Judge Orders Los Angeles Times to Delete Part of Published Article

Not all child rapists are the same. If an eighteen-year-old has consensual sex with a seventeen-year-old, technically they have "raped a child". And yes, over zealous prosecutors do prosecute cases like this. There are people on the offender registry convicted of distributing child pornography because they sent someone a nude selfie when they were a teenager.

That's a non-sequitor if Ive seen one.

Sure theres no argument with someone who aims at pre-pubescent children. But those laws have themselves been perverted so that even a single picture between 2 17 year olds is this horrible felony that ends up ruining 2 lives.

So yeah, its time to quit this Scarlet Letter for most "sex crimes" - cause its a gross miscalculation of justice and law.

I am using 'X' to represent a conviction for a crime. I am using 'X' because I don't want anyone to think that I am condoning or justifying any particular crime.

1. How would someone else know that the person did X?

2. What if that crime had nothing had bearing on the position?

3. What about the concept of a sentence representing the 'complete payment to society'? Denying someone the ability to make a living turns a finite sentence into an indefinite sentence.

For me,

1. If someone was guilty of embezzlement, this would be relevant (positive or negative) if the position involving money handling (cashier, or accounting) - but not relevant if the position was social work.

2. If the person was guilty of stalking, a position that would allow access to customers' PII would be problematic.

I think it's the same thing that prevents you from not hiring someone because of the color of their skin. You open yourself up to being sued. And if you paid an investigation company money in order to get a sealed criminal background on an individual and then don't hit them that's pretty good evidence you were using that as a hiring decision.

There are still limits in the US. You have to promise that you’ve never been a member of a communist party on entry. It wouldn’t be wise to talk about bombs near an airport, or tweet about killing the president when he’s visiting your city. People who say controversial things, write controversial articles, or make controversial films tend to get detained and questioned at the border a lot, get harassed, and get their devices confiscated.

Absolute freedom of speech doesn’t really exist anywhere. The US is probably one of the most liberal countries on earth when it comes to policing it, but it’s not like anyone can say anything.

Yeah but it hasn’t over turned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnais_v._Illinois

As usual, it depends on how you measure

It’s a hodge podge in the US

This all says nothing about the tacit control given to corps to control the work we undertake, thus controlling conversations we are allowed 40+ hours of week (the bulk of our waking life).

Or how Citizens United is enabling purchasing and pushing speech of a certain kind which we can see modifies people.

“Who controls the past controls the future.”

“The best books tell you what you know already.”

“War is peace.”

American is living those quotes and has been for decades.

I understand, my point is that freedom of speech is complicated and not so black and white.

At that point, you've spent a fair amount of money onboarding the employee, and they'd likely be eligible to file for unemployment benefits. Even if there are no further repercussions under the "ban the box" regulations, it still tips the scale—at least a bit—toward reducing the friction for those with criminal records to obtain employment.

You prove it in court just like any other employment discrimination case. The law doesn't need to catch 100% of lawbreakers to work effectively.

It prevents computer-based application filtering.

They dont. Employees are continually screwed over by employers, and even so most people work in Employment At Will states - so its even harder to prove it was anything.

In a whole lot of countries this information is not readily publicly available in the first place, and privately publishing it means someone has violated the terms under which they were given access.

E.g. in the UK, to even be able to do a check to see if someone is barred from certain types of work, you are required to abide by a long list of terms which goes much further than merely not republishing the data. To request a less comprehensive check requires you to have a compelling need (a specific set of roles). The basic checks can only requested by the person they're about.

Violating the terms comes at the risk of no longer being able to do records check (among other consequences), which may force you to close down your business in the worst case.

Nothing prevents you from making a truthful record of history if you have the data, but lots of things act to prevent most attempts to publish them.

Do you believe it should be legal for companies to have terms that prevent you from working at a competing company in a similar industry. It is illegal to share much of the information you learn there as well. The big difference is that you aren't meticulously saving every piece of information for easy access at your new company and that you know you're breaking the law if you did share that information. Simply make it illegal to use the data after a certain amount of time and the problem will fix itself.

The paragraph before that mentions that it is often appeals courts who have protected the behavior, as various trial "...Judges have issued similar orders before..."

Incidentally, no one would wish to see the cop's family harmed, but it's not like this plea agreement came as a surprise to them, so they already had time to reorganize their lives for security. That makes the seal difficult to justify. Also, the risks they face are mostly due to the cop's actions.

Wow. Your circle of acquaintances must be strongly against freedom of speech, then.

You cannot create the Memory Hole by court order. LA Times has a constitutional right to print anything they obtain legally. They are not directly placing anyone's lives at risk by publishing.

If anything, they could publish another article about how slipshod security practices in the court system leak sensitive information to the public, and the court system tries to censor journalists rather than investigating and fixing their own problems.

The easiest way to protect the corrupt cop's family would have been to crack down on police corruption, so that no cop could get so deeply involved with a violent criminal organization that their family would ever be at risk. If the gangs couldn't get corrupt cops to cover for them, they would find it much more difficult to murder families for retaliation and intimidation.

Judging by Mexico's example, publishing may also put the journalists and their families at risk.

This is definitely shooting the messenger. In a system where doing that is illegal.

The judge is wrong, and should be reversed. Yesterday.

No, it's not. Or at least, it contains ...

> John Saro Balian, 45, pleaded guilty to one count each of soliciting a bribe, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators as part of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors. The document was ordered to be filed under seal but appeared on PACER, a public online database for court documents.

> According to the agreement, filed in U.S. District Court, Balian agreed to cooperate with federal authorities by responding truthfully and completely in interviews and court proceedings. He is scheduled to be sentenced in September, when prosecutors are expected to recommend a reduced sentence.

And it doesn't contain the "corrections" ...

> 5:15 p.m.: This story has been updated to remove references from the filed plea agreement, which was ordered sealed by a judge but publicly available Friday on the federal court’s online document database. The changes were made to comply with an order issued Saturday by a U.S. federal judge. The Times plans to challenge the order.

> 3:40 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from the Glendale police chief.

> This article was originally published at 10:55 a.m.

It is if you make a derived work.

> If judges make decisions which don't represent the mandate of their constituents, they can/should be removed.

This collapses separation of powers, is against the idea that "law" and "politics" are separate things, and paves the way for removing judges who don't support the views of the Party.

Just a clarification: federal judges (like the one in this article) are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress. They are not elected and do not have constituents in the same way elected officials do.

A judge is there to interpret the law, even if the outcome isn't what the majority of people would like. Politicians are there to sway with what the majority of people want.

Often, a lower court will be bound to make a particular judgment, because of precedent. It isn't unheard of for a judgment to say "We have to decide this way, but it would be really nice if this was appealed up to someone with the authority to decide the other way".

Especially when the DoJ says that fleeing domestic and gang violence are not grounds for asylum, it's ridiculous to consider the lives of a corrupt cop and his family above society, which this decision does.

> regulating speech that makes people uncomfortable does have a very provable slippery slope effect.

Yeah, I can tell you hate speech laws don't work well, since any group with an agenda can push for those laws to be used against the common good, or even injudicious application of it, such as we see in the GB, where a woman has been sentenced to community service for quoting song lyrics, or the moronic laws of my country that make the denial of the Holocaust illegal.

However, I'd argue that from a moral standpoint, these laws are even more reprehensible. Language (and thought) are how we test ideas, and when you start to limit that because they're the wrong kind of language or ideas, you limit not only our capability to discuss ideas, but also our ability to talk about these ideas, but also our ability to test them, and therefore, if it is really such a repugnant idea, find out the arguments for why it is so.

There are other reasons why I believe that hate speech is a toxic idea. For example: hate speech is a term used by the small-minded to shut down anything they don't agree with. Serious discussion on any contentious subject is immediately rendered moot by the new Godwin that is calling something hate speech.

There are middle grounds that also work well, like what Canada has.

It's got entrenched constitutional protections for freedom of expression which courts are willing to use to invalidate laws, but the same constitution explicitly allows certain limits on that freedom.

The balance isn't perfect, especially not as applied to most Canadian defamation laws (Quebec is a bit friendlier to defendants here). But it's pretty good and way better than the UK's lack of any restraint on Parliament's surveillance state tendencies.

1. No they haven’t

2. There are limitations of free speech in every country, including the US. It’s a matter of where the line is drawn.

Because they obeyed the court order and took it down, so obviously they didn't have to do any of that.

I really don't understand what you are expecting. If you disobey a court, you get punished. Why is that strange?

And the exile in an embassy thing was unrelated to any leaks, despite Assange desperately trying to make it as if it was.

Look, I supported Wikileaks goals at first, but then Assange tried to turn it into his personal PR firm, using the name "wiki" to try to make it as if it's some "for the public thing".