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Comment by ifdefdebug | Hacker News Reader

How does such an attorney and judge feel after such a trial? Do they feel satisfied, fulfilled? Taking away 5 years of someone's life over a little mistake that didn't hurt anyone? I don't get it: why does a free people like the Americans allow for that kind of sinister figures to be their prosecutors and judges?

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>How does such an attorney and judge feel after such a trial?

They feel ecstatic. They won. The good guys won again, yay! You have a 10oz pot brownie (with a very small amount of mj in it), that's distribution amounts, 30 years in jail for you. Yay! The good guys won again.

* I see I have downvoters... Maybe you don't believe me? I've been working around both the prosecution and defense for around 20 years now, have many family members that work for law enforcement and judges. This is exactly how many of them think.

Even from the outside this is obviously true. They consider themselves the good guys by definition, because they see themselves as representing justice, as defined by the criminal code. A noble calling. Once you accept that, pure job performance (convictions) becomes an easy metric. The thought of ruining some individual's (or family's) life over recreational amounts of pot is either justified or compartmented away. Or like aaronsw...once the prosecutors are on it, there's no more question of proportion or actual justice, it's a matter of looking for the conviction.

Edit: I want to amend this a bit. It is something of a noble calling. In a better world, the executive legal function could depend a lot more on legislative and judicial functions to produce a criminal code that served justice better, and just worry about prosecuting what they can according to the law. But in so many cases now, the law is an ass.

I think you have downvoters not because people don't believe you, but because there still are people who believe people you sarcastically ridiculed as "good guys" are actually good guys.

In the meantime a (white) woman in a different district was given a stern talking to for deliberately voting on behalf of her dead mother.

She was contrite and acknowledged the severity of her crime, we got her sentence reduced! Good guy wins again!

For me, it's impossible to respect these professions (prosecutor, police, and to a major extent, judges) or any of the people in it. They throw around words like "justice" and "fair" without having a single clue as to what they mean. Maybe one day, they'll be the ones on the other side of the bars for the cruelty and harm they've caused to society. This kind of simple minded "good vs. bad" thinking or "I'm just doing my job" thinking has no place in any legal system and certainly not in any justice system. [Insert comparison to Nazis "just doing their job" here because after all, we have a few million people locked up, most of them for no reason.]

Prosecutors are zealously committed to convict, Texas has some pretty infamous wrongful convictions. https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-innocent-man-part-... Rick Perry had a death sentence carried out in spite of exonerating evidence - it turned out most of Texas arson investigators were trained incorrectly. https://www.innocenceproject.org/cameron-todd-willingham-wro...

Do you notice the color of the woman's skin? There you go.

voting while black. Or poor. Rephrasing that old saying - steal a vote and you get 5 years in prison, steal an election and you get to be the President.

I would assume that if they had doubts about the job they would change careers. So I would guess that either they feel like she’s an unfortunate victim of an imperfect system that works correctly in other cases, or that she must be guilty of something else but that something else was never discovered.

Currently there is a lawsuit to overturn life sentences for juvenile offenders. One of the leaders in that movement is a judge who gave a teenage murderer a life sentence with the comment “I feel the same thing you felt for your victims: nothing.” She doesn’t admit to having changed her mind on harsh punishment in general, but based her change of heart on new scientific beliefs about how morally developed teenagers are.

It may also be worth noting that judges in Texas are elected, not appointed, the same way as any other politician.

I agree that the exact level of punishment may be disproportionate, but where do you get "hurt no one"? An invalid vote cancels a valid one. Is disenfranchisement not a big deal anymore?

Her vote was provisional and removed on review:

"Ultimately, her vote didn’t even count. Provisional ballots are subject to review, which ultimately led to an investigation of Mason."

Why should criminals be denied representation? Does committing a crime suddenly make you no longer human?

Right, I can understand arguments for "you shouldn't lose the vote in that case", but that's a separate issue from "given that her vote wasn't valid, she was disenfranchising someone".

And "no franchise" does not imply "not human", unless you're saying that every country should allow foreigners to vote in their election or else they're deeming them non-human.

this seems to be devolving to word games. your use of the word "hurt" appears to be quite distinct from how "hurt" seemed to be used by the op.

It's not a word game; it's progressed into forcing the OP into clarifying why disenfranchisement can be such an atrocity but not "hurting" in any relevant sense, or (if I understand you) why all non-physical crimes should have some really low cap on punishment. Seems like progress to me, and unlike a word game.

Why is it "invalid" vote?

Setting aside whether or not the law is a good one (which is also worthy of discussion), in some jurisdictions people convicted of felonies are not allowed to vote. A vote cast by someone who is not allowed to is in that sense invalid.

Not only that, her children would lose a mother for a few more years.

Easy. This woman was black.

And I'm only half joking here. There's a similar case where a white woman purposely tried to impersonate her mother so that she could vote for Trump twice, and she was not charged.

Vote fraud is an extremely serious crime in a democracy.

This is probably the least serious vote fraud imaginable. It's not at all obvious that depriving any citizen the right to vote is ethical or constitutional.

You're thinking under the assumption that there's no corruption in the judicial system, and also that every judge and jury and attorney intend to act for the good of every individual person, rather than for some other agenda. That's the kind of naivety I had too. That's not how the world works. The world is a horrifyingly evil place.

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