The only solution for West Baltimore is to cease becoming West Baltimore, a location where Black and Low income people are concentrated.
@stonetools:
No, he fully acknowledges it. More than anything, he credits the endless litany of “you can do this. You are capable of anything. Much is expected of you, and you have what it takes to win.” That’s how you motivate someone – you give them a belief in themself. What he’s having trouble accepting is the notion that some kid in Sandtown is unavoidably incapable of ending up exactly where I am. I firmly believe that these people are capable. Yes, they have been dealt a bad hand, and yes, life has worked against them. I accept that. What I won’t accept is the notion that they can’t rise above it, which I’m hearing over and over above. It’s unbelievably cynical …
One of the reasons that I have soured so on unending governmental assistance is the message that I’ve come to believe it gives the recipient. In many ways, it’s a glaring statement to them that they have to be supported. That they are incapable of supporting themselves or of bettering their lives. It’s a cancerous, paralytic message to be sending to anyone, least of all someone who is already at the bottom of the pile. Every new payment just reinforces that depiction in the mind of the recipient, crippling them just a little bit further, until the paternalistic attitude that conceived the message sees it realized in another generation which eventually DOES end up incapable. I don’t believe that it has to be that way, and I believe that you start to change it by telling them that they can. If we’re going to spend money on support, which I believe is justified, then Jesus, let’s spend it on something that produces more than nothing but failure, nothing more than another generation of shattered lives.
As I said above, if the goal of these programs is to help these folks better their lives, then by and large they have been a spectacular failure. Refusing to acknowledge that failure is, IMO, an implicit acceptance of the notion that they’re incapable, and that I won’t do.
So we have a choice – we can change the way we do business, or we can ignore the glaring failure of the status quo and effectively just keep paying people not to rob our homes (which is at basis what it amounts to.)
@HarvardLaw92: The fine folks in Sandtown are capable of helping themselves — with the help of others, and a lot of luck.
Poverty is a trap. It limits your choices, and it limits your ability to succeed at the choices you can make. How many kids from Sandtown are going to be able to go from having a single parent and a very meager income growing up to being able to attend Harvard Law? And if you were to just stick them there, how many would succeed? Roughly none of them. They don’t have the skills, and they don’t have experience with doing the “right thing” actually helping them.
I have squandered more opportunities in my life than most of those kids will ever get.
The trap of intergenerational poverty cannot be broken from inside that trap. It needs people outside to help break down that trap, and ensure that there are opportunities and that the people there have a chance to succeed with those opportunities. The failure isn’t the people in our inner cities, the failure is our inner cities themselves. We need a new approach to poverty — the welfare state has made things less worse, but it hasn’t broken the cycle, while the Republican strategy of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is simple abandonment.
But none of this justifies police abusing the people they are holding. That’s just one more way the poor have things stacked against them.
@PT:
And BOTH SIDES DO IT TOO. Way too late to the discussion here, and sorry if I am repeating something that was earlier said, because I don’t feel like reading all 500+ comments. I’m a fellow law school grad, and your comments on this thread make me feel embarrassed about my profession. Not quite as bad as that dickhead “clinical professor of law” from Cornell, or John Yoo, but bad enough.
(That was directed to that Harvard Law guy, sorry!)
@gVOR08:
No, I’m saying nothing more than “the cases are relatively weak and the SA overcharged for political purposes.” Any halfway competent defense attorney will shred them, and these guys are going to have rockstars defending them. Their union is funding their defense, and as I hear it anyway the cash is flowing in at a steady clip to support that expenditure. That’s just how it goes – it’s reality.
Me speaking about a case is me being an attorney. Do I have a personal gripe / involvement / sense of outrage connected with the matter that is clouding my impartiality with regard to the players involved? Sure, and I’m working through that as best I can. With regard to the legal cases, however, I’m suffering no impaired thinking. I’m saying nothing more than “these trials are pretty certainly not going to turn out the way that most on here think/hope that they will.”. That’s all.
@bk:
You said that already a few hundred comments ago, but point taken. Being an attorney yourself, I think you’ll probably agree with my analysis of what the defense strategy will look like.
@Gustopher:
I think the question should be “how many MORE kids from Sandtown are going to be able to go from having …” if we stop telling them that they can’t.
No argument, but for the 500th time now, what we are currently doing is NOT working. It is NOT achieving that goal. If anything, it’s making it worse. Unless it creates a generation of kids empowered to believe that they can be anything they set their minds to, which is where any realistic change has to start, it’s meaningless. Produce that, and even if they stumble & fall or fail to make it to the finish line, they are still better off and farther along than they were.
The trap can’t be broken solely from the outside either. The sooner we recognize and accept that, the sooner we might start making a difference.
@HarvardLaw92:
Ok, you’ve said it 500 times. So what do you propose as a better method of dealing with the problem? Telling poor people they suck and giving the police license to brutalize them is probably not the answer…
Yea, I heard those messages growing up. And I do have what it takes to win. I’m white, healthy, intelligent, athletic, and, false modesty aside, attractive. I grew up in an affluent area – I’m comfortable around money and success. I have countless success models to emulate. I know how to dress, how to act in a first class restaurant, how to network…. I could go on and on.
How much of this bounty can be credited to myself? Ummmm – none of it.
And in spite of this, life is pretty f**king hard. I often wonder wonder what my life would be like if I had been locked out of the stadium instead of being born on second base.
@HarvardLaw92:
I think this is a middle class guy’s way of how the poor should look at government assistance. Most poor people do understand that they are getting assistance, and that they aren’t entitled to it, and a few are even deeply ashamed to be on assistance at all. Again, maybe you should speak to some actual poor people? I understand they are a bit thin on the ground in Westchester and at Wall Street, but maybe you can volunteer somewhere?
The plain fact is that poor people in Sandtown Winchester are poor because there are no jobs that they can get to, or because they don’t have the skills to do the jobs that are open. You’ve suggested for example that the poor have access to jobs through mass transit. I know for a fact ( because I used Baltimore mass transit) that’s its difficult for inner city kids to get to suburban jobs using mass transit. I also doubt that there is a lot of government day care assistance for poor single mothers. In short, I think there are more obstacles to the poor getting jobs than you want to admit.
As for the guys who you see sitting around on the stoops in Baltimore, you should understand that there are lots and lots of poor people who you don’t see working their a$$es off the back rooms of the restaurants you eat at, cleaning up after you when you go home at night, picking your organic tomatoes, bagging your groceries, and emptying out your trash cans.THOSE are the ones that are by and large getting government assistance. Yes, some undeserving poor may game the system. But a lot of poor who are getting government assistance are in fact deserving and usually get off assistance in a few years. It’s worth it to me to help those guys, even if some undeserving poor benefit. To use another biblical metaphor, God’s rain falls on both the just and the unjust. In any case, the solution is not to cut these programs , but to better administer them.
@anjin-san:
Get rid of petty drug offenses. Start spending money on programs that empower people to do more than collect a check, and more pointedly, to believe that all they can do is collect a check (I’m fully open to suggestions in this regard).
Just as an example: the assistance supplied to a single mom in Baltimore can hit the equivalent of $19 a hour, and almost none of it requires anything more from the recipient than breathing to qualify.
How much further along would we be if we took those funds and used them instead to create public sector jobs for these folks to do? Maryland’s infrastructure is falling apart, literally. Take these young men and pay them to fix it. Even if it’s just busy work they’re doing, it’s still a hell of a lot better, and hell of a lot more empowering for the soul, to be doing (and more importantly, to FEEL AS THOUGH YOU ARE DOING) something useful than it is to be sitting in place, spinning one’s wheels and ending up exactly where they started. I firmly believe that if you give someone a belief in themselves, they can accomplish anything. It might be a good place to start.
@stonetools:
Exactly my point. How much damage are we doing to these people, real long-term damage, by sending that message, and more importantly, how much as they doing to themselves by believing it?
@stonetools:
I do understand that. I also understand that unemployment in Sandtown is around 50%. 1 out of every two of those people sitting on stoops there evidently are not the people you are describing.
I’m not berating them. If you read above, you’ll see that I am quite clearly saying that I believe these people are quite capable of more than sitting on a stoop all day long. I’m saying that we, in our self-congratulating do gooder driven quest to help them, are instead crippling them by the means that we go about trying to accomplish it.
@stonetools:
You can read about Maryland’s program here
@anjin-san:
How much harder would it have been if you’d heard from birth that you were impotent, helpless and incapable of ever amounting to anything?
Just saying …
@HarvardLaw92:
I understand your dislike of helping single “welfare queen” moms. however, these are largely a creation of right wing propoganda. I doubt they get that much help. And since 1996, most of that help is time limited any way.
I can support a lot of that. I’ve always liked the idea of CCC type programs to deal with unemployment during recessions. Be advised, though, that many economists consider them counterproductive and at best more symbolic than helpful.
I think an even better solution would be German style apprenticeship programs offered through community colleges that would teach youths skills like carpentry and bricklaying ( Not everyone wants to go to college-or has the book smarts to make it in college).
Of course, most conservatives want to simply cut spending, period and give tax cuts to billionaires because in their cockeyed view of the universe, that will help the poor through trickle down mumbo jumbo. I’m hoping at least that you don’t believe THAT crap.
HL92:
That’s funny, since when I do actually “read above,” I see this:
I’m pretty sure that “shiftless, lazy” is a form of “berating.”
This is also hilarious, since calling people “shiftless” and “lazy” is pretty darn close to telling them that they are “incapable of ever amounting to anything.”
A key part of your MO is that you keep changing your story while pretending that you aren’t changing your story. It’s all part of your “performance.”
@stonetools:
This is entirely, massively off-base. It has nothing to do with regarding her as a “welfare queen”. It has to do with wanting her to grow up to be self-supporting, empowered and proud of the fact that she is. It has to do with wanting her to believe that she can be something more than where life has parked her at present. I want her to one day not NEED assistance. I have no problem, at all, supplying it to her, but I think that the end result of that should be a better life for her, and more pointedly the ability to provide a better life for herself.
This is possible, but I’d wager that expending money on what are effectively something for nothing (in the sense of reciprocal gain back to society) programs is more counterproductive. Given the choice between giving someone a benefit check or giving them a job (and by association a sense of pride & empowerment), it’s not much of a choice IMO.
Absolutely. I’d support this enthusiastically and without reservations.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Look, I have already spoken with Joyner about your incessant personal attacks. I have nothing more to say to you. Please seek joy elsewhere.
@HarvardLaw92:
I haven’t ever heard that message ( and I’ve worked with mentally handicapped people whose prospects are objectively quite limited). The message that I have heard from African American leaders is to go out there and work as hard as you can because “you have to be twice as good to be just as good.” ( Maybe you should sit in on a couple of black church services. You’ll find zero sympathy for people gaming the system).
My girlfriend lives in an Low income region of São Paulo, that´s probably worse than West Baltimore. Part of the problem is that low income people usually lives surrounded by other low income people. That means that´s much more difficult to network for a job, that means that there are less people that can talk to you about financial education and things like that.
That´s more difficult than a matter of message.
@stonetools:
I believe that the current benefits structure sends that message to people. Even it’s just indirect via implication, I feel pretty sure that they get the message, and I feel pretty sure that it’s harmful.
@Andre Kenji:
Hence my suggestion of creating jobs for them to do. I can’t really conceive of a way in which being at a job, around other people who are working and can serve as role models / educational resources / mentors could be a bad thing for these folks. I certainly think it would be better than the status quo.
HL92:
I recall you saying this:
So thanks once again for being inadvertently hilarious.
Anyway, I can’t find the part of your comment where you explain why you contradicted yourself. Someone must have hijacked your handle, because there is one HL92 who says “I’m not berating them,” and another HL92 who calls them “shiftless” and “lazy.” Here’s an idea: pick one story and stick with it.
You already made that promise at least once. I expect you to keep making it, regularly.
You’re still confused. The one who promised to leave is you. Speaking of worthless promises.
@HarvardLaw92:
As a lawyer, of course, you understand that it’s just what you feel, and not necessarily how the poor look at it? You also understand that there are many countervailing messages from the rest of society, right?
@stonetools:
Yes, I do, but I remain convinced that it’s debilitating. I think (or hope) that you know that, at the other end of the road, I want the same things for these people that most everybody else on here does. I’m not expressing malice. I just think that what we’re currently doing is, at best, counterproductive, if not also actually harmful. Maybe a better way of putting it is this:
If any of these folks are indeed shiftless and lazy (which I will agree was an exceedingly poor choice of words), then we probably need look no further than the nearest mirror to find the party(ies) responsible for that. We’ve created a system which effectively tells these folks they have no stake in society. That they’re outsiders dependent on the institutionalized charity of government in order to survive. We’re, as a society, effectively calling them “other”. I absolutely can’t support rioting & looting, under any circumstances, but I absolutely get why these folks would riot & loot. Nobody is going to care about damaging a society which they feel like – and in many ways which we tell them – they not are a part of to begin with.
I just can’t support that, both because it’s wrong and because it doesn’t fix the problem. It makes it worse. I’m in favor of things that work, and I just don’t think what we’re doing at present is working.
Link:
OK, so they’re no longer “shiftless and lazy.” Are they still “con artists?” Just wondering which HL92 is present at this moment. There are apparently several, and they have a hard time reaching consensus.
@HarvardLaw92:
It wasn’t a “poor choice of words.” It was exactly what you thought, in the depths of your racist heart.
@HarvardLaw92:
Some of HarvardLaw92’s comments from earlier on this threat:
We have the same shiftless, lazy people (which is what they are – uncomfortable facts …) sitting around on steps that we had when I was a child.
My sympathy now is reserved for the people whose distasteful job it is to corral them and keep them under control so the rest of us can live our lives out in some semblance of order.
the hordes down in West Baltimore who’ve made a drug dealer into their latest hero du jour.
I believe they’re being railroaded in order to placate the natives,
Just how long do you think will be required for these people to step up and take responsibility for their own lives?
These people tried to kill my nephew Monday night, so whatever sympathy or goodwill they might have had with me is gone
the life of a scum drug dealer
You become the enemy.
As far as justice, no, I am not concerned with it.
you effete bleeding heart asshole
If that’s what he sounds like when he’s “not expressing malice” I can’t wait to find out what he sounds like when he is.
Slow* Clap* to the lap dogs and especially you junkiebox. Playing over and over and over is the same broken Jukebox.
“It warms my heart to know that you are willing to spend your entire day scouring my postings in pursuit of something that I don’t care about in the least.”
It does warm her heart… Junkbox is so full of her racheal madcow self she is at ease giving us all an update….
….but doesn’t anybody(looking at you lap dogs) bother to check up on your false claims? HL92 doesn’t need to because he is right. But I will (xv) heroin; right there in the list you claim that doesn’t list it are the words heroin<…silly you…HL92 laughs at you again. So yes Grey was a convicted heroin dealer. Why do you always find you self on the wrong side every argument? It really must hurt your ego every time you slither out from under your rock.
An article about ISIS is inherently an article about Iraq (and this is reflected in the way that word was used in the article). I don’t think that’s a ‘pointless detail,’ but of course you’re entitled to your opinion. ….YOU were WRONG then and you are Still Wrong now. ….kinda reminds of the time you kept saying that there was a protest of some sort…
So I will close with the words of the man that slashed multiple fire hoses that night.
I troll the junkie because ….. The same man come up and cut the hose again, in full view of CNN’s cameras. “I just watched that guy cut the hose as well,” anchor Wolf Blitzer said.
The bystander seemed positively gleeful. “That’s how I do. That’s how I do.”
M u n c h b o x g r a d
Urchin:
I’m not sure I have crayons thick enough to make this simple enough for the likes of you. No, I never said “the list … doesn’t list it.” I’ll quote myself:
Yes, I know that CDS is a category that includes heroin. Trouble is, it also includes many other things, which means that a CDS conviction is not necessarily a heroin conviction. Starting to catch on yet?
Another instance where large crayons are needed. “Slashed multiple fire hoses” is a falsehood. “Cut the hose again” means that he cut the same hose twice. Are you able to grasp that cutting one hose twice is not the same as “slashed multiple fire hoses?” I guess not. And it’s also definitely not the same as “hoses were slashed all over the city,” which is the big fat lie your pal told.
The two of you make a great couple.
@HarvardLaw92: I think that the problem is deeper than merely having jobs(I know lots of low income people that have jobs). In fact, part of the problem as I pointed out is that people simply move from West Baltimore when they climb the economic ladder.
How remarkable. I see Rafer Janders has posted a comment which consists 100% of quotes from HarvardLaw92. The comment contains no commentary whatsoever by Rafer Janders. The comment has attracted (so far) 11 downvotes. Since the comment contains nothing written by Rafer Janders, and only contains statements made by HarvardLaw92, there are basically two possibilities:
A) Those 11 people disapprove of those statements made by HarvardLaw92.
B) Those 11 people think it’s wrong to quote HarvardLaw92.
I wonder which it is?
B kind of reminds me of this: “any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.”
@HarvardLaw92:
When you equate government assistance like SNAP, WIC, and childcare with telling them they can’t, then less kids from any poverty stricken neighborhood will be able to go if we stop “telling” them that.
If you think things are worse now than in 1965 for poor minorities living in the projects, I suggest that you don’t have a single clue what it was like to live in the projects then or now as a person of any ethnicity.
That is rather a catch 22 for a starting point. There needs to be the support to make that statement true for them to believe it and that support needs to last long enough for them to see it for most of them to believe it.
That, however, doesn’t mean that the 50% are shiftless or lazy or whatever today’s adjectives are.
That along with more educational opportunity including mentoring and apprenticeships in trades and technical work would be a good start.
I’m guessing you haven’t had many conversations with people in jobs where all they do is busywork. I don’t have a problem with it and can see some benefit even, but picking up garbage on the side of the road or digging ditches isn’t so empowering as learning a trade that will help them get a job that isn’t repetitive back breaking labor.
I think you believe that because you had all of the advantages to make that pretty close to the truth. Without nutrition and a good education and involved parents (at a bare minimum 2 of those 3) someone can have all the confidence in the world and they won’t be going to Harvard, nor will they be in a position to realistically reach a lot of goals that they can dream of. They will still be competing against people with far more advantages even with that confidence. Confidence is a great thing and is a part of any solution, but it is not the panacea you make it out to be.
Again, this is coming from someone with absolutely zero relevant experience. You have had at least a few people with the relevant experience say that this is not the message received. My family was not at all well off. More than a few of our relatives were on public assistance and that was not their experience either. When your feelings about the message received by people on particular programs are directly contradicted by the actual experiences of people on those programs it may be time to reassess your feelings about what message is being sent by said programs.
Just saying…
That is not at all the impression you gave yesterday. There was considerable contempt expressed yesterday and “poor choice of words” doesn’t come close to covering it.
If you had expressed that opinion from the beginning you wouldn’t have been on the receiving end of all the vitriol.
I am curious, do you still think that it is likely that Gray crushed his own larynx and nearly severed his own spinal cord? I am not asking you as a lawyer if you think you can cast doubt with a carefully selected jury. I am asking what you think as a person. Do you think that the officers in question acted with anything other than reckless disregard for the health and safety of someone in their care? Do you still plan to work pro bono for their defense?
@HarvardLaw92:
If, for example, you’d been called “shiftless, lazy,” a “thug,” someone who “should be corralled and kept under control so the rest of us can live our lives out in some semblance of order,” part of “the hordes down in West Baltimore who’ve made a drug dealer into their latest hero du jour,” one of “the natives,” “scum,” and someone of whom it’s wondered “just how long…will be required for these people to step up and take responsibility for their own lives?”
Yes, imagine how much harder it would be if that’s what you had to hear….
@Grewgills:
In truth, I do not know, nor does anyone else. There is a great deal of self-serving speculation going on, but nobody really knows what happened inside that van other than the officers, and they are exceedingly unlikely to reveal anything which might be incriminating.
Same answer as above. Much speculation (and much of that emotionally driven), little, if any, direct evidence. I’m not going to exacerbate that by speculating further. We’ll know more once the trials begin (assuming Mosby is even able to obtain indictments, about which I also have my doubts).
There are three elements to the depraved heart charge, all of which must be satisfied. It’s not sufficient for the defendant simply to have acted with reckless disregard. His/her actions also have to have directly caused the death, his/her conduct has to have created a very high risk of loss of life, and he/she has to have acted in conscious knowledge of the risk.
The classic example we’re taught in law school is dropping a flower pot off of the balcony of a skyscraper onto a crowded street. It’s not enough to accidentally drop it or knock it off of the railing. It has to be consciously dropped with the awareness that it has a high risk of causing death and a disregard for the consequences despite having that knowledge. I’m certainly open to negligence, but I have serious doubts that the officer(s) in question knew he was likely to die as the result of their actions and simply didn’t care. Proving that is a long shot. Even obtaining an indictment for it is a long shot.
Manslaughter – maybe, although I doubt that as well. If we see convictions at all, they are likely to be for misconduct in office.
I know who their attorneys will be. They don’t need my help. I did send a check to their defense fund.
@Rafer Janders:
Judging from the number of thumbs downs, people are getting tired of hearing your “I don’t like you” screed. You’ve made your point. Move on.
@HarvardLaw92: Care to give the amount?
@T:
No, actually, I don’t.
@HarvardLaw92:
I wasn’t asking you those questions as a lawyer. I knew from the get go that the likelihood of any of the officers serving time was slim. I am asking if you, the person not acting as a lawyer, think it is at all likely that Gray injured himself rather than it being the result of him being restrained in the back of a fast moving van with only think bench seats? Do you think that the officers in question acted with anything other than reckless disregard for Gray’s health and well being? I’m not asking if you think it possible to convince a jury of that, I asking your opinion.
I have a solid guess at the answer, given you contributed to their legal defense. Contributing to their legal defense if you thought their reckless disregard for his health and well being was the proximate cause of his death would be contemptible.
@HarvardLaw92:
If Gray’s neck was broken by being thrown into the wall of the van or one of the benches by the movement of the van then that should meet element one. They would have by their actions directly caused his death.
That this conduct created a high risk of death should be provable.
The conscious knowledge is the hard part. If the cops just thought it was highly likely he would be injured, even severely, what is the charge then?
How does their refusal to offer any aid or call for any medical attention when he was unresponsive on the floor of the van effect that?
How long does someone have to be cuffed and unresponsive on the floor of a moving van when in police custody for it to merit a depraved heart conviction?
HL92:
How odd that a large number of downvotes (as well as upvotes) are suddenly appearing in your favor at a time when the number of comments appearing in your favor (written by anyone other than you) is very close to zero. This is quite an unusual pattern; voting and commenting are usually congruent, for obvious reasons.
The current pattern normally doesn’t occur here, and it hasn’t appeared previously in this thread. I wonder what it means. But surely no one is manipulating the votes, right?
It’s also remarkable that you would call attention to voting at the same time that this sudden shift has occurred. During most of this thread the voting pattern was strongly against you, and you never mentioned it. But I guess it’s just a coincidence that the voting pattern and your attitude about voting would change at the same moment.
@Jack:
Small correction – there are two paths to charging a felony in Maryland – criminal information and indictment. A PCA is charging the officers via the firth pathway – criminal information.
She is not required to seek an indictment, but if she chooses not to, she will have to substantiate her assertion of probable cause at a preliminary hearing, at which a judge must agree that probable cause exists for the officers to be charged before the cases can proceed to trial.
The normal path for a prosecutor in Maryland issuing a PCA is to seek an indictment close to the eve of the preliminary hearing, in order to both avoid dissemination of information (grand jury sessions are secret, preliminary hearings are not), and to avoid giving the defense what amounts to free discovery. He/she does not have to do this in order to proceed to trial if they are willing to present their substantiating evidence in open court in the presence of the defense, but they almost always do seek an indictment. It’s strategic, not mandatory though.
By the way, I wonder if you noticed “the number of thumbs downs” on your comment where you advocate noticing “the number of thumbs downs.” I guess it’s time for you to adopt a new position again.
@Grewgills:
Again, as I said, I do not know. On the one hand I have an allegation that he was placed face down on the bench. On another, I have the statement from the other transportee that he was at a minimum acting out / being uncoopoerative during transport, so truthfully, I just do not know. I haven’t seen any actual evidence. I’ve read the same accounts of the story that you have, and the people writing them haven’t seen any actual evidence either. There is a great deal of conjecture at this point.
Do I think it more likely that he was injured as a result of falling from the bench during transit? Probably, but then we’re back to where we were with regard to satisfying all thee elements of the crime. It should be noted that at no point above did I ever actually assert that I did believe Gray injured himself. I asserted that it was PLAUSIBLE (many things are plausible – it doesn’t mean that they actually happened) and that I believed I could convince at least one juror to consider it plausible enough to vote to acquit. Truthfully, I think a talented enough attorney could convince one juror on any jury pool of anything. Doesn’t mean it happened.
That’s secondary to, but disconnected from, the sequence of events that actually caused death IMO, and even then it would have to be a case where the lack of medical attention would otherwise have saved his life if called sooner. I have not seen evidence in that regard. I lump that failure under misconduct in office.
I will say that the chatter down there is that the Medical Examiner’s report initially indicated accidental death, but was later amended to indicate homicide. I do not know if this is accurate, or, if so, why it would have been changed. I will say that if it was changed, the defense will be all over it (again, assuming the relevant charges even go to trial).
@Grewgills:
Why? Everybody deserves a defense, and several of these officers have families. Children of their own. Why should those families potentially be bankrupted in order to pay for a defense to alleged crimes they had nothing to do with carrying out?
You didn’t just say it was “PLAUSIBLE.” You said it was likely. Link. Yet another instance of you changing your position while pretending you aren’t changing your position.
@ Jukeboxgrad
No, I responded to someone else’s question of “is it at all likely” in the affirmative.
Likely = likely. “Did it happen?”
At all likely = possible. “Could it have happened?”
They’re very different animals. Evidently you need to learn to read, or just exorcise yourself of this obsessive parsing of my commentary.
@HarvardLaw92:
I asked you early on if you thought it was likely that the injured himself or if you just thought you could convince a jury. You replied both so you said more than PLAUSIBLE, you said LIKELY.
@Grewgills:
On that point I’ll have to disagree. Challenging the accepted dogma around here, in any way, tends to draw out the pitchforks and torches. If they could find a way to power cars on umbrage, this place would be a gold mine.
People around here like being intellectually stroked. They do not like being contradicted, especially about subjects in which they are emotionally invested (which again, tends to be anything related to the accepted dogma).
@Grewgills:
Seriously? I’m drawing the exchange from your own comment …
I responded to your verbiage – “at all likely” – in that comment. Don’t edit me on the fly.
He asked you the same question twice. Friday your answer was “in the affirmative.” Just now your answer was “I do not know.” Same question, different answer.
It’s OK to change your mind. It’s not OK to change your mind while pretending you didn’t change your mind. You do the latter.
By the way, you forgot that you promised to ignore me. But soon you’ll make that promise again, for at least the third time, right?
And speaking of changing your mind, here’s another example. Friday:
Monday:
There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, but it’s a good idea to acknowledge that you changed your mind. It’s also a good idea to explain why.
@ Jukeboxgrad
You seem to have a habit of twisting what people say. Don’t blame me if the comment you linked to doesn’t say what you thought it did and you rushed to get your barb in before you looked to see if it was accurate.
At all likely = possible. I don’t know = I don’t know. Lots of ambiguity there, but Jukeboxgrad knows all, right? He alone can state with specificity what other people mean when they make ambiguous statements, right?
If you are going to keep being a jackass with this parsing everything I say in service of nursing your grudge, I don’t really have a choice but to respond, now do I?
Strangely, you remind me more and more of the Tesla fanboi Peter Gordon.
@HarvardLaw92:
I wouldn’t have been arguing against that characterization, neither do I think would MR or at least half of the people that have been arguing with you. It was the apparent contempt you showed for the people of West Baltimore (not just the rioters) that turned the crowd against you. There are certainly a few who would have argued against you, but we wouldn’t be over 500 comments in at this point sans that apparent contempt.
@ Jukeboxgrad
And you are doing it again.
Seriously, let it go.
You’re confused again, because I never linked to a comment that “doesn’t say what [I] thought it did.” Grewgills asked you this recently:
Your answer:
Same question he asked you Friday, when you answered affirmatively. Different answer today.
Is there someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read and respond to my comments? Speak up, because I’ll be glad to dial 911 for you.
@Grewgills:
See my previous comment about “umbrage”. People see what they want to see, especially once they get pissed off.
Speaking frankly, this assclown Jukeboxgrad pissed me off the other night, and I lost it. Not proud of it, not excusing it, but it is what it is. I genuinely hate the guy. He in and of himself would justify the existence of an ignore button on this site.
For what it’s worth, though, you try responding to 10 or so different people at the same time when you are pissed and they are pissed, and see how it goes.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Yes, you did, here
You wrote, and I quote:
I said no such thing. Greg asked if it was AT ALL LIKELY, and I responded in the affirmative.
You not only changed the verbiage, you also misattributed its authorship. In short, you lied.
I’m seeing a pattern here of you doing that.
Correct (although that’s not his name). And then he asked you again, recently:
Emphasis added by me. Your answer:
Same question he asked you Friday, when you “responded in the affirmative.” Different answer today. I already explained this.
That’s funny, since there’s no one here named “Greg.”
Except that you are “excusing it,” because you’re suggesting that your execrable behavior is somehow my fault. That’s nonsense, like so many other things you say.
This is also a good moment to recall that you recently said this:
I’m sure he’s impressed with your use of the word “assclown.”
@ Jukeboxgrad
You completely sidestep your own error, try to flip it back around on me, and yet you accuse me of trolling …
I just reported you to Doug as well, since it’s his post. If he wants to penalize me for using that term, more power to him, but you are doing nothing more than engaging in an ongoing personal attack.
I seriously see no point in responding to your trolling any further, but I WILL blow up email boxes with continuous complaints about your personal attacks until you disengage.
@HarvardLaw92:
Come on, you know better. You know exactly what you are doing when you throw around words like “shiftless and lazy” to characterize an African American community knowing full well the history of those words. There was more to it than that and it was pointed out to you before, but that is enough. When you use racist dog whistles you can’t complain too much when people then think you are a racist. I don’t know you and I realize you were speaking when you were emotional and may have said things you don’t actually believe which is why I repeatedly said I hoped you thought better of what you were saying when you were less emotional.
I have more than once been in the position of arguing a distinct minority position against at least that many angry people. I managed to do it without treating entire communities or large groups with contempt. I have more than once here argued against the apparent contempt for republicans and other groups shown by some of the commenters here. I can’t say I’ve ever gotten pissed off by anyone I’ve argued with on the internet. I’m simply not emotionally invested enough to get pissed. I do have a SIWOTI problem, but it isn’t emotionally driven.
Anyway, I need to get back to grading labs rather than indulging my SIWOTI complex.
@ Jukeboxgrad
In closing, I will say that you seem to have a reputation for this sort of behavior.
Sockpuppetry and trolling seem to be a way of life with you. Looks like Buzz Buzz really has your number 😀
Good thing I didn’t make an error. Grewgills asked you the exact same question twice. Your answer changed.
You should also report me to your nephew.
I’m sure you really mean it this time, even though you’re making that promise now for at least the third time.
Be sure to let us know how that goes.
I have been commenting here for a long time, much longer than you. I say what I like to whomever I like. If you think that’s going to change, you should prepare to be disappointed.
I’m glad he impressed you. Maybe he’s your nephew.
@ Jukeboxgrad
And this is VERY ILLUSTRATIVE with regard to your tactics.
LOL, and 46,000 comments in three years??? On one portal alone??? Good g-d, man, do you EVER get up from your computer? That’s just sad …
You suckered me into your troll routine. Congratulations.
Yes, oddly enough my comments are “VERY ILLUSTRATIVE” of my comments.
I suggest you read all of them. You might learn something. And since you’re a fan, let me help you with some older stuff:
My main page at DailyKos
Another way to see my stuff at DailyKos
If you can spot any errors, I’m always grateful to hear about them.
Wrong. Not that it matters.
Also wrong. Not that it matters.
@ Jukeboxgrad
No thanks. I know a troll when I see one, or at least I should have. You got me good there, trollboy.
But we’re done now. Have fun …
46,000 comments. Sheesh, that’s like 42 comments per day, every day, 365 days a year, for the last three years straight, just on those few websites alone.
🙄 Sad. Just … sad … 🙄
@ Jukeboxgrad
They reveal your join date (March 23, 2012) and number of comments posted (46,256).
Or are they lying too? ROFL
I did feel particular amusement at your devastation over losing your upvotes though. This troll routine really is your entire life, isn’t it?
When Volokh Conspiracy and National Review converted to Disqus, most comment history was ported over. I started using this name at VC in roughly 2004.
Another figment of your imagination. But I’m glad to see you really meant it when you said this:
You sure seem concerned about it to me … LOL, you even contacted an admin about it. 😀
I’m actually glad I ran into you now. I haven’t laughed like this in a good while. Even trolls are good for something, I suppose.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Sure, sure they did … *wink wink* 😉
😆 😆 😆
This is what you said:
This is what I said:
I posted a few sentences reporting a problem. That’s not “devastation.” You recently said this:
If the word you use to describe a few sentences reporting a problem is “devastation,” then I guess you’ll have to find a much stronger word to describe your own current condition. Once again, your utter lack of self-awareness is stunning.
If you need confirmation I suggest you just check with your nephew.
Speaking of your nephew, that reminds me. You said this:
You said that Friday. Now it’s Monday. Any luck yet? Hasn’t your imaginary nephew been able to help you produce a few of those imaginary firefighters?
And speaking of questions that you have left unanswered, for some strange reason, I notice that a couple of people have pointed out that you have been saying things like this:
A longer list is here.
Subsequent to saying all that, you also said this:
And you also said this:
So there is obviously more than one HL92 posting here. Which one is real?
Things seem to be getting a bit personal here (I can’t honestly say I’ve been able to keep up with every comment in a thread that is about to hit 600 comment since Friday).
I’ll just remind everyone of our comment policies, and ask that you act accordingly.
I wonder if you’re talking about this:
Or if you’re talking about this:
Or if you’re talking about something else.
jukeboxgrad,
The general tone of alot of that, yes.
OK, thanks for clarifying that.
@HarvardLaw92: “Murder requires intent,…”
I’m trying to figure out how they could have killed him without intent.
@HarvardLaw92:
To pointlessly interject:
No. As a trained neuroscientist and spinal cord injury researcher, I can definitively tell you that no, a handcuffed man unsecured on a car/van floor can NOT sever his own spinal cord. It is possible to injure your own back, bash your own head, etc. it is not within the realm of possibility to traumatize your own neck and spine to that degree. If one were sufficiently committed (likely medicated) it could be done by running one’s body head first into a stationary object at a running speed, but handcuffed on a floor? No.
@HarvardLaw92: And you still haven’t explained why murdering him was justified.
@HarvardLaw92: “In truth, I do not know, nor does anyone else. There is a great deal of self-serving speculation going on, but nobody really knows what happened inside that van other than the officers, and they are exceedingly unlikely to reveal anything which might be incriminating.”
Oh, bull. You don’t *know* anything, and neither do I, in the ‘absolute certainty’ sense, but that’s never an issue with criminal charges.
Don’t try to lie to us about the difference between ‘beyond a doubt’ and ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.
HL92, something peculiar happened yesterday. Did you notice? Between the start of this thread and Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 12:43, you posted 125 comments. All your comments that received more than 5 upvotes (during that period) are as follows:
Friday, May 1, 2015 at 19:20 Thumb up 7 Thumb down 22
Friday, May 1, 2015 at 20:00 Thumb up 14 Thumb down 18
Friday, May 1, 2015 at 20:38 Thumb up 11 Thumb down 0
(Obviously these numbers can change, but that’s what they look like now.) That is, during that period, only 2.4% of your comments were getting more than 5 upvotes. But then yesterday something strange happened. Notice this list:
Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 18:05 Thumb up 14 Thumb down 7
Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 22:45 Thumb up 14 Thumb down 12
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 19:54 Thumb up 15 Thumb down 8
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:10 Thumb up 14 Thumb down 5
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:27 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 6
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:29 Thumb up 0 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:34 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 4
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:54 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 4
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 20:56 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:04 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:08 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:16 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 4
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:27 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:29 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 7
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:33 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 3
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 21:36 Thumb up 12 Thumb down 2
Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 22:23 Thumb up 13 Thumb down 5
Those are all your comments during the indicated interval. Aside from one exception, all your 17 comments during this interval got at least 12 upvotes. This is a remarkable streak. In your prior 125 comments, there is only one instance where a comment of yours got more than 11 upvotes (and I listed that instance; it was your second comment in this thread).
It’s important to notice that this flood of upvotes for you appeared at a time when the number of comments appearing in your favor (written by anyone other than you) was very close to zero. This is quite an unusual pattern; voting and commenting are usually congruent, for obvious reasons.
During the same period, there was also a flood of surprising downvotes. For example, Michael Reynolds got 15 downvotes here. I’ve been here a long time and I’ve never seen him downvoted like that.
Another odd coincidence: right at this time that there was a surge of voting on your behalf, you suddenly posted a comment calling attention to the voting. You hadn’t done that before, in this thread (or ever, as far as I can tell).
I recall when you said this:
Even though you like to “bend the rules,” I’m sure you’re an honest, trustworthy person who would never stoop to the level of manipulating the voting system here. So do you think someone else did this on your behalf, or do you have some other explanation for this odd pattern?
Maybe you have a lot of nephews who suddenly appeared to vote on your behalf? While also oddly neglecting to post comments on your behalf?
JUNKBOX….I suspect you are shiftless lazy loser…and that’s why you can spend all day on the internet worrying about how many upvotes you get. it must make you feel like you have friends or something.
that’s strange for someone who claims not to “care” about upvotes…
….mr shiny bald ass hat head deserves every down vote he gets for the crap that spews forth from his turd mouth. I think it’s because he has those specialty extra think glasses that enables him to see racism in everything… he is like a parrot …Sqw-a-ak that’s racist Sqw-a-ak that’s racist. SQW-A-A K!!
@jukebox:
Eh. I deserve this, I wasn’t specific. From the link I provided:
From your post here: [emphases mine]
and
Certainly a softer, informal use of the fallacy since you didn’t insist the view was right because of the popularity of his post, but you went out of your way to point out how many people agreed with him to bolster your view twice when the number of people agreeing with a person has nothing to do with their being correct. (No offense Kylopod.) Am I still misunderstanding you or the fallacy?
In fact, rereading your post, you only assert Kylopod is correct as a premise for everything else, and why is Kylopod correct? If you had another reason for thinking he was correct, you probably would’ve mentioned that at least three times, right? 🙂 Cheap shot here, I’ll cop to it.
The idea I had (to lurk for a while, what you mischaracterized as a gbcw) has yielded vaguely what I thought it would. You appealed to popularity to suggest someone should change their position. When the voting system turned on you (comment above this one at time of writing), you reached for offline conspiracy to explain it. So nothing you’ve done has ever depended on appeals to popularity? Is your concern for the voting system here the same as john personna’s used to be? Are you now thinking I somehow manipulated the voting to make you look worse instead of challenging your forthright, non-fallacious reasoning? 😀
So Many Boxes so little time a/k/a HarvardLaw92:
Good thing I don’t do that.
Good thing I never claimed that. By the way, there’s a word for someone who puts quote marks around a word the other person didn’t use. That word is liar.
Also by the way, whether or not I care about upvotes doesn’t matter. What matters is the obvious manipulation of your upvotes.
That’s rich, coming from the person who said this:
Tillman:
Thanks for explaining. I didn’t realize that’s what you were talking about. Now explain how these words of yours are not the same thing:
You seem to be pointing out that “many people” supported a certain view.
The voting system displayed a reversal that was sudden, intense and short. And also bizarrely incongruent with the commenting at the time. No one has explained this. Maybe you will.
“Conspiracy,” by definition, involves a group. I never said the votes were manipulated by a group. The most parsimonious explanation is that one person did it.
@jukeboxgrad:
First, I never claimed to be non-fallacious. That was you, remember? 🙂 If we’re going to be equated, I can at least avoid the minor vice of hypocrisy.
Second, as far as a jury goes, yes I was saying many people supported a certain view. Though I was hoping citing a jury decision and then fluffing it up to “society decided” would come off as a figurative use of language. I also ascribed “infinite wisdom” to society; did you take that literally?
Unless your comment includes a disclaimer warning the reader that you know you’re being fallacious, then “non-fallacious” is implied.
It comes off as you pointing out correctly that the jury represents society, and that their views ostensibly reflect the views of “many people” who are not on the jury.
No. I realize that “infinite” is hyperbole, and you simply meant ‘large.’
for someone who doesn’t “care” ….you sure seem too.
not even close loser.
the whole lap dog crew sure as a strange obsession thinking that we are all the same person….a/k/a
big bad conservatives…and that was the overarching theme of hl92 original comments …he is sick and tired of listening to the lap dogs bark in unision….it is so soo sooo tiring. like my earlier comment about turd mouth i mean everything he see is racist….like say; take this incident it was racist cops that did “herion dealing freddy” in….until it turned out three of the six weren’t white…..silly racist.@DrDaveT: Your comment reminded me of something. I grew up in Cleveland, another city with a lot of crime and where of late the police have been involved in violent actions against unarmed people (the particularly egregious Tamir Rice case).
Some have pointed out that police have become more violent and militarized since 9/11, and this may be an indication. Mid-1990s, police in my hometown neighborhood tried to pull over a motorcyclist for a broken tail light. The guy happened to be a drug dealer, and he fled. Police chased him, and he lost control of his bike and slammed into my mother’s house. I was on vacation and visiting my mom at the time and witnessed the whole thing.
The police immediately called the paramedics. Laying on our lawn, the guy went into shock , so the police asked my mother if she had any blankets. They let her know upfront that the blankets would need to be disposed of afterward, “so make sure they’re blankets you don’t want to keep.” They treated him for shock and tried to calm him down until the ambulance arrived. The man died of internal bleeding on the way to the hospital.
The officers involved were professional and compassionate the whole time, and did not deny immediate medical attention to a man who was a known drug dealer who had just led them on a high speed chase through a residential neighborhood. Was it just because saner heads prevailed in a pre-9/11 era? (And remember, mid-1990s was the tail end of the crack epidemic, so crime was likely worse then than it is today).
FYI, my neighborhood, the drug dealer, and the police officers were all African-American.
Wow, I go away for a few days and come back to an utter shitstorm of a comments thread.
Might be best for the mods to nuke it from orbit and start over.
@Barry:
Read the definition of manslaughter, then get back to me.
Or let’s play hypotheticals. Say, just as en example, I push you.. I have no intent to cause your death when I do it, but you subsequently lose your footing and fall into traffic, whereupon you get hit by a truck and die. I haven’t committed murder. I’ve committed homicide, but my mental state precludes murder. Most likely charge – involuntary manslaughter.
You’re assuming that they set out with the intent of causing his death. Even the SA disagrees with you on that one. She’s charging him with depraved heart murder, but she’s also filed manslaughter, manslaughter by vehicle as a felony and criminally negligent manslaughter by vehicle as a misdemeanor. She expects one of them to stick, but I doubt that even she expects it to be the murder charge.
@HarvardLaw92:
Once again, false, and a deliberate misstatement of Maryland law. The charge under Maryland law is “second-degree depraved heart murder,” which is so defined (bolding mine):
Second-Degree Depraved Heart Murder. Second-degree murder is the killing of another person while acting with an extreme disregard for human life. In order to convict the defendant of second-degree murder, the State must prove: (1) that the defendant caused the death of (name); (2) that the defendant’s conduct created a very high risk to the life of (name); and (3) that the defendant, conscious of such risk, acted with extreme disregard of the life-endangering consequences.
Second-degree depraved heart murder (not manslaughter) does not require a specific intent to cause death, only such intent leading to action as done “with extreme disregard of the life-endangering consequences” thereof.
@Crusty Dem:
And on face I tend to believe you on that point, although I’ll point out that I doubt you’ve either examined the body or read the autopsy report, so to some extent you are speculating, but I’ll bet you $1,000 that if necessary for a defense, I could dig up several other “trained neuroscientist[s] and spinal cord injury researcher[s]” who would swear on a stack of bibles that it’s absolutely possible. I would, of course, have to defer to their expertise in the matter and let the jury decide which expert they believe.
@HarvardLaw92:
Actually, now that you’re back, maybe you can finally answer something. Upthread you’d claimed that
Gray was picked up because he ran, and between his arrest history and the crime-infested nature of the area, that’s sufficient cause to arrest him.
I asked you several times to cite the specific crime Gray was detained and arrested for, and every time you ducked the question. Care to answer it now? (And no, merely being “in a high-crime area”, avoiding the police, and having an arrest history are not grounds for arrest. A brief detention, maybe, but not arrest).
@Rafer Janders:
Intent is implied in depraved heart murder as a consequence of the defendant’s knowledge that his conduct presented a very high risk of loss of life and his/her decision to act in disregard of that risk.
For example, in my scenario, I have to not only know that there is a very high risk of you falling into the street and being hit by a truck & killed, I also have to act despite that knowledge. I have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty that you will slip and fall. It’s a possible outcome, but not a probable one. It’s not murder, of any variety.
@HarvardLaw92:
If it’s anything like your success at digging up those multiple mythical firefighters, then that seems like a pretty safe bet for him.
Unless, of course, those trained neuroscientists and spinal cord injury researchers happen to be your nephews.
@Rafer Janders:
Gray was erroneously arrested for possession of a switchblade. Do you have evidence that was anything other than a good-faith error by the attesting officer?
@Rafer Janders:
Now you’re just being snarky.
@HarvardLaw92:
A. Once again you lie about your previous claims – earlier you’d said he was arrested because he ran, was in a high-crime area, and had an arrest history. Now it’s suddenly the knife, but the knife, of course, could not have been grounds for the detention and arrest, since it was only found after Gray was run down and assaulted.
B. Yes, the fact that several experienced police officers with years on the street are supposedly not able to tell the difference between an illegal switchblade and a legal knife. That doesn’t stretch credulity, it breaks it. It’s like claiming they can’t tell the difference between a revolver and an automatic.
@HarvardLaw92:
Yes, but I’m not expressing malice, so it’s all good.
@Rafer Janders:
I did not assert that the knife was grounds for detention. His presence in a high-crime area and his criminal history justify the detention. His decision to flee justifies the search IMO. The product of that search, had it actually been a switchblade, would have justified the arrest. They screwed up, no argument, but I think your previously acknowledged bias may be coloring your argument.
So, in response to my question, you’re proffering an assumption. Is it possible that he knew and lied? Sure. It’s also possible that he made a good-faith mistake. Do you have any actual evidence of his intent to falsify an arrest beyond “well, all cops should know the difference” ?
@Mikey: It’s the only way to be sure
@Rafer Janders:
If that’s what gets you through the day … 😀
@HarvardLaw92:
If I’m the prosecutor, I’m most likely going to charge murder, not manslaughter, if you pushed me so close to traffic that I was able to fall into it and get hit by a truck, whatever you claim your “intent” was.
@HarvardLaw92:
If it was a good faith error then the police need to fired for gross incompetence. An inspection of less than a minute could easily determine if the knife were spring loaded or gravity fed. A semi competent 12 year old with 5 minutes training could do it. That defense requires that the police in question be incompetent idiots. The more parsimonious explanation is that it was intentional.
So, again as a person, do you think it was false arrest or an honest mistake?
@Rafer Janders:
You’ll lose, but again, if that’s what gets you through the day.
@Grewgills:
No argument whatsoever about that point.
@HarvardLaw92:
Do you really think the people you earlier described as highly decorated officers and worthy of trust are really that grossly incompetent. Again, I’m not asking if you think a jury can be convinced that they failed such a rudimentary inspection, I’m asking what you think as a person.
I’m having some difficulty reconciling these two statements. Was the fact that he ran (when considered in combination with with his arrest history and the crime-infested nature) enough to arrest him or not?
@Grewgills:
I think that people make mistakes, and if you propose to assert something like murder, you need to have more than “well, he should have known the difference”. The bottom line is that I do not know his state of mind or his intent when he filled out the arrest report. Neither do any of the rest of you.
@Ken:
The first statement was erroneous and delivered at a point where I clearly should already have disengaged to cool off. It should have read “sufficient cause to detain him”.
The proper sequence of events would have been Gray being released once the search turned up no PC to arrest him. That didn’t happen, either because the attesting officer screwed up or because he lied in his application for statement of charges. I can’t speak as to which explanation is the correct one, and I’m not going to speculate.
@HarvardLaw92:
The charge regarding the arrest for the legal knife and mischaracterizing the knife on the arrest report would be false arrest and falsifying a police report, not murder. Of course, false arrest can be a felony which would open up felony murder. I’m guessing that is your real objection.
I have been asking you what you think likely as a person and every answer you give is as a lawyer defending a client. Why not drop that facade for a moment and respond what you think is actually most likely, rather than what you think a slick lawyer could fool a jury into believing?
@Another Mike:
I’m going to break this down. The 50 year mark indicates that you’re talking about either a) African-Americans, since the 50 year mark coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act; and/or b) poor people, since 50 years also coincides with the War on Poverty.
So who is “we, the taxpayers”? Are you talking about non-African-Americans, and non-poor people? Because those two groups are certainly also taxpayers. It’s a falsehood that the former two groups are supported by whites and/or the non-poor, without also making contributions of their own.
Second, “failed to improve lives in a meaningful way” is simply not true. Poverty rates, including AA poverty rates, are as a whole much lower than they were 50 years ago, as are total crime and violent crime rates. Compared to the decades prior to 1965, high school graduation rates, college matriculation and graduation rates, and income levels, have all increased significantly. Even the much deplored out-of-wedlock birthrate has been on the decline since about 1990.
I hit this point again and again because I don’t think it can be shouted enough. Black people (as a whole) are working damn hard to improve their lives, yet some people want to continue to kick us down and claim we deserve it. (And yes, there are black people who are involved in crime and violence, and who are doing nothing to improve their lives. But that’s true of white people, too, yet people don’t judge the entire white race by that).
@Grewgills:
Which is why the arresting officer, Miller, has not been charged with murder, or any other variant of criminal homicide, stemming from this matter. Second degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment only.
@HarvardLaw92: Here’s the thing about the numbers and programs you claim: very few poor people are benefiting from all of them. I used to work with a transitional housing program for women and children. Most of the women received welfare benefits (for which they had to be working or going to school to continue to receive them) of about $400 a month if they had a couple of kids, and they got food stamps (about $133 per person per month) and Medicaid. That’s $4800 a year, plus free medical care and food. A two bedroom apartment in my metropolitan area runs about $800-$900 a month on average. Public transportation is $2 per ride, or an unlimited pass for $63 a month. Then there’s clothing, toiletries, etc., and if they actually had housing, utilities, furniture, cleaning products they would need to purchase. (Oh, yes, that’s not to mention that transitional housing charges the residents 30% of their income in rent).
There are long waiting lists to receive subsidies for child care or Section 8 housing. Few of the women I worked with had the child care subsidies, and none of them the housing subsidies (hence their need for transitional housing).
These women are not receiving $19 an hour in living expenses.
@Grewgills:
To my knowledge, the common law crime of false imprisonment is not a qualifying predicate felony for the felony murder rule in Maryland.
@Monala:
Which I understand, and why I qualified the statement by saying “the equivalent of”. Of course they are not receiving cash in that amount. The state is expending resources equivalent to that amount.
I’m not saying that the state shouldn’t be expending them. I’m just saying that, at least from my chair, it doesn’t seem to be making much of a long-term difference in their lives. Short-term, sure, it makes a difference, but pursuing a solution that at least seemingly only offers short-term benefit seems to me to be misguided. In other words, I think perhaps we could achieve a better outcome if we changed what we’re doing. Not cut it, change it.
@Monala:
As a whole, sure, but we were discussing Sandtown as a specific example. Unemployment there is 50%, out of wedlock approaches 67% and single parent homes is 60%. High school graduation rates are similarly abysmal. Those figures are not entirely unusual for Baltimore, so whatever we’re doing there is not working. It’s certainly unfair to depict that as a failure across the board, so mea culpa if it came across that way, but it’s most definitely a failure in those neighborhoods.
@HarvardLaw92: “The proper sequence of events would have been Gray being released once the search turned up no PC to arrest him. That didn’t happen, either because the attesting officer screwed up or because he lied in his application for statement of charges. I can’t speak as to which explanation is the correct one, and I’m not going to speculate.”
Note that the proper sequence most definitely did not include killing him.
@Grewgills:
I see no benefit in that. There’s entirely too much emotional examination swirling around this topic as it is. Injecting more of it doesn’t help the situation.
@HarvardLaw92:
The number you gave of $19/hr equivalent is if they received every possible subsidy. She is pointing out that the situation you describe where they are receiving every possible subsidy at the maximum allowable rate is not what is happening on the ground. The people aren’t even necessarily aware of all available aid, much less availing themselves of all possible aid and there are long wait lists for some of the more popular programs like housing assistance. This makes your $19/hr comment rather hollow.
@Barry:
The proper sequence did not include his death. How and why that death occurred, who is responsible for it and to what extent, are matters for trial.
@Grewgills:
Actually, the figure is $18.35 per hour, and it only encompasses the 7 specific benefits that I listed.
@HarvardLaw92:
I’m not asking how you feel about it. You made that abundantly clear earlier. I am asking what you think actually happened. I am asking you to look at the facts and use reason to determine what you think was the most likely scenario.
@Grewgills:
You’re asking me to join your (IMO) emotionally derived conclusions. Again, I see no point in that.
Again, to be able to even begin to do that with any degree of validity, I’d have to see the actual evidence – the rather large body of information collected by the police and the SA’s office that is not being released to the press or to anybody else at this point. You’re asking me to engage in conjecture based on information which is unknowable to me beyond the anecdotal. Short version – you’re essentially asking me to try a case without having seen the actual evidence, and I just won’t do it.
@HarvardLaw92:
I was just referencing the number you used earlier and Monala was responding to.
@HarvardLaw92:
Regardless, as she pointed out the number of people that actually receive the full benefits you describe is rather small relative to the population you ascribe them to. That makes your observation rather hollow.
There have been times in my life where I could have qualified for public assistance though I never applied for or received them. Stating that I could have received x dollars in benefits doesn’t tell you anything about my dependence on said benefits. The same is true of the larger population of people not receiving the full complement of benefits you mentioned.
@HarvardLaw92:
I was not stating that you could never find a fraudulent pathologist to give you bogus testimony, my point is that your statement that Gray may have injured himself was absurd.
@HarvardLaw92:
Indeed. And it’s also possible that while I am at work today, my wife is on the phone with Sophia Vergara, making arrangements for a threesome this weekend. Lucky me!
All cops should know the difference. That is, at its core, the primary point when it comes to a “good faith mistake” in this instance. Absent a detailed and very convincing explanation and demonstration of how and why the particular knife in question is easily mistaken for a switchblade, expecting me to believe that a professional, experienced police officer is unable to tell the difference between a folding knife and a switchblade is not only not “reasonable”, it’s ludicrous.
@HarvardLaw92: Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification
@Grewgills:
If she’s speaking from specific knowledge of the benefits availability situation in Baltimore, then mea culpa, but she hasn’t specified.
I think the broader point stands though. Whatever we’re doing in Baltimore, it doesn’t seem to be working IMO.
@Ken:
Which brings me back to my earlier statement to Greg. I haven’t seen this knife. I doubt any of us has, since it’s evidence that is being held by the SA and not made publicly available, so I can’t make any sort of informed opinion about whether or not the officer thought it was a switchblade.
That’s the underlying point – the determining factor there is what he legitimately thought. If it’s a confusing sort of make which can be mistaken for a switchblade, then the possibility of good-faith error comes into play. If it’s not, and he clearly knew but lied, then it’s a whole other ballgame. It’s also a point I can’t speak to with any degree of specificity without seeing the knife and without questioning him directly, so I’m erring on the side of ambiguity – because ambiguity is really all that we have available to us right now.
@CrustyDem:
Fair enough. Medicine, like many other things in life, is at its heart a matter of opinions. Highly educated opinions, to be sure, but opinions nonetheless. I’ll accept that you believe yours. I can also accept that another equally qualified expert might disagree with you. If I’m defending a client, obviously I’m going to go with the one whose opinion benefits that client. Hashing out which of you is right would obviously be an argument between the two of you that wouldn’t include me.
@HarvardLaw92: Here’s the list of 7 benefits:
By the way, I searched for the link to the study you cite in this thread, and didn’t see it. Would you post it again? I’d love to see whether they did any research on what the typical benefit amount is for a low-income person in Baltimore, vs. the possible benefit amount were someone to acquire all seven benefits.
My experience is that the ones people are most likely to receive are WIC and SNAP, and possibly Emergency Food Assistance (I don’t know much about the latter). WIC, however, is limited to families with a pregnant woman and/or children under age 5. Prior to the Medicaid expansion under the ACA, Medicaid was very difficult to obtain unless your income was very, very low, although you could obtain it for your children under the SCHIP program at higher income levels.
TANF is time limited (eligibility limited to a max of five years in one’s lifetime). Housing and Utilities Assistance are hard to come by and have very long waiting lists.
So of all seven, SNAP is the only one (again, with the possible exception of Emergency Food, the one I’m unfamiliar with) that is readily available without long waiting lists and/or time or age limitations. And at an average of $133 per person per month, that means that (I’m guessing) the average annual benefit received by a poor person is more likely to be $1,596 rather than $39,520 ($19 an hour times a 40 hour work week).
@Monala:
This is the best that I can provide. The link to the study seems to be broken.
I’m not doubting your experiences, but I do have to ask if you’re speaking from any direct knowledge of the situation as it exists in Baltimore with regard to availability of benefits.
@HarvardLaw92:
This is not opinion. This is literally saying “This thing you claim has never, ever happened before in documented human history.” Biomechanically, it is not possible to intentionally deliver enough force to your spine to sever it. Even in an unrestrained individual it is almost impossible to achieve. An examination of the literature finds a single case of self-inflicted spinal cord injury (aside from gunshot wounds) induced by self-destructive behavior in a severally mentally compromised individual. They were unable to cause lasting damage (let alone death).
I’m sure you can find a liar or fraud to testify for you, but that is what they will be.
When I was in nursing school, my instructors referred to something called “NCLEX land.” NCLEX is the exam post graduation that you had to pass in order to receive your license. In in NCLEX land, you have every supply at hand, every doctor’s order has been processed, you are working in an ideal state. Reading through this thread, I can only assume HL92 lives in NCLEX land. Every resident of Sandtown and West Baltimore has an able and willing social worker to help them navigate the redundant paperwork for the various benefits available to them, obtaining old tax returns and birth certificates is as easy as picking up a dime bag and every person you encounter just wants to help. I hate the word privilege. I’m an educated white woman, I have educated parents, yet I’m still poor enough to rely on benefits for my children’s healthcare. This has been a revolting thread in so many ways.
@CrustyDem:
Just asking, but on what evidence are you basing your medical opinion that his spine was actually severed?
I realize that there has been a great deal of conjecture and media fueled hyperbole tossed about concerning this matter, but that certainly isn’t evidence. Have you read the actual autopsy report, or for that matter examined the body yourself, in order to enable you to speak with with knowledgeable specificity about the nature and extent of Mr. Gray’s injuries? If so, I’d consider it a service to be better informed about them than I currently am.
@KSMom:
Same question posed to Monala – do you have any direct experience with or first-hand knowledge of the situation as it exists in Baltimore with respect to the availability of benefits?
@HarvardLaw92:
No, it’s not. That’s just a fundamentally dishonest thing to write.
HL
An aside, a simple retraction and apology for some of your earlier over the top commentary would go a long way to sparing you what has happened to Pinky. Had he manned up and apologized for his statement to the effect that the death of two NYPD was like a christmas present to some of the liberal commenters here he wouldn’t be dogged by those comments on most every thread he posts on. I suspect that you will be hearing a lot about some of these comments of yours in future threads; particularly ones dealing with police violence, civil unrest, poverty and race relations. Manning up now, acknowledging that you were speaking from anger and apologizing will make most of that go away. Take it or leave it.
PS my name is not Greg
@Rafer Janders:
You’re being snarky again. Let it go …
You’re actually asserting that any random group of doctors will agree, 100% with each other’s medical opinions?
Grewgills:
He already explained what happened. It’s all my fault:
@Grewgills:
Fine.
I spoke out of anger, particularly provoked by one commenter with which I have history and whom I allowed to drive me to an irrational state of anger which I shouldn’t have allowed to occur.
My apologies to anyone who may have been offended by the more egregious products of that state of rage. This sequence of events has been and remains particularly emotionally raw for me, both as a native of Baltimore and as the family member of someone whose life was placed at risk during the riots. While not an excuse, I hope you will consider them as mitigating factors. Mea culpa.
@Monala: @HarvardLaw92: No, my experience is working with clients at nonprofit human service agencies in Massachusetts and Washington. Both states are fairly generous with benefits, so even if they’re not as high as in MD, they’re probably close to comparable. And from my experience, most people receive a fraction of the total possible benefits, mostly because they don’t qualify for every benefit (your comment that “almost none of it requires anything more from the recipient than breathing to qualify” is demonstrably false), or because they are far down the waiting list.
And I stand behind every word of that statement.
@HarvardLaw92:
A classic non-apology apology. Entirely worthless. and consisting almost entirely of excuses and obfuscations.
@Monala:
Ok, I’ll stipulate that benefits are often difficult to obtain if you’ll stipulate that you’re making informed conjecture about the exact nature of that situation with respect to Baltimore in specific.
@Rafer Janders:
At this point, your mind has already been made up, and submitting to a public flogging wouldn’t change it. The apology wasn’t directed at, nor was it intended for, you.
Let’s stipulate that we dislike each other and leave it at that.
@HarvardLaw92: Here’s the Cato study the article describes. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf
Published in 2013, it is an update to a study they did in 1995. In the earlier study, they acknowledge the objection that recipients do not receive every single benefit, and actually did some research on the percentage of recipients receiving which benefits (for example, in MD, 27.5% of AFDC recipients in 1995 also received housing subsidies). In the 2013 study, they note that this % had decreased 1%.
@Monala:
Fair enough, thanks.
HL92:
This might be helpful: Non-apology apology.
@HarvardLaw92:
Well, it’s a fact that TANF today is time-limited to 5 years in one’s lifetime, no matter where you live. It’s a fact that WIC is limited to households with a pregnant woman and/or children under age 5. It’s a fact (per the study you yourself raised, as linked by me above) that only 26.5% of MD residents on TANF also receive housing assistance. I don’t have to know about Baltimore in particular to realize that these facts mean that most public benefits recipients are not receiving every benefit. At most, any given welfare recipient has a 1 in 4 chance of receiving every benefit during a 5-year window of time.
HL92:
You deciding to “stand behind” your word “assclown” brings extra hilarity to these other words of yours:
@ Jukeboxgrad
Nor was it intended for, or directed at, you. I’ve apologized to the group. Further harassment by you will continue to be reported.
To whom, your fictional nephew? More hilarity, in light of this and the comment that precedes it.
It’s quite obvious why you have been banned from so many websites. Why they continue to allow you to engage in harassment here, which is all that you are doing, escapes me.
I am asking you politely, in accordance with this site’s policies, to leave me alone. Your misrepresentative replies to my comments and your personal attacks are both unwelcome and harassing.
I have been banned only from right-wing sites, and I’m proud of those bannings. Being banned by National Review, for example, is a compliment.
I realize that “harassment” is your word for ‘point out that you have repeatedly made false and contradictory claims.’
There is no ‘site policy’ that requires anyone to “leave [you] alone.” People who want to be left “alone” should refrain from posting hilariously dishonest comments on a public board.
I think it would be best if both of you just retreated to your corners at this point.
This is already one of the longest comment threads we’ve ever had here, if not the longest, and as such it’s been next to impossible to keep up with it, especially since I was away from the Internet for much of the weekend.
In any event, if the thread can continue with a worthwhile discussion on the issues that have been raised, then let it continue. Otherwise, if back-and-forth attacks are all we’re going to see then it may be time to bring this thread to an end.
@ Jukeboxgrad
Just so we are clear on the matter, I have politely asked you to stop harassing me, and you are refusing to do so.
Is that a correct statement?
@Doug Mataconis:
I’ve been attempting to engage in pertinent discussion for some time now. What I’m getting from Rafer and Jukeboxgrad are repeated personal attacks questioning both my motives and my honesty, despite having long since ceased aiming any such commentary at them.
They’re obviously nursing grudges and sniping. I’ve apologized to the group for any offense I may have caused earlier and I have politely asked for the harassment & personal attacks to stop. At least one of them has stated his intent to refuse to do so. I suggest / ask that you deal with what is actually the present problem.
@HarvardLaw92: Not specifically, no. But as I stated, I’m educated and pretty damn smart, and keeping my kids on SCHIP requires hours of paperwork and a willingness to keep at it. You provide links that refer to the best of situations, I know that the best of situations is not normal in Kansas, I doubt they are in Maryland either.
@KSMom:
Monala clarified that it’s not that different in Maryland, for which I’m appreciative.
I’m completely not against government benefits. I’m just looking at an area with stats like those in Sandtown and being faced with having to ask myself why whatever we’re doing there to try to change things isn’t working. The situation there, and I think I’m being fair in saying this, is a disaster. Maybe that necessitates a different way of addressing the problem. I’m not sure on that one, but I do think it’s pretty evident that something needs to change in that regard.
@HarvardLaw92:
Really? Everything you’ve said and you are unaware of this?
Obviously the official autopsy has been performed, is in the hands of the prosecutor, and has not publicly released. But that he suffered from a severed spine that is described as the cause of death has been extensively detailed.
Frankly, at this point I have to assume you are being deliberately obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.
@CrustyDem:
I’m not sure that a passing mention without any corroboration qualifies as something being extensively detailed. That said, I wonder who told the Sun?
Honestly I’m not trying to be obtuse. I’m trying to make a point about the rush to judgment and largely unquestioning crowd acceptance of what amounts to conjecture as fact.
I’ve literally read commentary from people in the UK – fricking ENGLAND – in which they’re lobbing specious information about this sequence of events around – about what happened in the van, no less – as if they were present when it happened. fact. Without bothering to check the validity of it at all.
IMO there is a lot of that going around, and quite a bit of it (again, IMO) is being fueled by a preexisting dislike of police officers.
I guess you mean “specious information” like this:
For some reason none have been produced.
Your “specious information” seems to be “fueled by a preexisting dislike” of “the natives.”
CrustyDem:
You’re expecting too much. It’s just “a performance.”
@HarvardLaw92:
Weak tea. Is binary “pro-cop” and “anti-cop” the best you can do?
Being “anti-police brutality” and “anti-police corruption” does not equal “anti-cop”
I can’t remember the book I read it in but in regards to both sides in a court case presenting experts that give conflicting testimony and asking the jury to decide between the two goes something like this, “One group of doctors says the patient needs heart surgery. Another group says the patient does not need heart surgery. They then call in the janitor to settle the dispute.” Nothing really pertinent. Just something I found funny that I hadn’t thought of in a long time that this thread reminded me of.
Latecomers might be helped by a short guide to this epic thread, so here it is (in multiple parts because the spam filter restricts links).
HarvardLaw92 posted roughly 200 comments (almost twice as many as anyone else). This is what he said in his first comment in this thread, on Friday: “this commentary is honestly just too much for me to stomach any further. I’m out of here. I wish you all well in your future endeavors.”
A couple of hours later he threatens to leave again: “challenging the orthodoxy of what has increasingly become some sort of self-congratulating mental masturbation society / echo chamber just doesn’t interest me much any longer. To be frank, it never really has. I’m not sure why I stuck around as long as I did. … In that light, let the echo chamber do its thing. I’ll be doing mine by volunteering my services pro bono to the defense.” Subsequent to this he posted roughly 150 comments.
A helpful summary of his comments about the “natives,” who are “shiftless” and “lazy.”
He says “unless he [Freddie Gray] injured himself, which is not outside the realm of possibility.”
My first comment in this thread, wherein I reference HL92’s prior comments that he described as “a performance.”
Ken asks a few good questions.
Something HL92 said Monday, explaining his behavior in this thread: “this assclown Jukeboxgrad pissed me off the other night, and I lost it.”
Michael Reynolds explains what this is really about.
I cite Kylopod to explain why I asked a question about fire hoses.
Some peculiar voting behavior is described.
“Self-congratulating mental masturbation society”
Dude said some things I don’t agree with above, but damn, he’s got you folks nailed with that one. One of the worst I’ve even seen.