:^) @andrastes - Tumblr Blog

moment of unspeakable beauty today when one of my coworkers called another coworker "judas" for not splitting a can of white monster with her, and i got to watch the guy who sits next to me open a new google tab, type in "jeudis," and say quietly to himself "french thursday...?"

all-aboutgorillas

Mountain gorilla silverback and baby

candyredterezii

starting a collection

lolitamadeo

i like to consider myself the 'eric bogosian' of my tumblr mutuals

bemusedlybespectacled

since I’m thinking about this instead of studying for bar prep:

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman.

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses.

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings.

I’m just saying that there are implications behind them that are deeply disturbing (“if I decide you’re guilty, you’re less of a person to me”) and that it’s the primary driving force behind most of the issues in our criminal justice system.

bemusedlybespectacled

actually, since this post has become relevant (again), I’d like everyone to join me in a little thought experiment: why do the police bring up a murdered person’s criminal record when they are extrajudicially killed?

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

it is this mindset that permits the police to murder. we cannot stop police violence unless we dismantle the idea that being guilty of a crime negates your humanity and your civil rights.

#people have a hard time understanding that when I say things like I don’t believe in the death penalty I mean for everyone #and that if we reframed the idea that people should be punished with death for any crime it would impact police brutality exactly as stated #i have many opinions #no one should be murdered for a crime they commit #and I mean no one

thelawfulchaotic

hi!! sorry if you've been asked this question before, but as someone who wants to be a lawyer, how do you deal with defending people that morally you really don't agree with? thanks!

I get a lot of versions of this question, and I answer it seriously every time, because it’s both important and not important at all. Anyone who asks respectfully gets my whole ass answer.

It’s just not really about that. My job isn’t about defending the idea of hurting someone else. It’s about stopping the state from inflicting further hurt, torture, pain. It’s about pushing back for some fairness against a monumentally stacked system. And it’s about stuff that’s normal human stuff that counts as crime for some reason.

Yeah, it’s hard to do a sex abuse case. Sometimes the images stick around and it bothers me. But honestly? Mostly those cases have real plausible theories of innocence or they’re cases that I will lose because the evidence is there, and the question is not whether the perpetrator will go to jail but how long.

Those cases are so rare, though. I get so much pointless bullshit. Felony of a teen taking mom’s car without permission. Two kids that try to break into a car and get so scared by the alarm that they run away. Trespassing on dad’s house because his new girlfriend wants you to stop coming around. It’s just human stuff, and the violence of the state is not necessary or helpful.

I also reject the idea of punishment completely. The state has a responsibility to stop people from hurting other people again. But inflicting pain doesn’t do it, we know this by now. So I argue for mercy and for real solutions to real problems. I’m here to build a future, not get caught up with doing violence to someone because of the past.

So yeah, sometimes it’s hard, but mostly my conscience is dead clear: I’m not responsible for the crime. The damage has been done. I want to start the healing process, and I want it for everyone involved. When that’s not possible, I just want to tell the authorities they don’t get to just Do What They Want.

The more I do this job, the more I am a genuine pacifist who is against violence in all forms, and actually I don’t see a contradiction between that and what I do for a living. State violence is a pervasive evil that tears apart families, communities, and countries, and it’s far more damaging and awful than any individual crime. The average prosecutor has more blood on their hands than a serial killer, but it’s invisible: people who died in jail, who froze to death on the street, who were shot in a drug deal. Their violence begets violence.

When I get blood on my hands, it’s because I put my hands over the wounds and try to stop the flow. I’m okay with it.

Also: people don’t ask doctors how they can stand to treat bad people. Why ask me?

bemusedlybespectacled

#i find people have such an inherent misunderstanding of the roles of defense attorneys (understandably but still)#in that most people i talk to seem to be envisioning me personally defending the right of people to commit crimes or that like. Crime Is#Good Actually#‘yeah this person did X but they should never face any consequences ever please and thank you judge’#(and people think this would WORK??? a different tangent on a lack of legal education and cop shows being awful etc)#meanwhile i am simply protecting people’s rights. yes even those people’s#idk i could write my own post but op Gets It and also a prosecutor just filed the DUMBEST motion ive ever seen and i need to respond to that#instead lmao (via @anixit26)

The number of people who respond to my post about how even the guiltiest person in the world deserves rights with "but not [crime I think makes you undeserving of rights]!" is truly insane. People really truly think that being accused of a crime makes you irredeemably evil and protecting the rights of those accused means you are also evil.

macklesufficient

almost peed my pants today when my bf told me about this dude in his hometown who dressed up like ryan gosling in Drive every day (including driving gloves) but did not own a car. bf was like “yeah we called him Walk”

orangefjuice

House of Leaves adaption where Johnny Truant is a reaction streamer watching a video essay made by Zampanó about The Navidson Record just pausing the video at random times to ramble wildly at his non-existent chat and doing shots on stream

savemefromthepirates

I couldn't help myself. 😏 I imagine adult Zuko is better at communicating...sort of.

pineapple-frenzy

:>>

arctik-fox

tatangadragon

water sports should be for adults too.me and the blokes at university should be allowed to shoot eachother with water guns

tatangadragon

post cancelled I've been told the term i used already exists in english and that it means something Very Much Different. english is a wicked language that i regret learning