You seem to believe we should not have judges that serve at the will of the electorate. Ok, I can understand that.
But why on Earth are you using Persky’s ruling on Brock Turner as an example of why this is so?
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“Mercy” didn’t get him fired. Egregious mis-sentencing got him fired. If judges are too stupid to understand the message, why should they be judges?
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but do you think that the outcome here will be judges showing less cronyism and misogyny?
when all the career public defenders come out and say things like this:
It makes me think that maybe it’s worth listening to them
@Lexicat I didn’t chose this case, and that’s not the point I am trying to get across. If I were on a campaign against elected judges, I would just remind everyone about Roy Moore, over and over and over again.
But if I say elected judges are bad because roy moore, but elected judges are great because the guy who presided over the Brock Turner debacle got shit-canned, then I have no actual position and I’m just a weathervane
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Governor pardons can solve the problem of overly-harsh sentences. What is the solution to overly-lenient sentences?
I would think a place like BB where the systemic is emphasized over the personal and anecdotal, would be more sympathetic to the concept that the individuals in this case matter less than continuing to hammer home the message to elected officials that you never lose by being tougher on crime. And all it takes is one high profile fuckup with leniency and you’re done, so why ever take that chance?
This is what we see, but that is not the “message” that politicians and judges will hear.
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Not at all.
My thoughts haven’t changed; all our systems are horribly broken, especially our judicial and legal systems.
And I’m not the right person to even begin to fathom how to fix them.
See my comment above your quoted comment; I have no answers to this problem.
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Writing for Vox, a public defender named Rachel Marshall argues that the recall sets a bad precedent: “In my work as a public defender in Oakland, California, I have observed how the recall effort has changed judges, whether consciously or not, making them more timid about taking risks on defendants who deserve mercy.”
Fuck off. Rapists do not deserve mercy.
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Obviously, but it’s not obvious to me that that’s what she was saying. I think she was saying what Ken White was, that this will foster fear among judges of being lenient to the convicts who do deserve it, not this lick-spittle rapist piece of shit.
I agree with @Melz2. I don’t know if Marshall and White are correct, but I glad this judge got cashiered. I don’t have answers, but I’m certain that keeping a judge who would let a monster like Brock “The Rapist” Turner off shouldn’t be part of it.
Excellent work, Californian voters!
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Nice point on behalf of the PD however Brock deserved no mercy and beign drunk is NEVER an excuse
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Let’s not forget that journalists (like Rachel Marshall) LOVE to write sensationalist stuff. Remember all the media warnings about the Y2K bug? Never happened. Most recently, I’ve been reading that Dems will get shut out of some races in Calif because of our jungle primaries. Didn’t happen. The media knows what gets clicks, and reasonable, measured articles ain’t it. So they claim to know what message judges will get.
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I must confess, I’m at a loss to understand how drunkenness can be a mitigating factor for sexual assault when it’s an aggravating one for careless driving, for example.
The Sentencing Council for England and Wales considers intoxication an aggravating factor across the board:
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/explanatory-material/item/aggravating-and-mitigating-factors/
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I advocate for leniency to people that have committed certain crimes, but rape deserves zero compassion.
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I agree. And any solution that involves keeping a judge on the bench who so egregiously protects rapists is unacceptable. Besides which, the effect on other judges is hypothetical. The rapist getting a slap on the wrist isn’t.
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Amen, and praise logic.
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So you are content for things to continue to go in exactly the opposite direction they should, because you don’t know the answers?
I’m beginning to see this case now as another bad episode of “do something-ism”. The victim here didn’t get justice, but Something Must Be Done so the net effect will be that others will also have a harder time getting justice.
Go back and read what I wrote. I said nothing about being content with the state of the judicial system.
The electorate exercised their right to remove a judge who refused to punish a monster. Doing something foolish would be keeping a judge like that on the bench because of hypothetical fears. Keeping Persky on the bench isn’t the answer, and just because we don’t have the answers doesn’t mean we should cling to a bad judge masquerading as one.
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The Y2K bug is kind of a funny example, because that wasn’t a case of an overhyped bug - that was a case of a genuine serious widespread problem which, as a consequence of the sustained attention and resources that got thrown at it, got fixed before it became a catastrophe.
It’s the proof that sometimes worrying about a problem before it explodes can be beneficial. It’s a veritable Nineveh
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I can see what Marshall’s saying, but she seems to be simultaneously under-and overstating the impact of the recall campaign:
It sends a dangerous message to judges everywhere: If we don’t like one decision you make, you’re out.
No, it says that if you act so egregiously, in extremis there’s a way to make you accountable. That’s a really useful message.
This isn’t a case of the public not “liking” one decision a judge makes - the sentence was clearly offensive.
**** no. That’s the opposite extreme. A judge should never be just a vehicle for the mob’s whims.
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Are you seriously suggesting that the rapist was somehow the victim of the woman who he raped because of her inebriation? Or that her drunkenness somehow took away his agency to not rape another human being?
EDIT: Sorry, I did not apprehend you were referring to Turner’s innebriation.
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Yes! The sky didn’t fall down because the issue was taken seriously, not because it was never going to fall down anyway!
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