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This fact tells how much the Judicial system needs improvement. The fact it depends on who's sitting on a chair to determine whether a journalist should be char

This fact tells how much the Judicial system needs improvement. The fact it depends on who's sitting on a chair to determine whether a journalist should be charged for helping the public. Unbelievable...

toss1 5y ago
You have pointed out a weakness, but it seems in this case that it is working. The judiciary, legislative, and executive branches of govt., as well as the other independent institutions of civil society, such as academia and the press, all must be strongly independent of each other for a democracy to survive. In an autocracy, all of the institutions are coerced to bend to the will of the executive. In this case, the executive (governor) made it very clear that he wanted this journalist prosecuted, a blatant attempt to bend the press to his will. In this case, it wasn't even the judiciary, but the prosecution, which is still in the executive branch, so nominally under the governor, who basically told the gov to go pound sand. So, whenever you see executives undermining the independence of other branches or institutions, be VERY suspicious; it's a dead giveaway that they are interested in only their own power and not working to benefit the citizens they serve.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
Agreed, but this issue goes far beyond the judicial system. The way the governor handled this situation really showed how much of a liability he feared this story would be to him and his party politically. Instead of examining the underlying conditions of the state agency responsible for the data breach, he chose to go after the messenger. Given that every single time a company gets caught like this, the first thing we all point to is how stingy they are when it comes to security. A conservative governor doesn't want to be in a position where the solution to the problem is to spend money, so he went after the journalist instead.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  I would campaign on this alone. Say how the opposing party wants people to be insecure, exposed and that they will try prosecuting you for doing the right thing cause they have such fragile egos.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- evan_ 5y ago
  He found an excuse to publicly attack a big-city journalist. That’s the beginning and end of the reasoning here.
  - suzzer99 5y ago
    And I'm sure none of his base will notice or care that months later the reporter isn't actually being prosecuted. The political points scored still count.
    - evan_ 5y ago
      Maybe, or maybe it’ll be “that crooked prosecutor let him go, you need to re-elect me so I can replace the prosecutors.”
- jorblumesea 5y ago
  If you look into the history of this specific governor and Missouri politics it makes more sense that he's an ideologue that refuses to accept any kind of bad press or even that mistakes can happen. This is the same politician that claimed he solved Missouri "covid problem" but ranks middle of the pack. It's a mindset that is all too common in politics today. Everything inconvenient is fake news. Every embarrassing headlines needs to be countered in the culture wars. Silence dissent, crush free press, etc etc. https://twitter.com/govparsonmo/status/1448697768311132160?s=21 https://twitter.com/govparsonmo/status/1448697768311132160?s...
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    > "decoded the HTML source code" > "Highway Patrol's Digital Forensic Unit" This could have been a joke. I'm sorry, but can these people be serious? Really, the digital forensic unit is under the umbrella of the "Highway Patrol"? I bet they're all into decoding HTML source codes all day long...
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Really, the digital forensic unit is under the umbrella of the "Highway Patrol"? Maybe it's the only state-wide law enforcement agency?
jumelles 5y ago
Who do you think should decide which cases get prosecuted?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Echoing my reply to a similar question here: > I'm not in a position to help improving it, but my impression is relying on a single person is not a good idea. > Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.
tedunangst 5y ago
Who else would decide? An impartial python script? Who provides the inputs to the script?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  I'm not in a position to help improving it, but my impression is relying on a single person is not a good idea. Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    > Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. This is intentional, the governor explicitly wanted to inflict such pain to a citizen. I don't see a path to meaningful change in how the legal system is weaponized against the public as long as wealth is the primary driver of power in this country: The legal system has always benefited the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    In principle, this is why we in the USA have grand juries. In practice, grand juries almost always vote to indict, unless the perp is a cop.
    - DannyBee 5y ago
      Grand juries are really only used in half of states, and even within that half, mostly for very serious crimes (IE life imprisonment or death).
  - DannyBee 5y ago
    This isn't very constructive, FWIW. If you say it's unacceptable, but can't define acceptable except as "not this", it's kind of worthless. Why is a single person better/worse than a group? Do you have any evidence to back it up? There are all sorts of tradeoffs involved in how this sort of thing is done, and why, and those tradeoffs have evolved over thousands of years of legal systems existing. In this case, the common tradeoff is that this is an elected official who is accountable to voters for the decisions they make. There are states where they are appointed. There are states which require grand juries. All of these have tradeoffs - there is no "best", nor do statistics say that any of them end up any more fundamentally fair than each other. Nor do any of them have a significantly different rate of indicting objectively or subjectively innocent people (last i looked). It's unclear exactly what you think a system should look like - i would argue any system with sufficient safeguards is not going to look very different than a preliminary hearing anyway. Particularly your complaint about the stress/loss/etc seems unavoidable. That occurs starting with when people are investigated in the first place.
andrewflnr 5y ago
Would there not also be a grand jury involved at some point? If there is, the prosecutor's decision is more like a single point of failure in the prosecution than a single decider.
- DannyBee 5y ago
  (Lawyer - but only 3 in states) What crimes require a grand jury is state-specific. About half of states require grand juries for some crimes. Of those, a bunch (minnesota, georgia are good examples) restrict grand juries to crimes that can be punished by life imprisonment/death require grand jury indictments. Others require them for any felony (New york is a good example) People who watched a lot of law and order think grand juries get everything, because in new york, grand juries are required for all felony cases. The other half of states do not require grand juries for indictments. My recollection (take with grain of salt) of Kansas is: 1. A prosecutor can, but is not required to, present to a grand jury for a felony case. They can also just indict directly 2. Citizens can actually empanel a grand jury. It's something like 100 people min + 2% of the voters in the county. 3. If that grand jury indicts, prosecutor can still dismiss it, but it requires leave of the court (rather than them just being able to do it out of hand).
arcticbull 5y ago
That's not an issue with the system per se, it's an issue that there's no specific carve-out in law for this kind of behavior. This could be solved by Congress in a hot minute.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  There's no carve-out in law for this behavior because there doesn't need to be. Same reason we don't need a law permitting breathing, eating, etc. - it wasn't illegal in the first place.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Sure, but there's obviously ambiguity here for some, so it needs to be remediated.
    - runnerup 5y ago
      You can clarify things like “it’s legal to film police officers in public” every single year but at some point you have to stop assuming the confusion is in good faith
hn_throwaway_69 5y ago
Really? It looks as though the system worked in this case. A technical violation of the law was not prosecuted as a result of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion not to pursue a prosecution which was not in the public interest. Grand juries are not a solution to this problem. One glance at the shockingly high percentage of cases in which grand juries indict should be sufficient to cast doubt that they are truly filtering out bad prosecutions. That the proceedings occur in the absence of the accused and therefore deprive them of procedural fairness is another problem. The responsibility properly lies with the prosecutor.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  In this case, yes, but look at how much risk this journalist beared. For helping the public... Helping protect teacher's private data. What if the prosecutor was politically influenced against him? I don't know how, but there's got to be a better way.
- catlifeonmars 5y ago
  > A technical violation of the law was not prosecuted This part I was not clear on. I was under the impression that what the reporter did was not a violation of the law. Or does term “technical violation” have a specific legal meaning that I’m not aware of?
  - hn_throwaway_69 5y ago
    I probably should have said arguable, not technical. That's what's in the article. I guess we never really know if the law was broken at all unless a jury gives a verdict, so it's all a bit hypothetical. Suppose there's a law that says you can't film other people without their permission. You catch a thief breaking into someone's house, film them, and give it authorities enabling their identification, then delete the footage. I'd describe this as a technical breach of the law. It probably shouldn't be prosecuted. This is kind of analogous to the present situation, a bit of a rough analogy I admit. Whether or not a law was broken, the journalist did something that was a net positive to society, with no real victim except a red-faced politician.
- 5y ago

toss1 5y ago

You have pointed out a weakness, but it seems in this case that it is working. The judiciary, legislative, and executive branches of govt., as well as the other independent institutions of civil society, such as academia and the press, all must be strongly independent of each other for a democracy to survive. In an autocracy, all of the institutions are coerced to bend to the will of the executive. In this case, the executive (governor) made it very clear that he wanted this journalist prosecuted, a blatant attempt to bend the press to his will. In this case, it wasn't even the judiciary, but the prosecution, which is still in the executive branch, so nominally under the governor, who basically told the gov to go pound sand. So, whenever you see executives undermining the independence of other branches or institutions, be VERY suspicious; it's a dead giveaway that they are interested in only their own power and not working to benefit the citizens they serve.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

Agreed, but this issue goes far beyond the judicial system. The way the governor handled this situation really showed how much of a liability he feared this story would be to him and his party politically. Instead of examining the underlying conditions of the state agency responsible for the data breach, he chose to go after the messenger. Given that every single time a company gets caught like this, the first thing we all point to is how stingy they are when it comes to security. A conservative governor doesn't want to be in a position where the solution to the problem is to spend money, so he went after the journalist instead.

encryptluks2 5y ago
I would campaign on this alone. Say how the opposing party wants people to be insecure, exposed and that they will try prosecuting you for doing the right thing cause they have such fragile egos.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
evan_ 5y ago
He found an excuse to publicly attack a big-city journalist. That’s the beginning and end of the reasoning here.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  And I'm sure none of his base will notice or care that months later the reporter isn't actually being prosecuted. The political points scored still count.
  - evan_ 5y ago
    Maybe, or maybe it’ll be “that crooked prosecutor let him go, you need to re-elect me so I can replace the prosecutors.”
jorblumesea 5y ago
If you look into the history of this specific governor and Missouri politics it makes more sense that he's an ideologue that refuses to accept any kind of bad press or even that mistakes can happen. This is the same politician that claimed he solved Missouri "covid problem" but ranks middle of the pack. It's a mindset that is all too common in politics today. Everything inconvenient is fake news. Every embarrassing headlines needs to be countered in the culture wars. Silence dissent, crush free press, etc etc. https://twitter.com/govparsonmo/status/1448697768311132160?s=21 https://twitter.com/govparsonmo/status/1448697768311132160?s...
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  > "decoded the HTML source code" > "Highway Patrol's Digital Forensic Unit" This could have been a joke. I'm sorry, but can these people be serious? Really, the digital forensic unit is under the umbrella of the "Highway Patrol"? I bet they're all into decoding HTML source codes all day long...
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Really, the digital forensic unit is under the umbrella of the "Highway Patrol"? Maybe it's the only state-wide law enforcement agency?

jumelles 5y ago

Who do you think should decide which cases get prosecuted?

rmbyrro 5y ago
Echoing my reply to a similar question here: > I'm not in a position to help improving it, but my impression is relying on a single person is not a good idea. > Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.

tedunangst 5y ago

Who else would decide? An impartial python script? Who provides the inputs to the script?

rmbyrro 5y ago
I'm not in a position to help improving it, but my impression is relying on a single person is not a good idea. Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. This is intentional, the governor explicitly wanted to inflict such pain to a citizen. I don't see a path to meaningful change in how the legal system is weaponized against the public as long as wealth is the primary driver of power in this country: The legal system has always benefited the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
- bitwize 5y ago
  In principle, this is why we in the USA have grand juries. In practice, grand juries almost always vote to indict, unless the perp is a cop.
  - DannyBee 5y ago
    Grand juries are really only used in half of states, and even within that half, mostly for very serious crimes (IE life imprisonment or death).
- DannyBee 5y ago
  This isn't very constructive, FWIW. If you say it's unacceptable, but can't define acceptable except as "not this", it's kind of worthless. Why is a single person better/worse than a group? Do you have any evidence to back it up? There are all sorts of tradeoffs involved in how this sort of thing is done, and why, and those tradeoffs have evolved over thousands of years of legal systems existing. In this case, the common tradeoff is that this is an elected official who is accountable to voters for the decisions they make. There are states where they are appointed. There are states which require grand juries. All of these have tradeoffs - there is no "best", nor do statistics say that any of them end up any more fundamentally fair than each other. Nor do any of them have a significantly different rate of indicting objectively or subjectively innocent people (last i looked). It's unclear exactly what you think a system should look like - i would argue any system with sufficient safeguards is not going to look very different than a preliminary hearing anyway. Particularly your complaint about the stress/loss/etc seems unavoidable. That occurs starting with when people are investigated in the first place.

andrewflnr 5y ago

Would there not also be a grand jury involved at some point? If there is, the prosecutor's decision is more like a single point of failure in the prosecution than a single decider.

DannyBee 5y ago
(Lawyer - but only 3 in states) What crimes require a grand jury is state-specific. About half of states require grand juries for some crimes. Of those, a bunch (minnesota, georgia are good examples) restrict grand juries to crimes that can be punished by life imprisonment/death require grand jury indictments. Others require them for any felony (New york is a good example) People who watched a lot of law and order think grand juries get everything, because in new york, grand juries are required for all felony cases. The other half of states do not require grand juries for indictments. My recollection (take with grain of salt) of Kansas is: 1. A prosecutor can, but is not required to, present to a grand jury for a felony case. They can also just indict directly 2. Citizens can actually empanel a grand jury. It's something like 100 people min + 2% of the voters in the county. 3. If that grand jury indicts, prosecutor can still dismiss it, but it requires leave of the court (rather than them just being able to do it out of hand).

arcticbull 5y ago

That's not an issue with the system per se, it's an issue that there's no specific carve-out in law for this kind of behavior. This could be solved by Congress in a hot minute.

ceejayoz 5y ago
There's no carve-out in law for this behavior because there doesn't need to be. Same reason we don't need a law permitting breathing, eating, etc. - it wasn't illegal in the first place.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Sure, but there's obviously ambiguity here for some, so it needs to be remediated.
  - runnerup 5y ago
    You can clarify things like “it’s legal to film police officers in public” every single year but at some point you have to stop assuming the confusion is in good faith

hn_throwaway_69 5y ago

Really? It looks as though the system worked in this case. A technical violation of the law was not prosecuted as a result of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion not to pursue a prosecution which was not in the public interest. Grand juries are not a solution to this problem. One glance at the shockingly high percentage of cases in which grand juries indict should be sufficient to cast doubt that they are truly filtering out bad prosecutions. That the proceedings occur in the absence of the accused and therefore deprive them of procedural fairness is another problem. The responsibility properly lies with the prosecutor.

rmbyrro 5y ago
In this case, yes, but look at how much risk this journalist beared. For helping the public... Helping protect teacher's private data. What if the prosecutor was politically influenced against him? I don't know how, but there's got to be a better way.
catlifeonmars 5y ago
> A technical violation of the law was not prosecuted This part I was not clear on. I was under the impression that what the reporter did was not a violation of the law. Or does term “technical violation” have a specific legal meaning that I’m not aware of?
- hn_throwaway_69 5y ago
  I probably should have said arguable, not technical. That's what's in the article. I guess we never really know if the law was broken at all unless a jury gives a verdict, so it's all a bit hypothetical. Suppose there's a law that says you can't film other people without their permission. You catch a thief breaking into someone's house, film them, and give it authorities enabling their identification, then delete the footage. I'd describe this as a technical breach of the law. It probably shouldn't be prosecuted. This is kind of analogous to the present situation, a bit of a rough analogy I admit. Whether or not a law was broken, the journalist did something that was a net positive to society, with no real victim except a red-faced politician.
5y ago