In which I can’t win

Luther M. Siler

I was not picked for jury duty, and my number in the pool was high enough that I’m not sure whether I was actually eliminated or just that they got the required number of jurors they needed before they got to me. The process itself was … fine, I suppose? It would have been significantly more fine had the St. Joseph County courthouse #3 at any point investigated the concept of moving air, or a similarly comfort-related concept called don’t cram sixty fucking people into tiny rooms during a pandemic. Unfortunately, neither of those rules were followed and I suspect that, despite being one of three (3) people who remained masked for the entire process, I have contracted Covid, Anthrax, monkeypox and probably rabies and fucking wandering womb syndrome as well.

Honestly, the most entertaining (or at least worth talking about) parts of the whole process were that 1) when the judge is conferring with attorneys they actually play static over the intercom to make it more difficult to pick up what they’re saying, and 2) the absolutely outstanding level of rudeness of the cop manning the metal detector on the way into the courthouse. Actually, a few things about that:

  1. I walked in behind a handful of people on the way into the courthouse. All of them put masks on as we were entering the courthouse; I assumed that they were mandatory. The moment everyone but me got through the metal detectors, they all took their masks right back off again. The hell?
  2. The cop was barking “Do you have a cell phone?” at everyone who came in. The gentleman in front of me answered in the affirmative. The cop actually picked up a copy of the summons we were sent and yelled at him about whether he’d read the “big box at the bottom,” and made him read out loud the part where it said to not bring cell phones into the courtroom.
  3. Three of us, including me, set off the metal detectors and were waved in without further investigation, so apparently the pistol I had taped to the small of my back was fine. I said I didn’t have a cell phone, though, so all good.
  4. I happened to be sitting where I could hear people coming in while we were waiting for everything to start, so I got to witness it when the same poor bastard who had gotten chewed out about having a cell phone realized that the room he had on his summons was different from everyone else’s. He made the mistake of asking the cop about it, and the guy yelled at him again, because you’re supposed to call a number the night before you have jury duty to make sure your trial is still happening, and this guy hadn’t done that. “You did not do what you were supposed to do!” the cop yelled. “Why would that be? Do you not know how to read instructions? I’m surprised you found the courthouse at all!”
  5. Dick.

The other big realization of the day is that people get too tied up in hypotheticals and don’t think shit through very clearly, but that shouldn’t be surprising because I teach and so I should know how fucking dumb most people are. It was still weird– and, frankly, it clearly had one of the attorneys confused– to see how many people indicated that they would not be able to render an impartial verdict were the defendant to choose not to testify. Several different people expressed variations on “I wouldn’t be able to make a fair decision if I didn’t hear both sides of the story,” which sounds reasonable and good so long as you don’t think about it at all. Like, y’all, we just had “beyond a reasonable doubt” explained to us a couple times. It’s not all that complicated a concept. The defendant does not have to testify. Period.

Examples:

  1. This was an armed robbery case. The defendant was caught on video robbing the store, clearly showing his face. There were several eyewitnesses to the crime, including the arresting officer and the store owner who was robbed. The robber dropped the gun while fleeing the store afterward, which had his fingerprints on it and was registered in his name. Before committing the crime, the thief posted a selfie on Twitter and Facebook of him outside the store and holding the gun, with the caption “Bout ta rob these motherfuckers.” In this case, I really don’t need the defendant’s version of the story. Guilty, thanks.
  2. Keeping with the metaphor of armed robbery. There were no witnesses other than the shop owner, who picked someone else out of a lineup and furthermore described a thief of a different race and gender than the person who was eventually arrested. The defendant has a solid alibi documented on social media for the time the crime was committed. There is video of the crime and the thief is clearly not the person on trial. In this case, again, I don’t need to hear from the defendant to decide to exonerate them.

These are both exaggerated, but it was really weird to hear so many people claim that they could not and would not be able to come to a conclusion without hearing from “both sides.” And again, the defense attorney was visibly surprised. The prosecutor had a similar situation in trying to ascertain if everyone understood the concept of “accessory to” being the same as having committed a crime; ie, you drive somebody to rob a bank and act as the getaway driver as well, but you weren’t the person who went in and robbed the bank. You’re still getting sentenced for bank robbery. Now, you could argue about whether this was fair, but the number of people who wanted to “what-if” this relatively simple hypothetical was still kind of alarming. No, the person wasn’t carjacked. Yes, they knew the robbery was happening. No, we’re not going to posit that someone was killed and the robber had promised not to kill anyone. Please stick to the current hypothetical, Juror 42. You know what, never mind, I’m rejecting all of you. Go home.

One way or another, I’m free for two years. Still haven’t made it to a trial. Hopefully next time it’ll be on a cooler day, but … yeah.

Neck-deep in human waste, underneath the jail

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This post has almost been about several things already; Gift of Gab, one of my favorite hiphop artists, passed away earlier today, and there will still likely be a post about him in the next couple of days. I’ve had a post about critical race theory brewing as well.

And then this murdering shitbag cop’s sentencing came down, and, well, that’s probably the most timely thing I could be writing about right now.

270 months. He murdered someone he knew by kneeling on his neck for nine and a half minutes and for that he will serve 22 and one-half years in jail. If the crime hadn’t been filmed, we’d likely never have heard of it, and he would no doubt have continued to be a murdering, racist asshole for the rest of his career.

I’m of two minds– well, several, really– about all this. He was convicted of second degree murder, for which the recommended sentence was 10 years, and the prosecution was pushing for probation. So the fact that he got over twice the recommended sentence is a good thing even if the defense was hoping for 30 years. I brought this up on Twitter earlier about an entirely different criminal; I don’t know that I’m any good about determining how long sentences should be for crimes.

The person I was talking about then was one of the Capitol rioters; she was in the building for around 10 minutes and committed no acts of violence while she was in there, and she got three years of probation. Is that “enough”? Hell, I don’t know. Would jail time have been better? 3o days of jail, to pick a number, instead of three years of probation? Six months? Is that too much for participating in an insurrection for ten minutes and not being one of the ringleaders of the crowd?

And this man gets 22.5 years for cold-blooded murder in broad daylight. Which doesn’t sound like enough; life without possibility of parole sounds great to me. Sure, there are more direct ways he could have murdered George Floyd; he was convicted of 2nd degree and not 1st for a reason. But George Floyd will still be dead when and if this man gets out of jail.

Well, okay, but he’s going to be spending that entire time in solitary, and when I am in a less bloodthirsty mental state I recognize that any amount of time in solitary confinement in America’s jails amounts to psychological torture, to say nothing of fifteen years, which is what I’m seeing would be the minimum amount of time he’d serve (who knows if that’s right, because Twitter, but whatever.). Fifteen years of solitary confinement 23 hours a day is not a sentence that many people can be expected to survive, and if they survive it, what emerges is not the person that went in. And I’m strugging, right now, to balance that need for justice and vengeance (not the same thing) with my disgust at the carceral state in America. I would prefer that jail be a place for rehabilitation and not for punishment. But it isn’t, and it likely won’t be in my lifetime. And this creature is not about to be the hill I choose to die on to fight the badly broken American justice system. The fact that he was convicted at all is remarkable, to say nothing of the sentence being more than the bare available minimum.

So.

I don’t want this to happen to anyone, but if it’s going to happen to anyone, it may as well happen to him. I’m not sure how that stands as a moral position, but it’s what I have at the moment. If he doesn’t like it, he probably should have listened to the crowd of people begging him to stop strangling another human being under his knee until that man died crying for his mother.

In which I’m okay with this

Luther M. Siler

My wife and I have watched the six-episode McMillions documentary over the last week or so. If you’re not familiar with it, you may remember the McDonald’s Monopoly game that they used to run; turns out that the game was basically rigged from the start, with one single guy taking most of the high-end winning pieces and selling them to a network of people that really wasn’t as spread out or sneaky as it should have been. Something like $24 million in prizes was diverted until an informant clued the FBI in, and then a lengthy investigation ensued, resulting in a whole bunch of people getting indicted, most of whom pled guilty.

The documentary itself is … okay. It’s probably twice as long as it needs to be– certainly an episode or two could have been cut out without really harming anything– and damn near every single person that they talk to over the course of the documentary is some variety or another of douchebag, loser, or both. There’s one guy who they try to make out as a sympathetic victim of the whole thing, which doesn’t really work because he’s just as much of a dick, if not more, than everybody else involved– and, frankly, as far as I’m concerned he might actually be the worst human being to actually take part in the documentary. But more on him later.(*) This will be diverting if you’re home on quarantine and you need something to watch, but it’s not gonna change your life or anything.

And, well, I don’t think this was the intent of the filmmakers, but by the end of the documentary I was pretty well convinced that nothing in the documentary was actually a crime and that no one should have been prosecuted for this.

There is a point, late in the documentary, where one of the defense lawyers points out that his client is being prosecuted for federal mail fraud because he broke a hamburger company’s rules for a promotional game that they made huge amounts of money off of. There is another point where an actual journalist points out that like three or four of the big winners lived in the same zip code and that no one ever noticed.

You know why no one ever noticed? Because they weren’t looking, because no one gave a shit, because no one even conceived of this as a crime until someone tipped off the FBI, who only paid any attention to the case because, as one of the lead douchebags investigators points out, they had been working on “health care fraud” and were bored.

Seriously, this man’s dress shirt is three sizes too big for him for the entire goddamn documentary and it was driving me insane by the end. But I suspect health care fraud probably involves actual victims? And this “crime” does not. Literally no one was hurt by this except for the people who didn’t realize that if you give the dude from the mob half of your winnings and the taxes on your winnings are 40% then you’re not going to actually get a whole lot of money out of it, and I don’t feel bad for them.

McDonald’s was gonna give that money away anyway, and remember they’re *profiting* enormously off of this game. No victims.

You could make a case that someone out there in the world was supposed to be the real winner of the money, or the car, or whatever, but it’s equally likely that those winning game pieces get accidentally thrown away, and at any rate we have no idea who that person is. No victims.

There’s a big deal made about how the marketing company and the “secure” printer went out of business and some people lost their jobs, but as it turns out the only thing they did wrong was hiring the guy who took the pieces, and at any rate they only lost their jobs because the FBI did the investigation. No investigation, no job loss.

You could make an argument that, yes, dude stole the game pieces– but that’s basically stealing office supplies, which isn’t a federal crime, and no law enforcement agency anywhere would ever take it seriously. If I can get you to give me a million dollars for a post-it note that I wrote “ONE MILLION DOLLARS” on, that doesn’t mean that I can get anyone else to give me a million dollars for that post-it note, and no one would argue that you have stolen a million dollars by stealing the post-it. Should McDonald’s have sued the guy? Sure, why not? But it’s not a crime.

They basically openly admit that the only reason they used mail fraud as the main crime they charged these folks with (apparently at some point you have to mail the winning game pieces in for verification) was because they really couldn’t get them on anything else. Because, again, this is breaking the rules of a hamburger company’s marketing scheme, not an actual crime. Crimes have victims. Some danger, either to individuals or society. This has neither. Literally no one anywhere was harmed by any of this, at all, except for whatever cases the FBI was ignoring so they could pursue the “more fun” french fry case.

The biggest bullshit? The longest prison sentence anyone served from this was the main dude, who did 37 months, which shows you how seriously the judge took the case. Three people mentioned having to pay restitution (I assume there were more; a whole bunch of folks pled guilty) and of those, two actually mentioned the amount.

One guy, who has to repay something like three and a half million dollars, is paying about $170 a month. And the ringleader of this entire thing, who diverted $25 million in winning game pieces, is paying $370 a month, or about 2/3 of the amount that I’m paying on my fucking student loans every month, and this is the point where I’m actively fucking angry now, if you were wondering. Because it’s abundantly fucking clear that this money is never getting paid back, so they don’t even care enough to actually pretend that’s going to happen. And McDonald’s didn’t care about the “crime” enough to do even the slightest amount of due diligence on the winners– like the journalist pointed out, several of them lived in the same zip code, and a bunch of them turned out to be related, and no one noticed or cared until the “informant” tipped off the FBI, and– this is great– it turns out that the reason the informant called the FBI was spite.

Because this wasn’t a crime. It was breaking the rules of a hamburger company’s marketing scheme.

I really do enjoy the idea that getting an education fucked up my finances worse than “stealing” twenty-five million dollars, well over three hundred times as much as I borrowed, would have. Tell me again why I’m paying this shit back?

(*) OH RIGHT I FORGOT: they go to some length to make one of the people who took the game pieces look sympathetic, right? And this guy does end up eventually getting acquitted on appeal. But the reason they let him go? Is because instead of being told “Hey, these fell off a truck” or whatever ridiculous justification they used for the other end-user people, this guy is told that the game piece was found by a guy who is going through a divorce, and he wants to secretly sell it so he can hide the assets from his wife, so that she doesn’t get any of the money. And, as he says, he’s been through a divorce himself, so he “gets it,” and he coughs up fifty grand or a hundred grand or however much money they asked him for so that he can prevent a woman who he doesn’t know and as it turns out isn’t real from getting half of the prize.

In other words, the sole “sympathetic” character in the entire documentary is a misogynist piece of shit, and fuck him a lot. As far as I’m concerned he deserves jail more than anyone else in the documentary, because he’s the only person who thought he was hurting someone, and he was just fine with it.

10:35 AM, Sunday, April 19: 735,366 infections and 39,095 Americans dead. It’s early in the day; we’ll be comfortably over 40K dead by the end of the day.

Two very quick things

Luther M. Siler

THING THE FIRST: Does anyone who is not currently using the Digit app want a referral for it so they can start? We each get five bucks if you do. Digit is one of those apps that links to your bank account and occasionally stealthily takes a few bucks out and puts it into a savings account. I’m experimenting with it right now. Drop me a line in comments; use the email address you want me to send the referral to when you sign in. You don’t have to put your email address in the comment.

THING THE SECOND: Well, I sort of screwed the pooch on this one. Thing Two was originally me asking why the hell Cyntoia Brown has to wait to get out of jail until August 7th. I had done some searches earlier today when the news popped and couldn’t find a damn thing, and the weird part was no one was asking. Well, as it turns out, August 7 is apparently exactly fifteen years since she went into jail, and the same governor who is letting her out early because her sentence was bullshit apparently believes that fifteen years is more appropriate than fourteen years and four months for some reason. I mean, at least she’s getting out, but … come the fuck on.

GUEST POST: On “Getting Criminals Off the Streets,” by Keith Ammann

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My friend Keith posted this on Facebook the other day, and he gave me permission to use it as a guest post when I asked.  

It’s impossible to separate racism from the long train of abuses and usurpations that police departments in this country have perpetrated, but even if racism could be made to go away overnight, that by itself would not be enough to solve the problem with policing. There’s another dimension that needs urgently to be addressed.

If you ask a police officer to tell you what his job is — or, for that matter, ask the average person what the job of a police officer is — he will most likely say something like, “To get criminals off the streets.”

This is a serious problem.

“Criminals” is a category of beings. Suppose a police officer has a certain idea in his head of what a “criminal” looks like. That idea may be influenced by either conscious or unconscious bias. The officer has to make dozens of snap judgments a day, under stressful conditions, of whether the person he’s dealing with is a “criminal” or not. And if he decides that person is a “criminal,” he understands that it’s his job to “get the criminal off the streets,” by whatever means necessary.

A “criminal” is a bad person. A “criminal” is dangerous. A “criminal” doesn’t deserve respect. A “criminal” has no rights. A “criminal” abuses the public, so abusing a “criminal” is righteous vengeance. It’s justice.

There are many things wrong with this mentality, but one salient flaw in it is that deciding who is and is not guilty of crime is the exclusive domain of the judicial system — the courts. Jurors are supposed to decide guilt, not the police. Sentences are supposed to be handed down by judges, not by an officer’s service weapon.

Moreover, “criminals” DO have rights. These rights are spelled out explicitly in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, indirectly, in the Fourth. “Due process of law” means that criminal defendants have the right to be judged guilty or innocent not on impulse or emotion but by standards of evidence, honestly obtained and fairly presented in court. And once they’ve served out their sentences, they’re not supposed to be considered “criminals” anymore.

But this is hard to remember and harder to honor, because we’re so accustomed to thinking of “criminals” as the enemy, the destroyers of peace and order. And if it’s difficult for us regular folks, it’s even more difficult for police, who fight an unending battle against “criminals” every day of their lives.

This is why the thinking — and, crucially, training — of police needs to undergo a fundamental shift.

We, and they, need to stop thinking of the job of police departments and police officers as “getting criminals off the streets.”

We, and they, need to start thinking of it as restoring citizens who are committing crimes to the status of citizens who are not committing crimes.

There are two elements to this change in framing.

One is the recognition that all the people whom a police officer interacts with are citizens with rights that he must respect. (Of course, not all of them are U.S. citizens — and it’s not only U.S. citizens who have rights. But this is a matter to confront another day. For now, let’s settle for defining “citizen” loosely, as a human being with social and political rights and responsibilities.)

The second is the emphasis on criminal activity rather than criminal identity. There are not “criminals” and “civilians.” There are citizens who are committing crimes and citizens who are not committing crimes. Citizens who are not committing crimes must be treated with respect, dignity and full recognition of their legal rights. Citizens who are committing crimes ALSO must be treated with respect, dignity and full recognition of their legal rights even as they must also be made to cease their criminal activity and to submit to the process of law for what they’ve done.

A person who is not committing a crime should not — must not — be treated like a “criminal.” An African-American man driving a nice car, a teenager hanging out on a streetcorner, a protester in the street: none of these people is committing a crime. There is nothing that they need to be made to submit to. Their compliance is not an end in itself. They are free people, citizens with rights. Unless and until they commit an actual crime, there is no reason and no justification for the police to make them do anything.

As for people who have committed or are in the process of committing crimes, the domain of the police is to investigate and apprehend, to stop the crime in progress and to hand the perpetrator over to the court system for judgment. That’s it. Because the perpetrator is still a citizen, just one who at the moment is not abiding by the law and needs to be restored to the status of one who is. It is not the domain of the police to administer punishment.

Refocusing the mission of the police from what people “are” to what they are doing or have done will make it more difficult to justify police brutality and detention without charge. It will dismantle the logic underlying racial profiling. It will lay a foundation on which police and communities can build mutual respect and trust. It will bolster people’s freedom to exercise their rights of conscience. It will make evident the moral necessity of restoring people’s right to vote and right to free choice of employment after they’ve paid their debts to society.

It’s something we need to do right now.