They should have asked him to recuse himself because of that statement.
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Meh. You’d have to have that judge let a rich POC off the hook before you can make that distinction. Until then, I’m willing to bet the proper criteria there is rich AND white. That judge done lost any benefit of the doubt, as far as I’m concerned.
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This is like a Reverse No True Christian fallacy. (No True Christian would ever do a bad thing; if they did a bad thing, they weren’t a Christian.)
Here, this rapist is a Good Boy. Since he’s a Good Boy, he cannot have done a bad thing.
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I’m stunned. WTF was that judge thinking? Even though I know it’s a true thing that happened I find it hard to wrap my head around. How much does it cost to get a judge to say something like that. I can only assume he was payed off by the “good family”
It’s like the judge is a precocious preteen’s level of reasoning.
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Please resign, Judge Troiano. Resign, and then rot in hell, you Rapist Kavanaugh wannabe.
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And the Stanford rape case judge, the “did you try closing your legs” judge, and on and on and on. Whatever respect our judicial system had is on its last legs. I do not have an answer short of blowing the system up and starting over, but open to suggestions.
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Perhaps. I do not think it is a yes/no situation. I would look at it this way.
- White and rich equals getting out of jail.
- Black and rich means maybe getting out of jail or a much lighter sentence. Say ten instead of twenty.
- Being white and middle class usually means being treated as a human being with an actual investigation and a fair trial and sentence. Usually.
- Being black and middle class usually means being treated as semi-human. Maybe free or doing twenty.
- Being white and poor means see you in twenty.
- Being black and white means it was nice knowing you.
It is not justice or injustice. It is difference levels of injustice with class and race modifying those dice rolls.
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It is undeniable that wealth provides a huge advantage in the US justice system.
Wealthy people are less likely to be arrested, less likely to be charged, less likely to be convicted, more likely to be given a lenient sentence, more likely to be imprisoned in humane conditions, more likely to be released early, less likely to be subject to onerous parole conditions.
And yet everyone acts as if this is perfectly normal, as if it does not fundamentally contradict the very notion of justice itself.
So long as wealth provides even partial impunity, justice does not exist.
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This feels so unavoidable in an adversarial justice system. If the person charged is responsible for “defending” themselves then the resources they have to bring to that defense will always be a factor. Even if you outlawed private criminal lawyers money would always help. I really wish trials were about getting at the truth instead of seeing who “wins”.
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i get what you mean though, and i don’t think you’re wrong.
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Sadly, probably more judicial experience of things like:
. . . [T]here have been some, not many, but some cases of sexual assault involving juveniles which in my mind absolutely were the traditional case of rape, all
right, where there were generally two or more generally males involved, either at gunpoint or weapon, clearly manhandling a person into . . . an area where . . . there
was nobody around, sometime in an abandon[ed] house, sometimes in an abandon[ed] shed, shack, and just simply taking advantage of the person as well as beating the person, threatening the person.
T]he factual scenarios themselves were so egregious, and it was those types of cases that the State felt the need to waive, and generally they were successful in their waiver[.]
If 99% of cases of rape brought before you are that kind of thing, it sort of has to desensitize you to the reality of most rapes which is that they are mostly exactly the sort of thing that happened here.
That’s not to defend the judge by the way. It nicely illustrates many of the problems in the system.
If you and your offense don’t fall neatly into the categories the system has classed as ‘serious’, you can expect all sorts of accommodations and leniency.
If you do fall into the categories where the system expects serious consequences, you can just as surely expect the system to be weighted against you, with everything being viewed and treated as harshly as possible.
Good question. I mean I know judges often give rulings like this off the top of their heads and are essentially deciding what to say as they go along but even so.
I think they tend to get very literal instead. You get a lot of [unintelligble] and, um, typed out, ah, fillers and … spaces.
I’m not the only one you know…
As already mentioned you can apply for a judge to recuse him/herself but it’s risky. Of course if you don’t apply then it makes your chances of appealing on the grounds of bias that much harder since you clearly didn’t think enough of it at the time to apply for recusal…
From the transcript, it appears that at that point the girl and her family were focused on getting the video deleted. So, while the cops probably should have thought about whether they should at least get hold of a copy for the family and/or the prosecutor to look at, since it’s fairly foreseeable that once the video’s deleted, the family might realise that just deleting the video isn’t enough and that they can’t put the event behind them, I can see where a well-meaning police officer might decide it’s better for everyone to do what the girl (at that stage) wanted and make sure the video is deleted.
I think it’s worse than that. In the same vein as @fuzzyfungus says above, here the argument is:
He is a Good Boy. He may have done a Bad Thing. But because he is a Good Boy, I don’t think the Bad Thing he did is as bad a Bad Thing as the things Bad Boys do and he shouldn’t be treated like a Bad Boy even if he did the Bad Thing.
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