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This defendant was convicted of possessing CSAM. Before that fact causes you to lose sympathy for the case, note that almost every significant criminal case aff
by sowbug 5mo ago
This defendant was convicted of possessing CSAM. Before that fact causes you to lose sympathy for the case, note that almost every significant criminal case affirming constitutional rights involves a defendant who did something unsavory, if not reprehensible.
Miranda was a kidnapper and rapist. Danny Escobedo (right to an attorney during interrogation) murdered his brother-in-law. Clarence Earl Gideon (right to a court-appointed attorney) was a career criminal. It's the same with freedom of speech cases: they often involve jerks and assholes; otherwise, they probably wouldn't have gotten arrested in the first place.
You can root for the right outcome without rooting for the defendant.
- stult 5mo agoBad facts make for bad law
- singleshot_ 5mo agoThat is the saying
- stackghost 5mo agoEnsuring due process before the law, regardless of the charge, is of course the whole reason for having a bill of rights in the first place.
- cturner 5mo agoWhat you say seems true. But a comment - there are more effective ways to achieve it than a bill of rights. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights but does have decent due process, as a result of deliberate legislation. The bill of rights leads to the US Supreme Court being highly politicised because it is a nasty undemocratic backdoor to synthetic legislation. Australia does not have a politicised high court.
- stackghost 5mo agoI'm Canadian, and as a fellow commonwealth citizen I don't think relying on common law precedent is stable. The common law, after all, is just whatever a judge says it is, and judges can be bought or unduly influenced. As we're seeing in the United States, the Rule of Law itself is being fundamentally eroded. Laws in the USA are worth essentially nothing now, because the Executive Branch is brazenly and openly ignoring the law and Congress is either too inept or too corrupt to do anything about it. That culture of lawlessness is not going to just go away. It's already started and will continue to "trickle down". What's more, neither the USA nor either of our countries are immune from political appointment of justices, and it's my understanding that Australia has in fact had some supreme court justices who were previously parliamentarians (sorry if these are not the correct terms), so that seems politically-motivated to me. The USA is merely ahead of us in crumbling, but I think we're in trouble too because their fucked-up political culture is so insidious in its spreading. We've seen similar in Britain, with its much-vaunted "uncodified constitution". These systems, much like the common law itself, only work when everyone's more or less on the same page. But when you have an entire political party that revels in shattering constitutional/governmental norms and conventions to the detriment of its perceived political enemies, the whole system gets ugly real quick.
- autoexec 5mo ago> That culture of lawlessness is not going to just go away. It's already started and will continue to "trickle down". Only for as long as it's allowed to continue. When the people who are acting lawlessly and those enabling it are finally held accountable and an example is made of them things can get back under control. It's just a question of how long it takes for accountability to happen and how painful that process will be for the rest of us. I'm still hoping it'll be as quick and painless as possible, but the longer it goes on the less likely that seems.
- simonebrunozzi 5mo agoI wasn't familiar with the acronym, therefore here you go: CSAM = Child Sexual Abuse Material.
- egorfine 5mo ago[flagged]
- plausibility 5mo agoThe rebrand here is because for something to be porn, the person in it has to be able to consent. Children can’t consent, thus it’s material showing sexual abuse. I think this new name is generally accepted at wide and will stick around in perpetuity from now on.
- pseudalopex 5mo ago> The rebrand here is because for something to be porn, the person in it has to be able to consent. This was a reason the rebranders stated. But it was false clearly. Dictionaries' definitions did not include consent. People understood revenge porn lacked consent. And people understood child porn lacked consent.
- sjtgraham 5mo ago> Before that fact causes you to lose sympathy for the case, note that almost every significant criminal case affirming constitutional rights involves a defendant who did something unsavory, if not reprehensible. Not always. Often times prosecutors pick cases with bad fact patterns to be test cases when they want to attack a right. A recent example is Biden DoJ choosing to take US v Rahimi to SCOTUS in an attempt to wheel back the NYSRPA v Bruen decision.
- voxic11 5mo agoHence the saying "hard cases make bad law"
- singleshot_ 5mo agoThat is not the saying
- nchmy 5mo agoSeems to be one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law
- zahma 5mo agoI’d take it one step further and say they deserve to have their rights respected as well and the outcome pursued by law to reinforce the ethics undergirding law. It seems like this person was a target and they would have eventually got him — this was simply an expedient shortcut.
- BizarroLand 5mo agoThere is a reason why justice is always depicted as blind and holding a scale. What matters is the law, not who the law is applied to or the circumstances for invoking that specific law.