#us judicial

[itsmythang]

MAGA Charleston Judge James Gosnell, who used the N word regularly & called Dylan Roof’s family victims, has been charged with Child sex abuse images & allegedly more & won’t be getting out of jail anytime soon. Law enforcement & the DA are looking for more of his young victims!

[allisondroberts]

It is good to see at least some of the Wall Street criminals getting significant jail time. Not that I think all people on Wall Street are criminals, but I think a lot of laws were being broken leading up to the financial crisis and I think most of those people have gotten away with it which I think is wrong.

[allisondroberts]

I am not generally one to closely follow high profile murder cases, but I know a lot of my friends and family from Memphis followed this one and are not very satisfied with this outcome. I have to say that this doesn't seem right to me. New evidence has come to light that means it is highly unlikely the three boys would have ever been convicted if the evidence had been there at the time of the trial so almost everyone seems to now believe that the boys are innocent, but instead of the State admitting that fact or going through a retrial, the boys were forced to a guilty plea deal leading to release for time served. WTF? Does that seem like justice to you? Yes, being free is a hell of a lot better than being locked up, but having felonies on your record aren't really good for your employ-ability and other freedoms that most Americans take for granted. The US justice system seems to be riddled with more and more of these unjust compromises that don't really provide justice to the innocents that have been locked up or the victims whose murder has apparently gotten away with it.

[allisondroberts]

I think that this is a growing problem with world media though it seems particularly bad in the US and UK. It is not the media's place to judge the accused or to question the jury. The media does not have all the facts in the case, and there are many cases now where an unbiased jury is impossible because of all the media attention long before the case goes to trial. The media likes and promotes stories. Stories that make sense and follow a certain pattern based on stereotypes. The media trims the facts to fit these stories as anyone who has ever been interviewed can attest. Life often isn't a clean story with clear motives, and it is a trial and jury's job to find the facts not the story.

[allisondroberts]

Because Information Wants to be Free

It seems the US is after Aaron Swartz for going on a little academic downloading spree at MIT last year. What I don't understand is why the Fed is upset since both MIT and Jstor (the source of the material) have settled with Swartz and are no longer pursuing legal action. Except that Swartz has angered the Fed in the past with a similar stunt of legally pulling court case files from free library access and then posting them online when those files typically cost 8 cents a page. I don't know about you, but I consider going after someone on something where the harmed parties are not seeking legal action because you are mad you couldn't go after them for something they legally did in the past is GOVERNMENT HARASSMENT. Is it just me or is the US government starting to do that more and more?

So here is Swartz original caper with the fed documents:

FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records

And here is his recent legal problems from the MIT Jstor caper:

Harvard's Aaron Swartz indicted on MIT hacking charges

But it gets even better because Greg Maxwell felt the Fed's recent charges were about as justified as I do, and decided to dump 32 gigs of old, no longer copyright protected academic papers in Jstor's library to Pirate Bay.

18,592 Academic Papers Released To Public Via Torrent

Now unfortunately, I have to agree with the author of the above article that while I agree with Maxwell's point, I am not sure how releasing the papers to pirate bay is going to do anything other than anger some more people,  possibly get himself in trouble on some loophole, and gain publicity for himself and the cause. Perhaps the publicity is good because we are talking about it, aren't we?

I think copyright has a place, but right now copyright is out of control. I also think that copyright is a civil issue and not a criminal one while the US government obviously has the opposite opinion. I still can't believe that the US is trying to extradite a British citizen for a website that offered LINKS to copyrighted material that was wholly located outside the US. I can't figure out how links could be illegal anyway or how the US has jurisdiction over servers not on US soil. Another article about the proposed extradition:

Big Content's latest antipiracy weapon: extradition

Maxwell is right that for profit academic journals are one of the most obvious cases of copyright abuse out there. These journals charge academics for the privilege of being published, make academics referee and edit the articles for free because of some sense of "reputation" you get from being a referee, and then charge huge amounts of money for the journals and individual articles forever. When the science that creates the articles is funded by the federal governments and other non-profit organizations for the advancement of all humanity. Who the hell thought this was a reasonable idea? Why does the government allow it to be legal when they funded most of the research that is then trapped behind a paywall? Some of the fees made sense when journals were expensive paper things to publish, but almost all academics get their reference papers online now because it is so much faster.

Here is a good article about Nature's attempt to extort more money out of the UC system in 2010 that will give you some idea of how much Nature is bringing in. The UC system paid Nature on average about $4500 per journal and Nature was demanding that that be increased to $17,000 per journal in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs

Copyright should expire and content in the public domain should be available to the public, particularly now that sharing content online is so cheap. The articles that Maxwell has put online should be available online anyway. They shouldn't be behind a paywall. They are over 100 years old and all the authors are dead. But somehow I suspect Jstor sees it differently. Wouldn't you if you could get almost $20 a view for something that should be free? Our government is enabling this bad behavior instead of putting an end to it.

Don't we have more important things to pay our tax dollar for than federal investigations into linking to copyright material? Particularly when the injured parties have made peace and are not interested in charges? Having state universities pay millions of dollars to journals reporting on science also paid for by the government? Think about it.

[allisondroberts]

Yes, I have to agree that these two articles sum up a lot of what is wrong with the American justice system at the moment. I can't believe that more of the architects of the financial crisis have not been thrown in jail for the rest of their days.

Edit: July 12, 2011 There seems to be a lot of controversy about these two articles and the validity of the story of the Louisiana bank robber so I did some additional research today. This blog post discusses the controversy:

http://wesawthat.blogspot.com/2009/01/shreveport-man-gets-15-years-for.html

and here is the original ktbs story:

http://www.ktbs.com/news/23350821/detail.html

[allisondroberts]

Th war on drugs continues to amaze me with the stupidity of it at this point. How can a society allow a petty drug sharing incident warrant more time in prison than multiple sexual assaults? How is that even up for discussion much less law?

[allisondroberts]

Does this seem like a really bad thing to anyone else? Prosecutors behaving badly with no consequences?