I agree with you. I look forward to seeing the judge’s instructions to the jury in this case, and also what other charges they will face.
So you’re saying* the judge influenced the jury’s decision?
#*FOR THE THIRD TIME
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In Japan, we give money to bank robbers who don’t fire their weapons. No harm, no foul!
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No. I was curious about the previous history of the judge, as there are some activist judges. This does not appear to be the case here. Both in the sense that WJC would be unlikely to appoint a right wing activist to a position as federal judge, and from looking at the Judge’s ruling history.
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I thought that there was nobody in there at the time.
From a contemporary article from a local news source:
The refuge, federal property managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was closed and unoccupied for the holiday weekend.
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While the building wasn’t occupied when they came it, it meant that people couldn’t do their job, at the risk of being shot.
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This is the flip side to the jury-nullification coin. There are a lot of bullshit laws that “we” feel shouldn’t exist, and juries should refuse to convict people who break them. We cheer when Dr. Kevorkian or NJWeedMan go free because the jury decided they did nothing deserving of conviction, undisputed facts be damned. Well, other people have issues with other laws. Those 12 people in Oregon believed that the Bundys did not deserve conviction, and that is their prerogative as jurors.
Like freedom of speech, you have to take the bad with the good.
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[quote=“chipandre, post:152, topic:88294”]
There are a lot of bullshit laws that “we” feel shouldn’t exist, and juries should refuse to convict people who break them. We cheer when Dr. Kevorkian or NJWeedMan go free because the jury decided they did nothing deserving of conviction, undisputed facts be damned. Well, other people have issues with other laws.[/quote]
I sincerely doubt this all-white jury would have had any problem with the laws in question if the people staging the armed occupation had been brown-skinned Muslim Americans.
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Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
We also recognize that the Native Americans had the claim to the
land, but they lost that claim. There are things to learn from cultures
of the past, but the current culture is the most important.
—Ryan Bundy
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Sort of depends where you are on the ladder. I am currently enjoying a lifetime of unemployability and difficulty finding housing because I had a personal use quantity of drugs a very long time ago. Because I was white, I avoided prison time (but did not avoid losing my job, car, about $5k in court ‘fees’, and 60 days in jail and 3 years of probation). Because I was poor, I had to accept the felony charge. If only I had just instigated an armed standoff with police instead of trying to get high from a plant.
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I think you’re giving Obama a bit too much blame/credit if you think he created that situation, though. The Federal government was insane on drug policy long before he was elected.
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I wasn’t commenting specifically on Obama per se, more so that the government is, and can be, pretty oppressive depending on your stats. In regard to Obama’s administration in particular, Standing Rock seems to be a striking contrast to the Malheur situation.
Obama hasn’t rocked the boat much.
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Probably not. But again, you have to take the bad with the good. In the bad old days, juries up north would refuse to convict underground railroad operators of assisting slaves to escape. Not long afterward, juries in the south would refuse to convict white men of lynching black men. Jury nullification is not a perfect system by any means, but it’s better to have it (and have it occasionally be abused) than not have it at all.
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I see the criminal justice system as the enemy. Its purpose is to repress and control marginalized people and maintain the stability of an unjust society. It is not a tool we should use to “even the playing field”. I want to end white supremacy too. Like really a lot. But endorsing state repression as a solution is naive and dangerous.
It’s totally true and totally fucked up. But we should not demand that the security state be harsher with privileged people so that treatment becomes equitable. We should end the security state and begin treating everyone with humanity and compassion.
The security state is not incidentally racist and patriarchal - that’s not a surface feature that could just be reformed, leaving us with an “egalitarian prison system” where all demographics are jailed equally. The security state exists to enforce oppression. Promoting the idea that it could become more palatable by repressing the right people just undermines the more important point: nobody deserves to be subjected to this system, it is racist, sexist, and fascist to the core. It must be abolished.
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And this is a prime example of that happening.
Do you honestly think I’m arguing for that? Of course the system needs total reform. Doesn’t mean that we should just stop having trials in the meantime.
I agree with this. But what do you suggest we do until we can get the system reformed? Of if abolished, as you suggest, what replaces it? Nothing? Vigilant justice? A new justice system that isn’t built on racism and male supremacy? I think this is a laudable goal, but what about in the short term? Because what is happening now is that white men get off for crimes that black men end up in prison for life for.
And what do we do about people who are really a threat to our safety and who refuse to play by the rules that the rest of us do abide by? The root problem is that the Bundys believe that they have an inherent right to do whatever they want whenever they want. They constantly flout federal authorities on some flimsy pretexts and ignore the fact that doing so tramples on the rights of others who pay their taxes for the services of the BLM out west. The BLM is meant, in part, to balance access to land for all.
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Depends on which broken treaty you’re referring to…
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It may be that they didn’t charge them with that. Which certainly seems like an oversight, but I don’t know what the prosecutor’s strategy was.
They did not. They were charged with “conspiracy to prevent government employees from doing their jobs”, “use of a firearm in a violent act” and “theft of government property”, all of which they were found innocent of. I think the prosecutor’s strategy was to come up with important sounding charges that they could easily get off from.
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You can’t smell your racism?
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