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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

This guy was really asking for trouble when he went ballistic on an FBI agent, from the article:

he sent an agent 80 increasingly overheated messages in 10 days. In one, he declared, “Just remember whatever ends up happening to you … You deserved it,” and added an expletive.

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Valid reason to arrest him. Not a valid reason to sit in prison for 14 months, with no due process, trial, etc.

Edit: Also, to me, the context is fairly clear that the "threat" of "whatever ends up happening to you" is talking about the potential embarrassment or career consequences to the agent around ignoring advice that might save some hostage. He was (incorrectly) convinced he was trying to save lives, and frustrated that nobody would take him seriously.

Just to be clear: he was in prison for a portion of his detention, after being arrested for making the threat and being informed by his mother that he was armed. He was then moved to involuntary psychiatric commitment.

The article is unclear on the amount of time he spent in each kind of detention, but gives the strong impression --- by marking time in terms of psychiatric evaluations --- that most of it was spent in psychiatric inpatient detention.

>>most of it was spent in psychiatric inpatient detention

Apparently, mostly because extremely important information needed to make a serious psychological evaluation wasn't made available to the medical people doing those evaluations.

See this image from the article: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/04/24/us/24salesman-psy... They finally got the information on his 3rd eval, which is what led to his release. All charges were dropped at that point.

Maybe. But the documents make a pretty compelling case for mental illness, because they also indicate that he expected to talk to the President about freeing Kayla Mueller, and became unhinged after she died. Lopez's grandiose claims about his connections to ISIS were in fact fictional --- it looks like he was being set up for an advance-fee scam.

None of this is meant to excuse the criminal mental health care system in the US, which is, I think, criminal.

I think it took over a year in Lopez's case because pretty much nobody gives a shit about people in this system.

It always find it surprising that Americans say they have the right to own guns but whenever something else goes wrong, owning or carrying a gun seems to cause massively greater punishment. Shouldn't it be illegal to discriminate against people based on gun ownership? Otherwise it's kind of restricting people's freedom to own guns.

Modern leadership prefers "nudges" to outright bans.

That's why you just do whatever law enforcement says and be kind and deferential to them at all times. They're literally above the law.

Not sure if sarcasm.

Having experience with the legal system, definitely not sarcasm.

Not sure if using Reddit style "questioning" or "asking" is right thing to do on HN.

No it's not sarcasm. Law enforcement privileges tend to breed abuse.

I meant more the part that we should be deferential, rather than try to influence politicians to make law enforcement not be above the law.

I don't think you should be deferential to politicians, not legislators anyway. I think you should be deferential to law enforcement. If you're talking about current term executive branch politicians then I guess I would include them too if they are in law enforcement.

Depends on the country.

> Valid reason to arrest him. Not a valid reason to sit in prison for 14 months, with no due process, trial, etc.

I remember when the NDAA passed for the first time in the budget bill, Obama said it would not actually be used to keep people indefinitely in prison with no trial. In reality, the government has already been doing that to people, even before the NDAA passed, and now the NDAA just represents legal cover.

Kind of how they repealed the law that said the US government can't use propaganda on US soil, and now they can also do that in one way or another (either through the MSM or through Internet psyops).

No portion of the detainee provisions of the NDAA were at play in this case:

* Lopez wasn't part of al Qaeda or involved in the 9/11 attacks.

* Lopez wasn't apprehended by the US military.

* Lopez wasn't detained "under the laws of war".

* Lopez wasn't held in military custody.

Which was the major reason to arrest him in the first place.

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