However, the point stands that Warmbier likely buys into blaming Garner and Bland for the repercussions of breaking the law. Therefore Warmbier's hypocrisy ...
Therefore, Warmbier's presumed hypocrisy ...
I mean, it's still possible to be a rich white guy and not be contemptuous of black people.
And yeah, Warmbier was dumb in a way that can only be explained by his privilege, but still, when you look at the run-ins with the law by Garner, Bland and Warmbier, the takeaway really has to be that the authorities in each case were majorly fucked up.
He probably thought Soldier of Fortune would pay a bounty for the poster.
I find myself wondering if his surname is actually pronounced "warm-beer."
Also, I'm all for whacking us some white privilege from time to time but the fact of the matter is that it's plausible for just about anyone to make the mistake of not being able to quite imagine just how absurdly draconian the laws of a totalitarian state are. (Of course if one is at all educated about totalitarianism and how it works this wouldn't come as a surprise, but one can't count on that happening at all for reasons other than white privilege.) Warmbier's mistake was stupid, but it's not the kind of stupid any halfway sane country would expect him to pay fifteen years for, that's just deranged any way you slice it.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that Warmbier blames Garner or Bland for their own deaths. That said, I have very little sympathy for the guy, and it just about kills me to think of the amount of diplomatic resources the U.S. will probably expend in order to save his dumb ass.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that Warmbier blames Garner or Bland for their own deaths.
Actually, it's probably most reasonable to assume Warmbeer has never heard of Garner or Bland.
Warmbier likely buys into blaming Garner and Bland
We can assume this based on what?
I don't hit preview because of privilege.
it's plausible for just about anyone to make the mistake of not being able to quite imagine just how absurdly draconian the laws of a totalitarian state are.
But that's just non-totalitarian privilege.
I was reminded of this guy. Some people are just stupid.
4,6: My logic went: Well, Warmbier clearly trusts that legal systems will act fairly. Therefore he probably blames the individual when the individual has a bad outcome.
Linked article is basically a perfect example of how invocations of privilege tend to work. Look how morally superior and wise the author is, because... he's making light of some kid who got sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. "What a mind-blowing moment... what a bummer... what a wake-up call." What an asshole.
"Invocations of privilege" "tend to" "make light" of kids getting sentenced to hard labour? What other "invocations of privilege" have I been missing that you think this makes a "perfect example" of the genre?
The implication that Rich Whitey ought to respect the sovereignty and propaganda of Non-Whitey Dictator States is uncomfortable for me.
Well, like assuming the author is male.
14. It's not about respecting the sovereignty and propaganda of the DPRK. It's about not being so oblivious to the facts in the world, and so cluelessly secure of your own invulnerability, that you think you can go and pull a dumb prank on a infamously touchy and unreasonable totalitarian regime. I don't think you need to respect the sovereignty of Boko Haram to know that going to Nigeria for the purpose of pulling a hilarious prank on them is an incredibly stupid and frankly pretty blameworthy move.
Short response to quoted sentence 1: No, Mx. Slatepitch, it is more reasonable to be more shocked by the former.
Apologies for mis-gendering the author. I was pointing out that the author was converting the horrible action of an totalitarian state into a form of moral currency that gives more weight and urgency to her (unrelated) political priorities. I'm also sorry for not providing data and context for the claim that this sort of conversion is part of a broader pattern.
Further to 16, it really is blameworthy, because if you're going to travel to NK, you should be aware of recent history and events in NK, and you should know that other foreigners have been given harsh sentences for arguably lesser crimes (leaving a bible in a hotel room, for instance). You should also know that the U.S. has been forced to use extraordinary resources to get these folks released. If you still decide it's worth it to pull this hilarious prank, then that is really shocking and pretty horrible.
it's plausible for just about anyone to make the mistake of not being able to quite imagine just how absurdly draconian the laws of a totalitarian state are
But one does not find oneself in North Korea by mistake. Surely anyone who is sufficiently motivated to plan a trip and actually go there could spend a few extra minutes to learn a few things about the place, beyond what one would pick up just by watching The Interview on Netflix.
I wonder what the punishment for posting without previewing is in NK.
It probably also emboldens NK to imprison more foreigners, possibly on false charges, and discourages the US from using these extraordinary resources to get people out. Just idiotic all round.
On that note, are we sure that he did in fact do it? I recall in previous cases NK charges of foreigners were very questionable, despite public confessions. (Not to claim that he's not privileged, etc.)
Since this post has "drug" in the title, it's the best place to note, NMM to Rob Ford.
22: There's a purported video.
10 years ago I met someone who was a North Korea tour guide organizer/documentarian, and he told me Americans couldn't even get visas. Have the laws changed since then?
I know lots of privileged white doods in China who think they should be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want (mostly public drukenness/nudity and coke off a hooker's ass, stuff like that). They are furious that the PRC is not as subservient to whitey as they used to be, and now enforce things like drug laws and visa overstays.
I agree with the author in general but not about Warmbier specifically. I mean sure he might be an ignorant racist bro, but we just don't have the evidence to support that accusation. We do have evidence to support the accusation that he is an arrogant dumbass, and that the American establishment is full of hypocrites who both blame Garner and Bland (while supporting the American police) and also blame the Korean police/judicial system while supporting Warmbier.
Generally,
1) This kid was very very dumb.
2) North Korea is very very bad.
3) This article is very very stupid.
4) Everyone on this thread is basically right.
5) Internet discussions of link-seeking trollery are very very pointless.
6) We (including me) are the ultimate suckers and stupider, in our way, than Rob Ford.
And so the world turns.
24: Thanks. I'm willing to bow to the consensus that he did it--I've heard no end of what Buttercup describes in 25, and it's interesting to talk about it as if he did it--but that's really not convincing.
Here's an aspect of the unequal-privilege conversation that annoys me:
Prelude
- Everyone* agrees that two classes of people are treated differently, as a norm, and that this is unfair.
- Then something happens to someone in one of the groups.
- Then people start making the analogy about what would have happened if a person from the OTHER group instead. It would never happen! It would get an opposite result! We would never hear about that! It would have gone so much worse or better!
The part that annoys me:
- Then the argument immediately devolves into "Ha ha finally that white dude deserved it, black people are treated like that all the time"
"Don't be stupid, the goal is to have everyone treated like white dudes, not to have white dudes get the shitty treatment of the rest of you**"
Both sides of this last part are irritating to me, for smugness and cluelessness respectively.
*everyone I would talk to
** so far I've only seen this argument proffered by white dudes.
20/25. I understand it's quite easy to get into N.Korea as part of an organised tour party these days. You are under constant surveillance and should assume that the authorities are aware of your every move.
The incident happened at 1:57 AM on New Years Day. There is a pretty good chance he was under the influence of something besides "white privilege," which perhaps contributed to his lack of forethought on the ramifications of swiping a souvenir from a deserted hallway while not also realizing he was being closely monitored.
I've tasted North Korean brandy bought by someone who took one of those tours, and if he got drunk on that shit hard labor is the least of his worries.
What I'm about to say is irrational and terrible and blameworthy. I acknowledge that. But my sympathy turned sharply against Warmbier when I saw his confession video begging for mercy while stating "I never, never should have allowed myself to be lured by the United States administration to commit a crime in this country." I am well aware that this was a scripted statement almost certainly extracted under duress. If anything it should have increased my sympathy. But it was just such brazenly false propaganda that it made him seem... profoundly cowardly. Again, I know this is terrible and I don't know why I had this reaction.
I have a probably irrational instinct, which may be racist but S.Korean beer is fine, that N.Korean alcohol would be extremely nasty. I use the analogy of Moldova. Moldovan wine made in the last 15 years or so is fine and unblushingly sold by premium importers, but back in the day I once tried something from the Moldavian SSR, and I would have hesitated to use it as cleaning fluid.
34 before I saw 32. My instinct evidently correct.
33: Comrade, it is good that you are willing to engage in a session of self-criticism acknowledging your ideological errors.
33: I would guess it's meant to evoke that reaction. These forced confessions aren't about actually fooling anyone, they're about advertising the regime's power to break people.
36: Agreed. Comrade urple shall be sent down to the countryside to engage in corrective proletarian education for only three years.
Agree with 37, but I suspect the aim is just as much to make Americans look cowardly, for the internal audience.
I get it, it was just jarring because the confession up to that point was so emotional and seemingly heartfelt that I was genuinely feeling for the guy, and then in the middle came that line, which was obvious scripted propoganda, still delivered with the same passion, which sort of threw my "wait, is all of this b.s.?" reactor switch, making me question the sincerity of the entire confession, which is of course a silly reaction.
25: it is actually possible to get away with pretty much anything of that kind in China (up to and including crashing your sports car while drunk, the car also containing two half-naked hookers and a load of drugs) but you have to be related to the right people to manage it.
On the piece quoted in the OP, you have to be a really special kind of vicious little bitch to write that kind of thing.
I get that! I'm just acknowledging that, to the extent 37 was correct, it worked.
43: I was under the impression that "the right people" are now high up the PRC power structure, instead of being any second rate second son white guy. Buttercup?
On the piece quoted in the OP, you have to be a really special kind of vicious little bitch to write that kind of thing.
Really? You don't think that growing up as a black woman in the United States and being chronically hyper-aware of exacting punishments being dealt out without sympathy, you might be flabbergasted that someone could be so dumb? Now who's a special vicious bitch.
two half-naked hookers
Is this equivalent to one fully-naked hooker?
46: yes, exactly. Princelings in other words.
48 -- As a representative of privileged, foolish straight white men who are also vicious bitches, I think the problem isn't so much the overall sentiment "oppressed people are more likely to think twice about questioning authority" as it is using this guy's unjust imprisonment in North Korea as the vehicle of choice for making the point. It's like using Eric Garner's death to make your point that it's bad to sell loose cigarettes to kids because they can get lung cancer.
But of course the point is made because it's semi-effective trollery and the whole thing exists for no other purpose than setting up a dumb internet conversation (I oppose privilege! No, wait, I oppose North Korea!) to alleviate boredom.
Oh god damn it. /b should have made the bold go away after "also."
51 is correct - Charlie Stross, I think, had some line about how in the last ten years we had - through a combination of social media software and always-available mobile internet - accidentally invented telepathy, and the result hadn't been a sort of Arthur C Clarke Overmind in which the collective intellectual might of mankind was unified, but a horrible twitchy blob of exposed neurons and stress hormones.
You don't think that growing up as a black woman in the United States and being chronically hyper-aware of exacting punishments being dealt out without sympathy, you might be flabbergasted that someone could be so dumb?
Jeez, ajay, what would empathy be worth if we gave it out free to just anybody?
It is the discrimination, the hierarchies, the ranking of the deserving and undeserving that gives the human affects their value, the exchangeable and accumulative wealth acquired in countless daily choices. Indeed, how long could empathy even be possible unless the entropy of caritas is resisted with the irony of cruelty. Thus Spake Zarathustra.
51 is pretty good. However, mass communication really does create the Overmind, but simultaneously and in the same process creates the infinite distance between the individual and the Overmind. The awareness of this distance is called anxiety; the denial of the Overmind is called irony or sin. Union with the Overmind is called self-denial.
46
Yeah, you have to be the kid of someone seriously powerful in the CCP to get away with something like what ajay was describing. And even then, the reason we know about it is that the coverup didn't work, and torpedoed the father's career.
As China becomes more aware of itself as a major super power, they're less impressed with white people trying to wave "I'm from a first world country, you'll pay for this!!" type empty threats in their faces. Also, as the number both of foreigners total and of people doing dumbass shit increases, the motivation of any government to potentially offend the Chinese government to help anyone has plummeted.* As a foreigner though, you do get nicer customer service from the CCP bureaucracy, are less likely to be the victim of direct corruption/extortion, a lighter sentence/deportation if you commit a crim, and get preferential treatment in prison, according to some news article by a sociologist who spent a year in a Chinese prison.
*You would not believe the number of idiots who think that their government would actually seriously intervene if they get busted for doing hash/sleeping with underage prostitutes/drunk driving/illegally working on a tourist visa etc.
The big scandal when I was there was the son of high-ranking official and a movie star (along with his wealthy friends) were charged with gang-raping a karaoke hostess. Some elites were caught on record saying things like it was NBD to rape a karaoke hostess because she probably some rural prostitute anyways, and a real crime would be to rape a girl from a good family. Anyways, Chinese popular media completely exploded, and the son got 15 years, IIRC.
Are there any Asian countries where officials are impressed by "I'm from a first world country, you'll pay for this"? Especially from some hard partying white college student?
I've heard some insane stories about what (Chinese) people are capable of getting away with in China, but those are powerful people.
46, 50
Also, the reason the coverup didn't work is totally hilarious and so perfectly Chinese. The official, who we'll call Mr. Y had the police assign a fake name to the dead son, so know one would realize it was his son. The police assigned a common surname which also happens to be the same word as "fake." It turns out though, a high ranking official in a rival party faction happens to have that last name, so when it was leaked that the dead person was "John XX," everyone assumed it was Mr. XX's son. Mr. XX was super furious, and got an even more senior official to demand a full inquiry into the identity of the dead guy, which he leaked to the press. Then of course, it came out it was really Mr. Y's son, and that he 1) not only had a son who drove drunk with a bunch of drugs and half-naked hookers, but 2) he had covered it up. Mr. Y went from one of the top 5 most powerful people in China to pushing paper in Inner Mongolia.
57
Visa laws, especially working on a tourist visa, used to be a lot more "flexible" and amenable to sweet talking and minor bribes (thing $50 range). That's changed a lot since the 2008 Olympics. Drugs used to be more tolerated if Westerners did them with only each other and very discretely, but I think that's also getting less tolerated.
58: Holy cascade of unintended consequences, Batman. That's pretty insane.
On the piece quoted in the OP, you have to be a really special kind of vicious little bitch to write that kind of thing.
Well, that's putting it a bit strongly, but I have to admit I had a similar reaction. Gloating over an egregiously unjust punishment -- and basically siding with the sham justice system of a brutally authoritarian regime -- is not only shockingly stupid, but also kind of vile.
60: it is pretty much the tangledest web woven by someone practising to deceive in recent memory.
because no one here agrees with blaming Garner nor Bland for their deaths
Bland is a particularly stupid example for that article to use. When you're looking for people blameless in their own death maybe suicides aren't the way to go.
The question of Sandra Bland is still open with serious doubts about the original investigation and a wrongful death lawsuit pending. Easy there, tiger.
64: No it's not. The perjury case is ongoing and what, the family filing a lawsuit? The released the ME report and the camera footage of the hallway outside her cell. There's 0 evidence of anything but a suicide.
Yeah, the grand jury declining to indict a cop means no there there? Which past couple of years did you just fucking live through?
66: What is the "there" you're talking about? She was a cutter who disclosed a prior suicide attempt to jail staff. The girl in the cell next to hers said Bland was distraught over her friends and family not bailing her out. The ME ruled it a suicide. I do find this kind of thing interesting. If there's something I've missed or not heard about I'd like to see it.
But LC, my honoured compatriot, do you honestly believe that Sandra Bland was murdered?
I believe she committed suicide; but I also believe she never should have been in custody in the first place (and had she not been in custody, she very probably would not have despaired to the point of suicide). Putting people in jail for minor traffic infractions, or for unpaid court fees, or for anything less than a violent assault upon the public safety, strikes me as ridiculously punitive, and as probably racist in origins in an American context.
So: lots of blame to go around, but I doubt she was outright killed/murdered by a second- or third party.
Since we're talking China and privilege and las drogas, I thought I'd share my reaction to this reddit thread on a recent bust in Shenzhen.
I checked it the day after the event and the comments have moved around a bit since, but there's still plenty of "you deserve it for doing it in China" sentiment to be seen, which really rubs me the wrong way. While it's not a risk that I'm going to take, I can totally understand why people do, and can't see what's so different about any other pleasurable risk-taking behaviour that has serious consequences if you are unlucky (motorcycling, horseriding, skiing, etc). And that's putting aside the fact that there aren't often bright lines in China between legal and illegal - the ambiguity is intentional in many cases - and so foreigners quickly become accustomed to making judgement calls about the law, or even disregarding it, in many other areas of their lives.
Sorry, not a direct parallel with the OP. But there's something so infuriating about the combination of sanctimony and obvious delight in another's misfortune that you somehow hope that the whole situation becomes recursive and the author suffers some unpleasant consequence themself, that you can gloat about in turn.
68: No. But I do believe she's dead as a result of a false arrest that the grand jury declined to prosecute on account of cop immunity and not giving a shit about black people. I also believe trying to gloss that as simple suicide is outright deceptive and that gswift is smart enough to know better.
(I also feel like maybe it's time to move past this thing where swift is automatically self-appointed defense counsel in every shitty story about a shitty-assed crooked cop that comes up in a comments thread, where his version of the so-called story is absurdly nonsensical and credulously victim-blaming like ninety percent of the time.)
70- I don't quite understand. I feel like it would be pretty hard for everyone else to move past it when that seems to be the role gswift wants to play.
Right you are. I mean I feel like it's time swift moved past it. Would make his nick more accurate if nothing else.
where his version of the so-called story is absurdly nonsensical and credulously victim-blaming like ninety percent of the time
Then you should have no problem providing links to some of these occasions.
I'm not going to try to dig up links right now, but it was just a couple of days ago that you were claiming the cop using the choke hold only "contributed" to Eric Garners death. I gotta say its amazing the way that responsibility usually so clear cut when minorities are accused of something, suddenly becomes something so vague and amorphous when police do something out of line.
But I do believe she's dead as a result of a false arrest that the grand jury declined to prosecute on account of cop immunity and not giving a shit about black people.
You don't know what you're talking about. They did get the cop on perjury and he's been fired. You can read about the legalities of the arrest if you like.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/sandra-bland-video-legal-but-not-good-policing
74: Not that it matters because you're already convinced I'm a right wing troll, but for the record, what I said was that the characterization of the Garner incident as a murder was off. I'm also on the record as thinking they absolutely had a manslaughter case.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_14239.html#1764046
God, fuck this derailment. I should go to bed, I have to get up and do some basic training on auto theft cases to our newest hire class.
This, from 68, I do think is interesting and more on topic. Putting people in jail for minor traffic infractions, or for unpaid court fees, or for anything less than a violent assault upon the public safety, strikes me as ridiculously punitive
When to jail isn't always an easy line to draw, at least I don't think so. The above would rule out jailing people for breaking into houses, stealing cars, etc. But even for less egregious things, what about a case like Sandra Bland (outside of her last TX incident).
http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/Suburban-Woman-Found-Dead-in-Jail-Had-Previous-Encounters-With-Police-316025661.html
I don't know I'd call that kind of history a "violent assault upon the public safety", but she seemed to have a real penchant for driving way too fast and not insuring her cars. And throw in a couple DUI's to boot. Tickets and fines didn't seem to be doing the trick and there seems like there was a legitimate public safety interest in keeping her off the road. Should jail be off the table? If so, then what?
And while I'm filling the sidebar, anyone who agrees with 70 can freely ignore 73. I don't care enough to argue the point.
77 is the kind of comment that makes me glad gswift is still willing to get involved in these discussions, despite the pushback he always gets (and despite his frequent quasi-trolling like in 63).
Also, I'm curious about if and how he voted today.
(It's still Tuesday 3/22 in a Alaska, for a couple of minutes.)
79 feel very much likewise even when I don't agree.
gswift, if you're interested, I'd love your opinion on a thirty year old book on the London police. email in the pseud
75: They got him for perjury, the argument I'd hoped it would be clear that I was referencing when I said "false arrest " is that what happened amounts to illegal detainment and false arrest, which they did not charge him for.
Perjury is what they used to bring down Martha.
Martha is currently in Arrakis for some kind of food week shindig.
I think the problem isn't so much the overall sentiment "oppressed people are more likely to think twice about questioning authority" as it is using this guy's unjust imprisonment in North Korea as the vehicle of choice for making the point. It's like using Eric Garner's death to make your point that it's bad to sell loose cigarettes to kids because they can get lung cancer.
Reading the thread yesterday this seemed plausible. But reading the linked post this morning, I really don't see much to complain about. Yes, I'm sure that the parents of Warmbier would be hurt to read it, but other than that I don't think she's grandstanding at all.
For one thing, she's not claiming the moral high ground. She doesn't say that the punishment is appropriate or reasonable, and she doesn't say that her reaction is completely justified (she more or less calls herself "callous"). She's using her own reaction to demonstrate the emotional costs of living in an unequal and unjust society.
I've tried to imagine spending a decade and a half performing what the North Korean state deems hard labor and I can't. But I'm not 11 anymore, and now, my mother's callous reaction to Micahel Fay's sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
So, I completely disagree with 43.2.
87: One ought to avoid calling someone (other than neb) a "little bitch," but I'm generally sympathetic to ajay's sentiment here.
As you note, the author is endorsing this:
"That's what the hell he gets. Good for him!" My mother had uttered those words in her typical matter-of-fact tone one morning as she watched the news. "He" was Michael Fay, an 18-year-old from Ohio who had confessed to vandalizing cars in Singapore, and was subsequently sentence to six lashes from a rattan cane.
The question is, what do you find interesting about the situation of Warmbier or Fay or Garner or Bland: Their misdeeds or the consequences?
What fault do you find when an intoxicated woman is raped at a frat party, or civilians get blown up in a terrorist attack.
The bad guys in all cases are pretty clear, even if we understand that it might be unwise for a woman to drink too much at a frat party, and even if we believe that the policies of the West have predictably led to homicidal rage.
The author is clear that Warmbier's misdeeds are the proper object of focus in this story, rather than North Korea's. In addition to endorsing her mother's sentiment, she explicitly finds Warmbier more shocking than North Korea:
As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what's been described a "college-style prank."
Further on, the author arrives at what is almost a parody of the folks who said of Garner, "After all, he was a recidivist cigarette-seller." Regarding Warmbier's parents:
I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK. ... Didn't they rear him to respect law and order? Did they not teach him the importance of obeying authority?
Is it possible that this was intended ironically? That's the only way I can read it to find it non-repugnant.
I'm a nonparticipant but I am also getting a little tired of the stock gswift-vs-everyone-except-sometimes-Tigre-and-ajay arguments about police brutality, since they seem to have lost sight of the forest for the trees. If focusing on and rallying around individual cases of alleged police misconduct isn't a good or fair way of addressing racism, then you may as well move on and collectively propose alternative means to that end instead of litigating for the hundredth time who was standing where and grabbing for which gun and so forth. I don't see how it serves any purpose except to devour time and energy that could be spent more constructively addressing the root social problems that I think all participants agree on. If these are the only conversations people want to have with gswift about the role of police (or anyone) in addressing racial disparities, then he probably will asymptotically approach the status of a right-wing troll, because what other moves are there? It's a conversation carefully winnowed and calibrated over many iterations to be a dead end. There isn't anyone to blame for this -- that's not how these things go -- but isn't it at least worth acknowledging? Am I missing something? Is the arc of internet squabbling bending towards justice out of my view?
80: We switched to caucuses here and I kind of hate people so I went to a boxing class with my daughter instead. I probably would have gone for Bernie just to try and push Clinton left.
84: The people of "counter current news" should hire someone with some actual knowledge of criminal law. Then maybe we'd get an article about Mimms, which deals with the legality of an officer ordering someone out of their car during a traffic stop. Instead we get an article incorrectly referencing Rodriguez, a case dealing with extending a traffic detention for the purpose of getting a drug dog to the stop.
I don't see how it serves any purpose ...
Are we now expecting Unfogged commenters to serve some kind of purpose? When was this change made and why wasn't I informed?
The question is, what do you find interesting about the situation of Warmbier or Fay or Garner or Bland: Their misdeeds or the consequences?
What fault do you find when an intoxicated woman is raped at a frat party, or civilians get blown up in a terrorist attack.
I don't think either of those are a fair description. I think of the article as being about, "what's the first thing that goes through your mind when you hear that [something has happened]."
To violate the analogy ban, when I see that there's a story about some mass-shooting I don't immediately think, "I hope it wasn't a white man again." But I completely understand why some people would immediately think, "I hope it wasn't somebody that looks like me." What those two reactions (or my lack of reaction) reveal isn't that the other person thinks that a shooters skin color or religion is the most interesting part of the story.
In the case of this post, the venom in a paragraph like the following isn't directed at Warmbier, it's directed at a world which meets the tears of so many people with indifference on a daily basis.
What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.
I also don't think that's the same thing as saying that it's "intended ironically." Take the sentence you quote asking if his parents taught him the importance of obeying authority. I read that as an allusion to all of the ways* in which black people know that they have to submit to authority -- that aren't just or appropriate but a fact of life.
I don't think she's arguing that it's good for white people to suffer in that way, just that her first reaction is, "yeah, my sympathy is limited right now" and she's explaining why.
* I still shake my head at the fact that LeVar "Reading Rainbow" Burton has a protocol for dealing with cops.
The second line in 92 is also a quote and should be in italics . . .
90.2: IANAL but it seems to me the legal expert you're requesting would probably notice that the particular purpose of extending the traffic stop in Rodriguez is entirely besides the point. Which is the kind of thing which makes it almost seem as if you're desperately splitting hairs to avoid admitting the obvious, which of course you never do when this sort of topic comes up.
Endorsing 91.
More cynically (Bob-ishly?) I'd say self-reinforcing internet outrage really is its own purpose.
94: I am a lawyer, and I agree with Castock that Rodriguez isn't offpoint.
Huh. The most significant thing I registered about Bland was that she had a seizure disorder and was denied her meds while in jail. I admit I haven't followed up on whether that was actually true, but I can say that if it is, it's dereliction on the cops' part, and being deprived of one's anti-seizure medication might could send one toward suicide.
This is a sidebar at this point, I guess.
94, 96: Seriously, try and find an authority on criminal law who thinks this is a Rodriguez issue rather than Mimms.
I don't think she's arguing that it's good for white people to suffer in that way, just that her first reaction is, "yeah, my sympathy is limited right now" and she's explaining why.
The author explicitly denies this. She contrasts her childish initial view with the more mature view that she now shares with her mother: "That's what the hell he gets. Good for him!"
I'm not 11 anymore, and now, my mother's callous reaction to Michael Fay's sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws
It'd be nice if there weren't such deep rifts in this country -- if we could all just get along -- but I think we owe the author the respect to read her words as written, and not try to impose a narrative on her that's designed to be comforting to us.
98: Mmm-hmm.
Been a slice, dude. *sigh*
91, 95: There's a real purpose for sure; it's just increasingly irrelevant to the implicit purpose of the argument. I am aware of all Rhetorical hand-wringing and concern trolling are allowed, if obnoxious, moves in the game.
Isn't that the nature of argument in general? Ever-intensifying disputes over ever-shrinking issues; angels, pinheads, academia.
98: There aren't non-overlapping boxes you can put situations in where one precedent or another applies to the exclusion of all others. Mimms, from 1977, stands for the proposition that a police officer can order a motorist out of their car in the interests of safety. Rodriguez, from 2015, stands for the proposition that when the legitimate purpose of a traffic stop is over, the officer has to let the motorist go -- there's no de minimis amount of time the officer is allowed to keep a motorist hanging around if the stop could be completed and the motorist sent on their way.
I'm not going to argue with you about who you'd accept as an authority on criminal law. But Bland's situation is one where I don't see any claim that ordering her out of the car was in the interests of the safety of the officer, and where the issuance of the ticket was complete at the time he ordered her out of the car, making it an illegitimate extension of the stop under Rodriguez.
Sorry about the lack of posting. I'm sick and have spent the day at the doctor or sleeping. Now I'm on antibiotics and feeling better but not near a computer for a while.
Yeah, heebie, why aren't you posting more often? You've been totally slack.
Take it easy, heebie! Don't need to use up your psychic powers remotely commenting -- especially when you're sick!
Rodriguez, from 2015, stands for the proposition that when the legitimate purpose of a traffic stop is over, the officer has to let the motorist go -- there's no de minimis amount of time the officer is allowed to keep a motorist hanging around if the stop could be completed and the motorist sent on their way.
I am not familiar with either case and, out of curiosity, I searched for Sandra Bland Mimms and found this article which was very interesting. It seems to argue that the officer was behaving badly but legally, but the part that I found most informative was the following. Does this match other people's understanding?
When does a traffic stop end?
But the exit order actually conceals a more nuanced constitutional problem. Notice that as she's being arrested, the officer tells Bland that he was originally just going to give her a warning. But if you go back to the moment he returned to the car with a warning, it seems he never told her that. So only the trooper knew that Bland was going to be released with a warning. Bland believed she was still being detained for a ticket, or worse. She ended up being right.
As far as the officer was concerned, the investigatory stop had concluded with the handing of the warning: He gives a warning; driver is free to leave. Thanks to modern recording devices, we actually learn that this is this trooper's M.O.-- from the car stop immediately preceding Bland's.
...
This is where it gets complicated. You see, while you're being detained, a court will scrutinize any answers or consent a driver gives, because of the coercive atmosphere of the stop. But, when police hand you back your license and a ticket, and say "drive safely," courts have concluded that that moment, the encounter has just de-escalated from an investigatory stop, to -- get this -- a mere "consensual encounter."
...
This is where the Sandra Bland car stop, together with the advent of audio and video-recorded stops, really highlights the disconnect between Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and the reality we live in. At the moment the car stop concluded with the supposed warning, Bland should have been free to leave. But officers know what we all know: No one feels free to leave with an officer at the window with his car parked behind, lights ablaze. When he asked her why she was upset, and ordered her to put out her cigarette, he was continuing to fish -- or worse, goad -- after the investigatory stop had concluded. It's not illegal, but it's not fair, either.
Isn't that the nature of argument in general?
This gave me a happy, warm rush of pure nostalgia for early college-era social circles, so thank you for that.
I think we owe the author the respect to read her words as written, and not try to impose a narrative on her that's designed to be comforting to us.
Okay, how do you read the post? You wrote earlier, "The question is, what do you find interesting about the situation of Warmbier or Fay or Garner or Bland: Their misdeeds or the consequences?" With the implication that you think the consequences are far more notable than the misdeeds and that the author of the post feels otherwise.
I read her as talking about the relationship between misdeeds and consequences and saying that what happened was: Warmier switched environments from one which was likely to be permissive towards minor misdeeds to one which was very strict and wasn't able to mentally adjust for that switch, and that's part of why he did something stupid.
That is unsympathetic and I understand why, reading that, somebody might think, "why make that the issue?" But I also think there's a fairly obvious reason why she might make that the issue -- because black people are expected to code switch* all the time and so that's a natural thought to have.
But, before I make too much of an argument, let me go back to asking, "what do you think she's saying and why do you think she's saying it?"
* Note: "code switching" isn't precisely the right term there, but I think my meaning is clear.
89 is a super fair point, though:
1. As others have said, literally everything done on Unfogged is a gigantic pointless waste of time by definition, so why is fake micro-litigation of events more of a stupid and fruitless waste of time worse than our other stupid and fruitless wastes of time? I guess it is worse, because it's less funny and more tedious. But still.
2. To the extent there's any more serious point to be made, the one I do care about and keep trying to make is that good, effective policing is a really really important anti-poverty social service. People cannot thrive in neighborhoods that are affirmatively dangerous. Crime prevention is just as important a part of the welfare state as education, unemployment payments, public libraries, parks, or whatever else good liberals care about. Good policing, not anti-policing, should be the focus of liberals. As others have said, poor communities are simultaneously over- AND under-policed. To be clear, the 'over-policing" part is real. And it is bad. Focusing on the over-policing part is really important. Eliminating unnecessary brutality is a really really important part of good, effective policing. But when the conversation moves directly to all-cops-are-racists and when people aren't taking policing seriously as a job that needs to be done, which it does sometimes in the left-liberal internet these days, including here, then people are IMO doing something similar to writing off public school teachers because some of them really suck, or writing off child protective service workers because some of them are tyrants, etc. etc.
I hear you on that. But to get to a state where basically law-abiding people aren't resistant to policing, I think the attitude, consciously 'pro-police', that over-policing problems should be viewed with great leniency and understanding, is more damaging to the relationship between police and the community than a focus on police wrongdoing where it exists is.
Like, my office had an 'active shooter' training today, which was super stupid (and included a gratuitous mention of the zombie apocalypse). And the nimrod doing the training (not himself a cop), talking about police response to an "active shooter", singled out a harmless, inoffensive attorney, and said "Is he a threat? The police would perceive that guy as a threat; he'd get shot." Meaning, after we all kind of looked at him funny, that the guy had his hands in his pockets.
And you know, possibly it's worth warning people not to do anything that could confuse a police officer into thinking you're dangerous in a violent situation (nothing about this training was actually worthwhile. Doing it like that, though -- telling a middleaged attorney that putting his hands in his pockets is a stupid thing to do that would make it legitimate for a police officer to shoot him -- encourages law abiding people to hate and fear the police.
If the cop who shot Tamir Rice is an inexcusable aberration, I don't have to think anything bad about police generally. If what he did is a legitimate mistake by good policing standards, the police are terrifying.
More cynically (Bob-ishly?) I'd say self-reinforcing internet outrage really is its own purpose.
Nah. The purpose is social: bonding, solidarity, inclusion and exclusion, conformism, epistemic closure, derp.
I find it fascinating and spend time in closed comment sections like LGM and Making Light trying to understand the little tests and exercises everybody performs on each other with varying competitive degrees of intellectual complexity or emotional blackmail.
Are you with me/us or against me/us? Are you one of us or the Other?
"Cynical' barely approaches it. Psychoanalytic might be closer to where I really am.
Watching NickS vs politicalfootball currently. Who's the Real Racist* there?
the issuance of the ticket was complete
I don't think it was. He was up to the window but AFAICT he never hands it to her. Can he order her out of the car just to complete the paperwork? Mimms says yes.
Mostly whats dumb though is citing legal opinion that's pretty widely held by people who study this stuff for a living and having it characterized as "desperately splitting hairs to avoid admitting the obvious".
If the cop who shot Tamir Rice is an inexcusable aberration, I don't have to think anything bad about police generally. If what he did is a legitimate mistake by good policing standards, the police are terrifying.
Agreed. But I don't think anyone here, including GSwift, thinks that the Tamir Rice shooting was anything other than an inexcusable aberration. The only dispute (if there is one) between sane people is whether the shooting under current law is (or sunder some hypothetical law* should be ) criminal murder. Everyone agrees that what the cops did was terrifying and should never be part of any responsible police practice.
*(My own view, not that anyone asked, is (a) that administrative review, not criminal justice, is the best place for meeting out these kinds of reforms, but also (b) that "homicide via gross negligence in policing" should be a separate, defined crime with a much shorter sentence than regular-law murder, with the crime defined as a "homicide that was the reasonably foreseeable consequence of a gross deviation from the standard of care applicable to an ordinary police officer, including the officer's role in creating the situation that led to an unnecessary use of force." I think that both the Rice case and certainly Garner would have been easily prosecutable under that standard. IMO Garner should have been prosecutable negligent homicide anyway under any current standard, but that would have made it even easier. Rice is difficult under current law because of the decision by courts to limit the use of force analysis to the seconds before the use of force and to ignore the officers' role in negligently or recklessly creating the situation that led to an unnecessary use of force.)
Can he order her out of the car just to complete the paperwork? Mimms says yes.
No, it doesn't. Mimms says he can order her out of the car for safety reasons, not whimsically. His judgment about safety reasons is not going to be inquired into closely by the courts, but where safety isn't what's going on at all (and I haven't seen any argument that it was), Mimms doesn't justify it.
A Mimms defense might work -- if he were in court on charges, and claimed that, after getting almost all the way through the stop with her in the car, he suddenly felt he had some safety reason to need her out of the car, a court might buy that. But it would plainly be bullshit.
Mostly whats dumb though is citing legal opinion that's pretty widely held by people who study this stuff for a living
Appealing to unidentified authority doesn't look all that strong from over here.
This one guy I know says it's fine.
As others have said, literally everything done on Unfogged is a gigantic pointless waste of time by definition,
This is not true, not unless you hold some weird ethically-saintly beliefs about how human beings should spend their time. It's just that, like the poet, I hate repetition. (And was all that a waste of time, I ask you?!)
114: Everyone agrees that what the cops did was terrifying and should never be part of any responsible police practice.
This is kind of the disconnect -- it's a tone argument either way. You're worried that people outraged about overpolicing are breaking down trust in police in a way that makes underpolicing more likely. I'm worried that overzealous defense of police officers (not by their own attorneys, who can be as zealous as they like, but in the public sphere generally) will make people believe that their options are to accept terrifying police behavior as a legitimate norm, or to be completely alienated from the police.
E.g., the defense of the police in the Freddie Gray incident was that they were following ordinary procedures and weren't doing anything wrong when they put him unsecured in the back of a van and drove in a way that left him so badly injured he died of it. If that's correct, then the ordinary procedures the police are allowed to follow are the sort of thing that lead to putting a healthy man into a van and taking a dying man out of it. Emotionally, my options there are to reject the defense or be terrified of the police.
Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard heard, but I think...
109: Nick, in prior comments 88 and 99, I quote the author to supply her view of what she was saying.
To the extent that you provide quotes, you offer nothing inconsistent with the quotes that I provide. The author doesn't contradict herself.
Sure, some of her sentences would work in the article you wish she had written, but she didn't write that article.
Mimms says he can order her out of the car for safety reasons, not whimsically
I'm posting from a phone so I won't be copy and pasting the relevant decisions but go read the Mimms decision along withe subsequent cases Maryland v Wilson and Brendlin v California. On a traffic stop the police can order you out of your car without reasonable suspicion and they don't have to tell you why. I'm not saying it's always a good idea but that's the law.
Appealing to unidentified authority doesn't look all that strong from over here.
I linked to Seth Stoughton at TPM and off the top of my head I know I've seen similar from Peter Moskos and Orin Kerr.
122: There's no point in belaboring this too much. Other than Bob I suspect we're boring everybody, so I'll try to make a simple reply.
109: Nick, in prior comments 88 and 99, I quote the author to supply her view of what she was saying.
You take her position to be self-evident, whereas I think it requires some interpretation. Let's look at the paragraph that we've both cited in defense of our respective positions.
I thought about my mother's words a few days ago while watching video of 21-year-old Otto Warmbier, another man from Ohio who last week was convicted of subversion for stealing a propaganda banner in North Korea, and sentenced to 15 years hard labor. Just as in Fay's case, I was shocked by the severity of the punishment. I've tried to imagine spending a decade and a half performing what the North Korean state deems hard labor and I can't. But I'm not 11 anymore, and now, my mother's callous reaction to Micahel Fay's sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
She says two potentially contradictory things in that paragraph. First that she was shocked by the severity of the punishment and can't imagine what that would be like. Second that her reaction was, approximately "That's what the hell he gets. Good for him!" We have to reconcile those two different statements. I think the way that we get there is to say that she is reporting her indifference to somebody else's suffering as commentary on the way in which her experience of an unjust world has shaped her.
You, I presume, either think that the comments about being shocked by the severity of the punishment are just rhetorical cover or you think that any point that she's making about the unjustness of the world isn't enough to warrant her indifference. Is that an accurate description of how you feel? If so, I'm happy to leave it there. I don't know that there's use in arguing our positions any further.
If I'm not reading you accurately than I would be curious to know if you think that, as readers, there's a tension within that paragraph that needs to be resolved, and how you resolve it.
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As an aside, can I just say how utterly depressing it is to see what North Carolina's government has turned into? We have crashed through the Alabama/Mississippi floor, with no end in sight.
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125: this is what you get for making fun of California five or six years ago. More seriously, it absolutely sucks to live through that kind of soul-crushing bullshit. I hope it gets better before too terribly long.
Unfortunately, we are gerrymandered within an inch of our lives and are consequently probably stuck with these assholes until 2022 at the earliest.
Banter with friends isn't a waste of time.
Hey, how about this: http://missoulian.com/one-star-yellowstone-national-park-reviews/collection_0f87dfc2-f125-11e5-8e57-839deb83106c.html#15
Gswift, I've read Mimms. Caselaw saying that a police officer does not have to articulate a reason for ordering a motorist out of a car, does not stand for the proposition that ordering a motorist out of a car renders the conduct of the police officer as a whole unquestionable, particularly where the policy underlying Mimms -- the protection of the safety of the officer -- patently doesn't apply.
Mimms and its progeny would certainly form part of any legal analysis of the situation, but as I said in my first post on the issue, that doesn't mean that Rodriguez, prohibiting a police officer from unnecessarily prolonging a stop beyond the time necessary for the completion of the legitimate police business, doesn't apply. Your contemptuous dismissal of a discussion of how Rodriguez applies to the facts of Bland's case as completely off point really is not well supported.
On a traffic stop the police can order you out of your car without reasonable suspicion and they don't have to tell you why. I'm not saying it's always a good idea but that's the law.
Right, but that doesn't contradict what LB said about Mimms. Mimms held that on a traffic stop the police can order a driver out of the car for safety concerns, and they don't need to point to objective facts to justify those concerns (i.e. no need for reasonable suspicion). Maryland v. Wilson just extended the rule to passengers. Brendlin characterizes the holding of Mimms as allowing officers to "order a passenger out of the car as a precautionary measure, without reasonable suspicion", but does not endorse ordering drivers out of the car whimsically. As LB said, as a practical matter police can order people out of the car for any (or no) reason and there's no remedy because a court won't look behind a subsequent assertion that it was precautionary, but if the order was in fact not precautionary (or otherwise reasonable), Mimms et al. don't make it lawful. (And of course the facts of Mimms were completely different: the case involved an officer who routinely ordered drivers out of the car at the beginning of the traffic stop, concededly as a safety precaution; not an officer who felt perfectly safe for the first n minutes, but suddenly became overcome with safety concerns in the last few milliseconds before he handed over a warning.)
124: Yeah, you're seeing her as contradictory, but you don't identify a contradiction. It's perfectly consistent to say that N. Korea's behavior is shocking, and that Warmbier's is more so.
For the portion you quoted, the tool you need is Jim's Rule of Buts -- linked here by ogged.
The rest of the piece backs the interpretation suggested by the Rule of Buts.
In 87 you say this, and you repeat something similar in 124:
She's using her own reaction to demonstrate the emotional costs of living in an unequal and unjust society.
But she never expresses any ambivalence about her feelings - no sense that they are unjustified -- unless, as you seem to think, it's ambivalent to acknowledge that N. Korea's actions were nearly as shocking as Warmbier's.
She doesn't talk wistfully about when she was 11 years old and not yet corrupted by the world. She talks about when she was young and unable to comprehend her mother's valid point.
Had she wanted to write your essay, she could have. She could talk about how her feelings are inevitable and natural, even if they are unjust or unhealthy or unwise or whatever. That seems to be how you feel about her, but you're imposing your view on her.
You say she demonstrates the emotional costs of her experience -- and you may be right -- but that isn't how she views it.
129 and 130 are totally right as analyses of the law, but as 130 recognizes, as a practical matter a cop can order someone out of a car during a traffic stop on the absolute barest of figleafs as to "safety" and there's no available remedy at all. And Rodriguez doesn't alter the analysis because the ordering out of the car is "legitimate" under that case, so the detention isn't "over" while that's going on. So everyone commenting here comes out in about the same place on the law as a practical matter no matter what. Unless the cop is ready to admit that his ordering out of the car was 100% whimsical and had no basis at all in any legitimate safety concern, ordering Bland out of the car was "legal" in the sense of "would be upheld in a court and not found to violate any law."* Am I missing something?
*this absolutely does not mean that it was good policing, should not violate any policy, or that the law as it currently exists is awesome or makes sense at all. All I'm saying is that there's way less difference than there might appear at first sight between GSwift and the rest on the legal analysis.
**I have not followed the facts of the Bland case at all and may be missing something big.
I'm worried that overzealous defense of police officers (not by their own attorneys, who can be as zealous as they like, but in the public sphere generally) will make people believe that their options are to accept terrifying police behavior as a legitimate norm, or to be completely alienated from the police.
Yes, this is totally fair and accurate.
IMO the key and the solution is to move the conversation about correcting police misbehavior away from criminal law and towards norms -- imposing good practices on the police as an administrative matter and public policy matter. The right answer can't be that police officers are immune from consequence for terrifying behavior. It can't be that at all. But at the same time the laws imposing criminal liability for conduct will always distinguish between conduct by the police and conduct by non-police. This is necessary for policing -- police simply can't be liable for assault or homicides in the way that ordinary citizens are. Even if you think current law is too police-protective (and I do), this will always be the case under any reasonable criminal law regime. You have to square the circle of necessary consequences for crappy policing and limits on criminal liability.
Put more simply, there has to be room to say "that was terrible policing and the officer should be fired or punished. But it wasn't a crime." Making that distinction is important for good policing and is the only way forward.
Or, another way of saying it is that we need to figure out ways to have people not accept terrifying police behavior as a legitimate norm, and also not be completely alienated from the police.
Fortunately there are a lot of people working on these issues, many of them, fortunately, in police departments.
IANAFAL, but reading the decisions right now convinces me that Mimms is bullshit -- the dissenters are right -- and Brendlin is pretty well written.
Another pet peeve of mine is the constitutionalization of all of this law. It was probably necessary in the context of Southern states and the civil rights movement, where it arose. The South wasn't going to police its police so the federal courts had to. But the result is a tendency of police departments, officers, courts, and Legislatures to assume that the constitutional minimum for police conduct is the only relevant standard. That if the constitution isn't violated there's no violation at all, or need for a remedy. And that judges in general and the US Supreme Court in particular should be tasked with establishing the micro-rules for legitimate police practice. That's a bizarre and unnecessary system.
We need intermediate standards for police conduct that's punishable (even if not criminally) or actionable (even if not in a civil suit for damages) but that's still constitutional.
Had she wanted to write your essay, she could have. She could talk about how her feelings are inevitable and natural, even if they are unjust or unhealthy or unwise or whatever. That seems to be how you feel about her, but you're imposing your view on her.
Uggh, that sounds awful (or, rather, that sort of essay has a place, but would be very different). I don't claim to be speaking for her, in my descriptions of the essay, I'm trying to explicate my understanding of it, and how I'm responding to it.
I will say this, part of my reading is based on my sense of context, and that's entirely inference on my part. I don't know anything about LaSha or the Kinfolk Kollective, but just based on the design of the website it looks like a fairly small scale personal blog. Here's why that matters. If somebody had written the exact same piece in Slate I would have agreed with you completely, that it was offensive grandstanding. Because writing that in Slate would have been intentionally provocative.
Writing on a personal blog in which most of the readers presumably know her and know where she's coming from . . . there's absolutely no need to spell everything out.
It's possible that I'm being too generous in my interpretation, but I also don't feel like I'm having to work at it either, it was, legitimately, how it struck me on a first read, and I wasn't bothered by the fact that it is callous because . . it's her blog.
125-127: It's so fucking awful--practically excluding trans people from public places. And calling a special session to legislate it quickly. Pure garbage.
And I'm mildly afraid, given the composition of our legislature, that it could happen here. (Although having a Democratic governor is a relief.)
I guess I'm also convinced that gswift is right about Mimms: once a lawful stop is made, the additional instruction to get out of the car is such a de minimis intrusion on the driver's rights, that it's ok even without any hint of danger in the specific case. I don't see anything in Mimms that make the cop's motive or subjective intent relevant in any way.
A bullshit decision, made without briefing or argument.
AISIANAFAL.
Could we also use some more concept of, what would you call it, contributory negligent manslaughter? From the description of the shooting of Tamir Rice, it seems like the driver rolling up so super-close also bore a measure of responsibility in creating a situation where Loehmann could later semi-plausibly say he had no choice but to shoot, but our system doesn't really account for that.
Mimms: also bullshit since the guy had already served his time.
141 --- agree. See 114.3. Or don't, if you don't want to.
114.2: that "homicide via gross negligence in policing" should be a separate, defined crime with a much shorter sentence than regular-law murder, with the crime defined as a "homicide that was the reasonably foreseeable consequence of a gross deviation from the standard of care applicable to an ordinary police officer, including the officer's role in creating the situation that led to an unnecessary use of force."
Ah, good to see a lawyer giving voice to my so far unvoiced here (I think) thoughts on this. It seems, as with military law, that there needs to be a some sanctions/rules that take into account the murky areas that the duties specifically put an individual into.
I don't really understand why the courts can't just look at decision to roll up so close and say that was negligent or reckless conduct for a trained police officer.
Also I think I have some strong common law* distaste for giving state agents a different set of defences than members of the public.
* word specifically chosen to word Halford up, not a claim about the actual law.
What if it was only for assaults, but not homicides? You know, enough to fuck someone up, but not end their life. A sort of license to ill.
Under common law, you can end up married to somebody you never married if you don't cross your fingers every time you have sex with them.
In the common law justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: actual, modern legislatures and vaguely literate pig farmers from pre-modern Sussex. These are their stories.
Round every other corner stands PC 1984.
This place needs less micro-litigation and more 149.
129, 130: Late coming back, but Tigre and Charlie already beat me to it.
114.3, *(My own view, not that anyone asked, is (a) that administrative review, not criminal justice, is the best place for meeting out these kinds of reforms
I think this is totally right, and as I've mentioned before, the real action here is with the state police councils having the power to revoke an officer's certification. It's being done now in some states and is absolutely something that can be accomplished legislatively in the states that aren't. This paper is a bit old now but covers the subject pretty well.
http://www.aele.org/revocation-slu.html
that makes me glad gswift is still willing to get involved in these discussions, despite the pushback he always gets
Yeah, this. I don't always agree with gswift (who is absolutely not a right wing troll), but I appreciate his perspective, and I appreciate his willingness to continue to engage.
Also, my baby sister is a cop in an economically depressed, post-industrial city outside of Toronto. Some of the stories she tells would really curl your toes. She has a permanent, lifelong eye injury, thanks to a crazy methhead beaming a TV remote at her face (which caused a corneal abrasion). Just a routine call, that was.
128 is a very important point
"Warning: trails are not flat"
152: No, Tigre agrees with 129/130 that not every order to get out of the car is lawful, but as a practical matter the unlawful orders can't be remedied. That's a meaningful difference, to me at least. Carp reads Mimms more broadly than I do. It doesn't hold that getting out of the car is a de minimis injury and thus no violation, full stop: it's that it's de minimis in relation to legitimate safety concerns. If lower courts are reading that bit out (which wouldn't surprise me), they're doing something that Mimms doesn't require--certainly in the broader Fourth Amendment context, a violation isn't rendered lawful simply because the injury is de minimis.
I'm not going to go through the 3000+ cases that cite Mimms, but I'd be surprised if there aren't a few factual-outlier cases that recognize this. (Just to make one up: if a camera caught a cop ordering a woman out of the car "so I can get a better look at your tits", would Mimms really require a court to shrug on the Fourth Amendment question if the officer later mumbled something about safety?)
But agree totally with 135 and especially 136. I'm just being a lawyerly little bitch about what Mimms really stands for.
If after she got out of the car, he noticed a bulge and discovered it was an illegal gun? If in getting out, she dropped a bag of cocaine on the ground? Not getting suppressed, my friend.
"Teacher said I had to bring enough for everybody."
157: I don't doubt it; and the fact that this issue essentially only comes up in a suppression context means that the cases are going to be unrepresentative of a range of factual situations. Nobody's going to litigate a 1983 claim for nominal damages just for being unlawfully ordered out of a car and then sent on their way a few minutes later. Still doesn't make it lawful.
1983 claim
"Big Brother is listening to you when you talk really loudly."
(I'm currently briefing an argument that a particular affirmative defense has been waived in a case. Assuming it would have been a complete bar, if appropriately raised, one could use the word "lawful" in a way that I don't like, and I suppose the other guy will . . .)
159: Which is exactly what makes the Bland situation interesting about the interaction between Mimms and Rodriguez. Under Mimms, he is allowed to order her out of the car without giving a reason, and there's almost never going to be a sympathetic set of facts that encourages looking into what his real reason is that will lead to litigation, because the suppression context is by definition unsympathetic. Under Rodriguez, he's not allowed to extend the stop unnecessarily.
So, he's at the point where the only remaining bit of legitimate business is for him to hand her the ticket and say she's free to go. Instead, he orders her out of the car. Is that lawful under Mimms, because he doesn't have to give a reason? Or unlawful under Rodriguez, because ordering her out of the car at that point is an unlawful delay in bringing the stop to an end? The policy argument of Mimms is gone -- there's no plausible way to interpret the order as being about his safety: to use Mimms, you have to think of it as an absolute rule, without regard to the surrounding context. Rodriguez, on the other hand... this really does look like an extension of the stop past any legitimate law enforcement purpose, and it certainly led to significant damages to her, in a context where there wasn't any underlying preexisting violation of law (in the way that there always is on suppression contexts).
I don't know how a court would handle it, but I think it's a tossup.
(And what Tigre said about how it's bullshit that the two conceptual categories here are unconstitutional and just fine, no problem.)
there's no plausible way to interpret the order as being about his safety
This is where I think we're diverging. The bar for that order being tossed as illegal is so high it might as well not be in sight. In this case in particular he walks up, notices she's agitated, asks her about it, etc. Ordering a visibly agitated subject out of the car to complete the ticket isn't within a country mile of an illegal order and by extension Rodriguez isn't on the table.
Gswift, I also wanted to chime in with others and say I appreciate your perspective in these general discussions of police encounters that end badly. Even if you're grumpy.
I think where we're diverging is the difference between 'plausible' and 'I have complete faith that the bar is so high that no court will ever think critically about genuine plausibility.'
Also, my understanding is that what was necessary to 'complete the ticket' was to 'hand her the ticket and leave', at which point the legality of the order to exit the car is very arguably beside the point under Rodriguez. There are lots of things that a police officer can do while interacting with you that are not unlawful in themselves, but are not a license to detain you unnecessarily.
FWLIW, the teenager who was caned in Singapore, several months following, was treated for burns incurred in huffing butane.
166: Am I the only one who thinks caning sounds like a much more reasonable penalty than jail for some crimes? I know I'd rather have that than jail time if I did something dumb (depending on details like healthcare and such).
The ex-cop/sociologist Swift namechecked above, Moskos, wrote a whole book about it.
By the way, LB, any thoughts about the Peter Liang story?
I don't care much? I'm glad he was indicted and convicted -- while I doubt he meant to kill anyone, holding a gun in such a way that your response to being startled is to aim and fire at the thing that startled you is properly regarded as criminal, in my eyes. But it's kind of a sui generis situation, so I don't feel the need for him to do jail time out of fairness.
I wouldn't need to argue with someone who was outraged by the leniency, though. That seems like a legit reaction as well.
164: I'm not grumpy godamnit! Well, at least no more than usual. But I do appreciate the sentiments from you all.
I echo the g(rumpy)swift-positive sentiments, and would even get behind locking up people who drive too fast and have DUIs, if only because it would mean filling up jails with BMW-driving lawyers.
131
It's perfectly consistent to say that N. Korea's behavior is shocking, and that Warmbier's is more so.
That's not at all how I read her post. Warmbier's behavior wasn't shocking to her at all, because he was a "cis male white guy" and it's exactly what she thinks such people do all the time and get away with it, unless they are in NK. This is, of course, a reductive and ridiculous view. CMWGs don't always do such stuff, and don't always get away with it. Going to NK as a tourist is not necessarily a stupid risk, either, though it is increasingly a risk as they escalate their latest bids for attention. Warmbier was probably ignorant and/or drunk, and NK is always looking for excuses to raise a stink. If NK had sentenced him to a month in jail with hard labor most people wouldn't have blinked, assuming the video of him isn't fake: they are getting better and better at that, presumably from lots of practice inserting KJU into places and events he wasn't present at.
In the case mentioned in 166, I would guess that the caning sentence, even though it was an internet sensation, was so because it was caning, rather than jail time or a heavy fine. No one was saying that because of CWMG privilege the teenager shouldn't have been punished.
I think the author was straining to view the situation through a "check your privilege" lens when it doesn't apply.
Stealing signs from hotels is something we (white guys) all do and get away with.
They do. That would be a great place for a 3/5ths compromise.
it's exactly what she thinks such people do all the time and get away with it, unless they are in NK. This is, of course, a reductive and ridiculous view.
She's not the only person who thinks that.
It seems small, but we broke all the rules and had a fun time. . . . Don't break the laws. Don't kill people. Don't steal. But most other rules can be bent.
Not everybody agreed with me at the time. I don't think it's accurate that people do it all the time, but it happens a lot, and it isn't ridiculous for her to say that.*
* I'd argue that it's not ridiculous for her to say that even if it isn't true about Warmbier specifically but, again, not everyone's going to agree with that.