He hasn't been convicted of anything yet. This is the media seeing that someone wants to charge him with making a terrorist threat, and that if he was convicted, there would be no way he could possibly spend more than 8 years in prison.
He hasn't been convicted; I assume he has clean record so far; he doesn't have materials in his home about wanting to kill children and eat their still beating hearts; but US taxpayer money is spent keeping him in jail until it gets to trial?
When I get FU money I'm going to hire designers to make "Never talk without your lawyer" posters and get that message across.
I agree that someone making a credible terrorist threat needs some form of punishment and rehabilitation. I don't think the sentence about beating hearts was a credible threat, but I don't have all the information.
It is weird to me that most young people are seen as "evil", not "stupid". Often the reaction should be to just tell them not to be stupid and explain the havoc they've caused. We shouldn't be locking them up.
This reminds me of an anecdote I heard, or maybe read, or confabulated. A police officer had shot an adolescent who was in the street with a toy gun that had been painted black. Somehow a police officer in Japan was asked about this situation, an his response was that, in Japan, the police would assume that, because it was a child holding it, the gun was a toy.
You can't assume that in the land of the Second Amendment though. I read a story just a few months ago about a child in Kentucky who accidentally killed his sister with an actual "kid-sized gun" or something like that.
A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit.
That doesn't mean that the cop had to shoot the child though but I don't know the details to the case you're referring to enough to comment one way or the other.
Sadly true. Not only the Kentucky case, but in New Jersey a few months ago a 4 year old playing outside went into the house, picked up a gun, and shot & killed a 6 year old. The father of the 4yo has been charged over it since.
Toy guns in the US are now required to have bright orange flashing on them to ID them as toys. Of course a criminal could put bright orange paint on a real gun to make it look like a toy, and some do (http://publicintelligence.net/baltimore-police-department-gu...) but since most criminals want to intimidate people with their guns it doesn't happen that often. It's more common, I suspect, for people to modify toy guns to make them look more real. Some people do so to threaten people, sometimes there's a case of 'suicide by cop' where the person calls the police or brandishes the painted-to-look-real toy weapon in public and then points it at police when they show up to investigate, who unsurprisingly tend to shoot rather than waiting to see if they'll get shot.
"A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit."
It probably should, since that is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Furthermore, painting such a broad stroke of a nation with ~314 million people and thousands of political jurisdictions, with their own gun laws, is absurd.
It's also rare when someone wins the lottery, but it doesn't surprise me when it happens. It'd be unusual IMO to have seen the rare event, but not surprising that it happened.
Convicted or not. This seems like it would fall under a federal crime. That means that he's most likely either going to be convicted via a plea bargain or his family will risk going bankrupt in order to defend him. And if him and his family do attempt to challenge it, the DA will probably through all their resources at the kid and bury him because many have contempt for people who try to exercise their right to trial by jury.
You extremely difficult be part of a system where you see legitimate criminals everyday and not develop a posture that everyone that comes across your desk deserves to be behind bars.
> He hasn't been convicted of anything yet. This is the media seeing that someone wants...
I'm curious about your wording in your comment. I may misreading your intentions but do you find absolutely nothing wrong with someone being in jail for the past 3 months for making a threat followed by "lol, jk"?
And do you find that it always follows that someone making sure that the facts at issue are correct must always support the side that the incorrect facts back up? We're not allowed to even discuss this on a somewhat even keel without having motivations questioned?
I agree with what you're saying but I wasn't quite sure jrockway was simply making sure everyone had their facts straight which is why I was asking him to clarify his position. If he actually felt the arrest was appropriate I would have some follow up questions for him. Was that wrong of me?
By the way; what does it mean to question his motivations anyways? If he came out and said he supports Justin's arrest, what does it matter? Heck, I'd love to have someone say so. Maybe then we could have an interesting discussion on the matter.
I disagree with a lot of things people say here on HN. But I still love to hear people rationale's for the things they say.
Someone who has been accused of something really heinous (or threatening to commit a heinous crime) shouldn't get bail, they should be locked up until it is determined that they are not a danger to society.
The problem is that the courts are so busy with other cases that it has taken at least three months so far to do that (and probably more) for the trial to start. Have they even had a bail hearing? It wouldn't surprise me if bail was denied.
The fact that some people get charged with serious crimes and then they have to be in prison for months/years before their trial could start (even if the lawyers were ready) seems like a miscarriage of justice.
This is also why plea bargains are supposed to be so common, to avoid clogging the courts.
> Someone who has been accused of something really heinous (or threatening to commit a heinous crime) shouldn't get bail, they should be locked up until it is determined that they are not a danger to society.
I accuse MBCook of really heinous threatening things (that i don't dare repeat or more people will feel threatened). Please lock MBCook up until we can prove that MBCook can't possibly be a danger to society.
Problem is without being convicted, he has already spent 3 months in jail... So not only does it seem an overblown charge, he is being punished for it while still being legally innocent (hasn't been proved guilty).
