9 ms·

The insanity of the charges/sentencing reminds me of a passage from The Hot House(which is excellent, Pete Earley somehow got permission to go mingle with priso

The insanity of the charges/sentencing reminds me of a passage from The Hot House(which is excellent, Pete Earley somehow got permission to go mingle with prisoners at USP Leavenworth for a year and write about it). A Bank Robber, 45 'They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I'm really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when we come outside there is a cop waiting across the street and he starts shooting. He shoots my buddy, but I don't know he's dead so I pull him into the car and drive away. When they bust me, they charge me with murder, kidnapping, and the robbery. I ask my attorney, "How the hell can they do that? All I did was rob a bank" He says the law says if you are committing a felony and someone dies, a bank teller has a heart attack or something, you can be charged with murder. He tells me they charged me with murder because my buddy got killed. He says the law says when I pulled my buddy into the car and drove off, I kidnapped him because I was taking a body from the scene of a crime. That's how they got me for kidnapping. He says the law says that I can be charged with all three even though I didn't kill nobody and I didn't kidnap nobody. I say the law sucks.'

zerocrates 12y ago
The felony murder rule is somewhat controversial but nevertheless nearly universal in the United States.
- beamatronic 12y ago
  Does it always override the Good Samaritan law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law "Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated." Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?
  - ctdonath 12y ago
    It might protect you from breaking the heart attack victim's ribs while delivering CPR, but it won't protect you from inducing a heart attack in the bank teller you tried to feloniously rob.
    - mod 12y ago
      Why would it protect you from that? You aren't trying to help the bank teller. This guy tried to help his buddy. He should be charged with what he actually is responsible for. His buddy sealed his own fate.
    - Someone 12y ago
      I think the OP was thinking of the attempt to save his buddy who was shot. I can't see how that was being a good Samaritan; that act wasn't about saving his life, it was about keeping him out of the hands of the police. If he asks that in general, I would think being a Good Samaritan would take precedence over lots of crimes. For example: speeding or driving through a red light on your way to a hospital with a heavily wounded passenger, or jumping into a pool where it is forbidden to swim to save someone from drowning IMO should not be punished. Felonies may be different. For example, pulling a huge man in the line of fire to save two others? Highly questionable, IMO. On the other hand, this article seems to indicate that pulling someone from the ledge he wants to jump of or even preventing someone from falling out of a tree legally is kidnapping. If so, I would hope one can't go to prison for such acts.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    > Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony? As long as the decision is up to prosecutors, no.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony? I don't think any jurisdiction has a "Good Samaritan" law which makes it so that trying to provide assistance after the fact negates liability one would have for criminal acts that make you liable for the injury in the first place, including effects of injury that the attempt to provide assistance was intended to prevent but failed to.
psychometry 12y ago
The deal you get from prosecutors is only as good as your lawyer and good lawyers cost money. This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public whose understanding of punitive systems doesn't get any more nuanced than "let's be hard on crime!"
- r00fus 12y ago
  Sounds not unlike the non-insured experience at any hospital - you get charged with insane amounts of stuff so they can negotiate discounted reasonable rates with insurance companies. If you don't have representation you basically get shafted.
  - aero142 12y ago
    I've often thought I need a medical agent for negotiating with hospitals and navigating my insurance. Do you know of anyone doing this? Might be a company idea in there somewhere. Medical negotiation agent.
    - mynameismonkey 12y ago
      http://billadvocates.com/ http://billadvocates.com/ http://hospitalbillreview.com/ http://hospitalbillreview.com/ http://thekarisgroup.com/ http://thekarisgroup.com/ lots and lots of these
      - aero142 12y ago
        Thanks for the list!
- maratd 12y ago
  > This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public The same stupidity is on display in states that don't elect their judges or prosecutors. The problem is that there is no incentive for actual justice. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor pay for the incarceration. Nor do they care for how long the individual is incarcerated. Might be nice if they were given a limited number of years to distribute among their convicts. A little scarcity might to do the system some good.
JanezStupar 12y ago
That is horrible. And I think that the people who keep upholding this system are even worse.
ctdonath 12y ago
What's the problem with the charges? Felony murder is serious business. Yeah, he didn't choose to kill anyone by his own hand directly, but he wantonly created the felonious circumstances which directly led to someone's death. As for the "kidnapping", that's an understandable edge case for the legal definition entailing taking a human body (which may or may not have been legally dead at that particular point) without permission. I say committing major felonies sucks. Doesn't matter if he thought bank robbery was "harmless", it is and the consequences demonstrate why. Throw the law library at him.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  When felony murder kills a bystander through recklessness, that makes sense. Felony suicide should not count as felony murder by the partners. He got himself killed.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    Now when a cop shoots you while you are trying to rob a bank, it's suicide? This seems like a perfect example of felony murder.
    - refurb 12y ago
      I'm with you. If said person had not decided to commit a crime, the person would likely not have died. It's not different than if I were speeding recklessly, zoomed by some old person who gets scared, runs off the road and dies. Maybe they shouldn't be charged with murder, but maybe manslaughter? Their actions directly contributed to the death of someone.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - caf 12y ago
        It's not different than if I were speeding recklessly, zoomed by some old person who gets scared, runs off the road and dies. It's vastly different. The old person in your example is not a willing part of your crime. Frankly the concept is absurd. Innocent bystanders and responding law enforcement that are killed in the commission of the crime can be said to have been murdered, but willing participants have died primarily as a result of their own actions, which is not murder under any sensible definition.
downandout 12y ago
If you think this sentence was unjust, there is another Colorado prisoner named Michael Dipentino. He is currently serving a 305 year sentence. What was his heinous crime? According to the Denver DA [1] he created phony checks to buy $200,000 worth of postage stamps, that he later pawned or resold. He was facing a minimum of 96 years after his conviction, but the judge decided to give him 305 years. The "justice" system is completely out of control. [1] http://www.denverda.org/News_Release/Releases/2006%20Release/Dipentino%20guilty.pdf http://www.denverda.org/News_Release/Releases/2006%20Release...
- slayed0 12y ago
  It looks like that guy actually has a blog[1]. Not sure how he has internet access in prison but it looks fairly interesting. [1]http://mjdipentino.blogspot.com/ http://mjdipentino.blogspot.com/
  - jonah 12y ago
    Generally prisoners write out their essays and mail them to someone who types them up to put online. Others share audio via calls from prison[1]. [1] http://prisonradio.org/media/audio/Mumia http://prisonradio.org/media/audio/Mumia
- fixxer 12y ago
  Counterfeiting, IMO and apparently the opinion of the Government (we rarely agree, for the record), is basically on par with treason.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    Counterfeiting seems to me to be on par with fraud and theft. Could you explain why you consider it to be on par with treason?
    - fixxer 12y ago
      You debase a medium of exchange upon which our society is built.
fixxer 12y ago
> All I did was rob a bank I totally understand how somebody might look at that situation and say "gee, he did only rob a bank because the guy who died was his accomplice", but at the same time... he robbed a bank! Had he not robbed it, that life might not have been lost and a body would not have been taken from the scene of a crime. If you want to argue that the quality of one's lawyer plays a large part in the charges, hell, I agree with you and I think that sucks. But, I'm not about to toss out the legal system because a criminal had a shitty time in court. Fuck this guy.
- qiqing 12y ago
  The legal system is supposed to make punishments fit the crime, not heap arbitrarily much punishment on anyone who ever breaks any law ever. If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive... As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.
  - fixxer 12y ago
    You're comparing violent crime (robbing a bank) with non-violent crime (illegal immigration).
  - Torgo 12y ago
    I think it does fit the crime, and it's not arbitrary. You get charged with crimes you committed because you didn't want to be caught committing a crime. "I moved the body because I was being chased by the cops" isn't a good excuse. >As someone who was once an illegal immigrant This is perfectly analogous. People in countries illegally sometimes engage in identity theft, illegal labor, and a variety of other things so they can stay in the country. The fact that someone "had to" so they could remain illegally in a country isn't a mitigating circumstance. I'm not at all insinuating it should escalate until you get shot, but if you get caught, you're culpable for every law you broke. Why would you not be? Like, this is the simplest thing in the world. If you don't want to leave your friend's body behind if he gets shot while robbing a bank, don't rob a bank. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway. It's a threshold that everyone can meet. If you take the body, well, now you've committed another crime. I actually think that law makes a lot of sense.
ecdavis 12y ago
> He shoots my buddy, but I don't know he's dead so I pull him into the car and drive away. What if his friend wasn't dead, but in fact died in the car as he was driving away from the scene? What if his friend's life could've been saved by treatment at the scene? Moreover, did he have a plan for saving his friends life or was he simply trying to get them both away from the police? Furthermore, being charged with something is not the same as being found guilty of it. The quote begins, "They originally charged me," so I'm guessing some of the charges were dropped? Even then, it comes down to a jury to decide guilt. I binge-watched a bunch of prison documentaries recently (in particular, Into the Abyss and the series by Louis Theroux are very good). They shed a lot of light on the terrible aspects of the U.S. prison system. Interviews with inmates, though, also make it clear that a lot of these people: a) Know next to nothing about the legal system outside of their own interpretation of whatever their lawyer/judge has told them. Think of explaining programming to someone who doesn't regularly use technology, and then they go and explain it to someone else. b) Maintain their innocence even in the face of extremely damning physical and forensic evidence to the contrary. Into the Abyss has a great example of this. I have fundamental problems with the adversarial justice system, but it's nonetheless important to be critical of what convicts say about their own situations. They're obviously going to be biased - even if they are innocent.
- mikeash 12y ago
  > The quote begins, "They originally charged me," so I'm guessing some of the charges were dropped? Even then, it comes down to a jury to decide guilt. This is another deplorable aspect of the US justice system. The vast majority (something like 95%) of convictions are not from jury trials, but from plea bargains. Piling on charges is one way prosecutors force plea bargains on suspects. It's likely that the prosecutor charged this guy with everything he could find in order to induce him to plea to a lesser charge to avoid the hassle and uncertainty of a trial.
  - ecdavis 12y ago
    Great point, I didn't consider that.

zerocrates 12y ago

The felony murder rule is somewhat controversial but nevertheless nearly universal in the United States.

beamatronic 12y ago
Does it always override the Good Samaritan law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law "Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated." Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?
- ctdonath 12y ago
  It might protect you from breaking the heart attack victim's ribs while delivering CPR, but it won't protect you from inducing a heart attack in the bank teller you tried to feloniously rob.
  - mod 12y ago
    Why would it protect you from that? You aren't trying to help the bank teller. This guy tried to help his buddy. He should be charged with what he actually is responsible for. His buddy sealed his own fate.
  - Someone 12y ago
    I think the OP was thinking of the attempt to save his buddy who was shot. I can't see how that was being a good Samaritan; that act wasn't about saving his life, it was about keeping him out of the hands of the police. If he asks that in general, I would think being a Good Samaritan would take precedence over lots of crimes. For example: speeding or driving through a red light on your way to a hospital with a heavily wounded passenger, or jumping into a pool where it is forbidden to swim to save someone from drowning IMO should not be punished. Felonies may be different. For example, pulling a huge man in the line of fire to save two others? Highly questionable, IMO. On the other hand, this article seems to indicate that pulling someone from the ledge he wants to jump of or even preventing someone from falling out of a tree legally is kidnapping. If so, I would hope one can't go to prison for such acts.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  > Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony? As long as the decision is up to prosecutors, no.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony? I don't think any jurisdiction has a "Good Samaritan" law which makes it so that trying to provide assistance after the fact negates liability one would have for criminal acts that make you liable for the injury in the first place, including effects of injury that the attempt to provide assistance was intended to prevent but failed to.

psychometry 12y ago

The deal you get from prosecutors is only as good as your lawyer and good lawyers cost money. This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public whose understanding of punitive systems doesn't get any more nuanced than "let's be hard on crime!"

r00fus 12y ago
Sounds not unlike the non-insured experience at any hospital - you get charged with insane amounts of stuff so they can negotiate discounted reasonable rates with insurance companies. If you don't have representation you basically get shafted.
- aero142 12y ago
  I've often thought I need a medical agent for negotiating with hospitals and navigating my insurance. Do you know of anyone doing this? Might be a company idea in there somewhere. Medical negotiation agent.
  - mynameismonkey 12y ago
    http://billadvocates.com/ http://billadvocates.com/ http://hospitalbillreview.com/ http://hospitalbillreview.com/ http://thekarisgroup.com/ http://thekarisgroup.com/ lots and lots of these
    - aero142 12y ago
      Thanks for the list!
maratd 12y ago
> This is what happens when the criminal justice system is run by politicking judges and prosecutors elected by a public The same stupidity is on display in states that don't elect their judges or prosecutors. The problem is that there is no incentive for actual justice. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor pay for the incarceration. Nor do they care for how long the individual is incarcerated. Might be nice if they were given a limited number of years to distribute among their convicts. A little scarcity might to do the system some good.

JanezStupar 12y ago

That is horrible. And I think that the people who keep upholding this system are even worse.

ctdonath 12y ago

What's the problem with the charges? Felony murder is serious business. Yeah, he didn't choose to kill anyone by his own hand directly, but he wantonly created the felonious circumstances which directly led to someone's death. As for the "kidnapping", that's an understandable edge case for the legal definition entailing taking a human body (which may or may not have been legally dead at that particular point) without permission. I say committing major felonies sucks. Doesn't matter if he thought bank robbery was "harmless", it is and the consequences demonstrate why. Throw the law library at him.

Dylan16807 12y ago
When felony murder kills a bystander through recklessness, that makes sense. Felony suicide should not count as felony murder by the partners. He got himself killed.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Now when a cop shoots you while you are trying to rob a bank, it's suicide? This seems like a perfect example of felony murder.
  - refurb 12y ago
    I'm with you. If said person had not decided to commit a crime, the person would likely not have died. It's not different than if I were speeding recklessly, zoomed by some old person who gets scared, runs off the road and dies. Maybe they shouldn't be charged with murder, but maybe manslaughter? Their actions directly contributed to the death of someone.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - caf 12y ago
      It's not different than if I were speeding recklessly, zoomed by some old person who gets scared, runs off the road and dies. It's vastly different. The old person in your example is not a willing part of your crime. Frankly the concept is absurd. Innocent bystanders and responding law enforcement that are killed in the commission of the crime can be said to have been murdered, but willing participants have died primarily as a result of their own actions, which is not murder under any sensible definition.

downandout 12y ago

If you think this sentence was unjust, there is another Colorado prisoner named Michael Dipentino. He is currently serving a 305 year sentence. What was his heinous crime? According to the Denver DA [1] he created phony checks to buy $200,000 worth of postage stamps, that he later pawned or resold. He was facing a minimum of 96 years after his conviction, but the judge decided to give him 305 years. The "justice" system is completely out of control. [1] http://www.denverda.org/News_Release/Releases/2006%20Release/Dipentino%20guilty.pdf http://www.denverda.org/News_Release/Releases/2006%20Release...

slayed0 12y ago
It looks like that guy actually has a blog[1]. Not sure how he has internet access in prison but it looks fairly interesting. [1]http://mjdipentino.blogspot.com/ http://mjdipentino.blogspot.com/
- jonah 12y ago
  Generally prisoners write out their essays and mail them to someone who types them up to put online. Others share audio via calls from prison[1]. [1] http://prisonradio.org/media/audio/Mumia http://prisonradio.org/media/audio/Mumia
fixxer 12y ago
Counterfeiting, IMO and apparently the opinion of the Government (we rarely agree, for the record), is basically on par with treason.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Counterfeiting seems to me to be on par with fraud and theft. Could you explain why you consider it to be on par with treason?
  - fixxer 12y ago
    You debase a medium of exchange upon which our society is built.

fixxer 12y ago

> All I did was rob a bank I totally understand how somebody might look at that situation and say "gee, he did only rob a bank because the guy who died was his accomplice", but at the same time... he robbed a bank! Had he not robbed it, that life might not have been lost and a body would not have been taken from the scene of a crime. If you want to argue that the quality of one's lawyer plays a large part in the charges, hell, I agree with you and I think that sucks. But, I'm not about to toss out the legal system because a criminal had a shitty time in court. Fuck this guy.

qiqing 12y ago
The legal system is supposed to make punishments fit the crime, not heap arbitrarily much punishment on anyone who ever breaks any law ever. If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive... As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.
- fixxer 12y ago
  You're comparing violent crime (robbing a bank) with non-violent crime (illegal immigration).
- Torgo 12y ago
  I think it does fit the crime, and it's not arbitrary. You get charged with crimes you committed because you didn't want to be caught committing a crime. "I moved the body because I was being chased by the cops" isn't a good excuse. >As someone who was once an illegal immigrant This is perfectly analogous. People in countries illegally sometimes engage in identity theft, illegal labor, and a variety of other things so they can stay in the country. The fact that someone "had to" so they could remain illegally in a country isn't a mitigating circumstance. I'm not at all insinuating it should escalate until you get shot, but if you get caught, you're culpable for every law you broke. Why would you not be? Like, this is the simplest thing in the world. If you don't want to leave your friend's body behind if he gets shot while robbing a bank, don't rob a bank. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway. It's a threshold that everyone can meet. If you take the body, well, now you've committed another crime. I actually think that law makes a lot of sense.

ecdavis 12y ago

> He shoots my buddy, but I don't know he's dead so I pull him into the car and drive away. What if his friend wasn't dead, but in fact died in the car as he was driving away from the scene? What if his friend's life could've been saved by treatment at the scene? Moreover, did he have a plan for saving his friends life or was he simply trying to get them both away from the police? Furthermore, being charged with something is not the same as being found guilty of it. The quote begins, "They originally charged me," so I'm guessing some of the charges were dropped? Even then, it comes down to a jury to decide guilt. I binge-watched a bunch of prison documentaries recently (in particular, Into the Abyss and the series by Louis Theroux are very good). They shed a lot of light on the terrible aspects of the U.S. prison system. Interviews with inmates, though, also make it clear that a lot of these people: a) Know next to nothing about the legal system outside of their own interpretation of whatever their lawyer/judge has told them. Think of explaining programming to someone who doesn't regularly use technology, and then they go and explain it to someone else. b) Maintain their innocence even in the face of extremely damning physical and forensic evidence to the contrary. Into the Abyss has a great example of this. I have fundamental problems with the adversarial justice system, but it's nonetheless important to be critical of what convicts say about their own situations. They're obviously going to be biased - even if they are innocent.

mikeash 12y ago
> The quote begins, "They originally charged me," so I'm guessing some of the charges were dropped? Even then, it comes down to a jury to decide guilt. This is another deplorable aspect of the US justice system. The vast majority (something like 95%) of convictions are not from jury trials, but from plea bargains. Piling on charges is one way prosecutors force plea bargains on suspects. It's likely that the prosecutor charged this guy with everything he could find in order to induce him to plea to a lesser charge to avoid the hassle and uncertainty of a trial.
- ecdavis 12y ago
  Great point, I didn't consider that.