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You Commit Three Felonies a Day
- jrockway 17y agoThe concept of punishment is also out of whack. If this guy was convicted of wiretapping, he could go to prison for longer than someone who ran someone else over with their car. (The reason is that "intent" is well defined with respect to murder/manslaughter, but not with newer crimes.)
- nostrademons 17y agoAnd if he was caught with marijuana three times, he could go to prison for life!
- jrockway 17y agoCitation? 3-strikes laws are for felonies, and marijuana possession is a misdemeanor in most (all?) places in the US.
- blhack 17y agoIt is a felony where I live...in Arizona.
- weaksauce 17y agoOuch... do they have a three strikes law there? By the way I just went to Phoenix and I really don't like the speeding cameras. I am curious though, do they work to make the traffic overall smoother? When I was there I didn't see any traffic.
- jrockway 17y agoSpeeding cameras are a way to increase city revenues without raising taxes.
- natrius 17y agoAs someone who navigates roads without a steel cage around myself, I wish red light cameras were replaced with Red Alert-style Tesla coils. Running red lights is dumb. Cameras make the roads safer.
- jrockway 17y agoCitation needed. To make the roads safer, the speed limit needs to be lowered to 25 on city roads. Licenses need to be suspended for running red lights and for speeding. Instead, the cities just want to make a quick buck off of offenders. (Even this has backfired, as it turns out that cars can't speed, only drivers can, and the Constitution requires that the driver be offered a trial. Oops.)
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoI cycle, but red light cameras have recently been part of a scandal where they slowly reduce the amount of warning time before the light changes. This simultaneously increases revenue and endangers everyone on the road. Speed cameras seem to go through a similar process, but are now (at least where I live) referred to as "saftey cameras" and brightly decorated so that you're slowing down at accident blackspots not getting caught out by sneaky placement.
- weaksauce 17y agoI was actually only talking about speeding cameras. The red light cams are ok with me as long as they don't change the yellow length to make more money. If speeding cameras were used to improve overall flow of traffic I would be ok with them too. I can see them positively affecting traffic because I have seen how backed up traffic can get when a cop pulls someone over for a speeding ticket. Spelling mistakes == commenting from my iPhone.
- natrius 17y agoOops, I misread. Speed limits are set arbitrarily low in some places compared with the design of the road, so I usually disagree with speed limits anyway. If you want people to drive more slowly, change the road to make them want to drive more slowly.
- blhack 17y agoThey certainly do not. The traffic jams that result from people slamming on their brakes in front of the cameras (I forgot the technical name for them. I just call them latency-jams...) have lengthened my commute considerably.
- cwan 17y agoI've heard that the three strikes law in Arizona is supposed to apply only to more "serious" and "violent" felonies with only certain felonies counting as "strikes". Does marijuana possession falls under this category? http://www.kvoa.com/global/story.asp?S=4808026 http://www.kvoa.com/global/story.asp?S=4808026 [It'd be crazy if it did?]
- michaelkeenan 17y agoYou are correct. The Arizona three strikes law only applies to aggravated or violent felonies, not all felonies. The law lists 24 kinds of felony that are considered aggravated or violent (they are things like murder, assault resulting in injury, sexual assault, kidnapping, terrorism, arson). Drug crimes are not among them. Here's the statute: http://law.justia.com/arizona/codes/title13/00713.html http://law.justia.com/arizona/codes/title13/00713.html
- danek 17y agoI could be wrong, but I once heard a complaint against 3-strike that (in CA) a lot of crimes that are misdemeanors can become felony charges if you've been convicted of a felony in the past, so people with a previous felony were getting life for tagging buildings and other relatively minor crimes..
- lucumo 17y ago> If this guy was convicted of wiretapping, he could go to prison for longer than someone who ran someone else over with their car. Which I'd say can be justified. Very private information that can be revealed by a wiretap and then "leaked" can destroy a life almost as bad as death can. If the former is done with the intent of really messing up somebody's life and the latter is caused by stupidity, I can see how someone would want to punish the wiretapping harder than the car incident. The specifics here don't matter as much as the fact that two reasonable people can disagree over which crime should be given the higher punishment. There isn't really a concept of absolute wrongness in it, only disagreement. (On another note, are fines always lighter sentences than prison? Even using some reasonable conversion key. What if you're a poor, unemployed person with no hope of finding a job for quite some time? Being indebted for a long time or serving some prison time?) Anyway, why are we discussing politics on HN?
- jrockway 17y agoAre you serious? Everything in life is reversible except death.
- patio11 17y agoEverything in life is reversible except death. I'm indebted to my Econ 101 professor for teaching me that this is not the case. He was discussing the decision "You have a pristine prairie next to a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart wants to pave it to make it a parking lot. What are the pros and cons of this?" Someone pointed out that, if you turn it into a parking lot, you can never get the prairie back, but if it turns out you really need the parking lot you can make that transformation at a later date. My teacher said "Ah, but after it is Tuesday, you will forever lose the use of the parking lot on Monday if you haven't already built it. You can't ever get that day back." This concept is widely applicable -- for example, many pro-life folks say the death penalty is irreversible and that this is a strike against it. I happen to be pro-life but am not persuaded by this, because prison is also irreversible. After you've locked someone up for ten years and discovered, whoops, he was innocent, you can free him but you can't free him ten years ago. (This is a philosophical point with serious policy implications: if you buy it, you'd want to shift your resources from opposing the death penalty qua death penalty to ensuring fair trials generally.)
- swolchok 17y agoThe article didn't do much to support the "Three Felonies a Day" thesis. More support for the tired, more general "laws are bullshit" refrain, but not for the thesis in the title.
- dionidium 17y agoOpposition to vague or unenforceable laws is not the same thing as opposition to the rule of law, in general. In fact, I think -- as, e.g., Lawrence Lessig has argued wrt copyright -- such laws might have a corrosive effect on general support for the rule of law and could be opposed on those grounds.
- gojomo 17y agoThree Felonies a Day is the title of the book by the featured civil-liberties lawyer. I suspect the case is made there.
- danek 17y agoyeah, i was kind of hoping for more examples in the article since i probably won't buy the book
- erlanger 17y agoMore than that, but that's another story for another day.
- davidw 17y agoAnd another site.
- erlanger 17y agoEr, "but that's another story for another day" isn't an actual promise to spill the beans. Colloquially it means the speaker will likely never reveal the secret(s), and when made in passing the reference is intended to be lightly humorous. Time to roll up the Jump to Conclusions mat.
- tc 17y agoWhen I read this line, Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. I thought it made the whole piece. It's quite clear to anyone who follows federal cases that this is exactly what is going on, and it is rather obvious why anything that enables this is perverting justice.
- pmichaud 17y agoThe trend is pretty scary -- if any given normal activity could conceivably be made into a "crime," then you end up with a sort of underclass of people trying to keep prosecutors and police happy because they know that no matter what they do they could be hauled into court at any moment. That's wrong.
- alabut 17y agoI learned a similar corollary in constitutional law class in college - that Supreme Court justices already have their opinions on issues and their related cases, then go crawling through the previous cases to construct the precedents that support their position rather considering the merits of the individual case. It was unsurprising but disheartening to learn.
- visitor4rmindia 17y agoPhew! I'm glad this doesn't apply to me.
- billswift 17y ago"Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood." They write so many laws, even without considering regulations and State and local laws, that you can't even READ them all, much less understand them. Where do you think the "tyranny of the lawyers" has come from; they've been doing this for decades.
- rsingel 17y agoThis is crap. Councilman did more than store emails. He gave away free email accounts, then he spied on those who got emails from Amazon.com. The dude argued that because the emails went into storage on his server for even a second that he wasn't wiretapping. The judge agreed. On appeal, both the Justice Department and the EFF wrote in to say that counts as wiretapping. Let me repeat: in this case the EFF and the Justice Department agreed the dude was wiretapping. The whole rest of the piece falls apart if you know anything about the case. This is typical of the WSJ's opinion page -- which holds to NONE of the standards of its news pages.