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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

This going to be an unpopular opinion I'm sure, but maybe if you are a judge who holds the power to literally destroy lives on a whim with your judgements, you should be fully accountable for those actions. And yes, maybe this means having your personal information public for all to see.

If you make a shitty judgement and destroy someone's life and you end up getting targeted as a result, then maybe you shouldn't have made an unjust judgment and destroyed someone's life. Your judgements should have weight, and shouldn't be made lightly.

Maybe if there was more personal accountability in our justice system then the American judicial system would stop focusing so much on prison profitability and punishment, and would start focusing more on positive concepts like rehabilitation and social support structures?

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> If you make a shitty judgement and destroy someone's life and you end up getting targeted as a result, then maybe you shouldn't have made an unjust judgment and destroyed someone's life. Your judgements should have weight, and shouldn't be made lightly.

In regards to woman's son's death, this is entirely victim blaming. What judgement did she make that destroyed someone's life? What did she do that warranted her son being killed?

I think your opinion is valid to have. Mistakes are made that nobody would ever want to suffer from and regardless if the victims gain financial freedom from the mistakes (that rarely happens).

Realistically, I don't believe Judges will ever face real consequences and what's more probable is the system adapting towards lesser punishing modals. Also providing the ability to expunge records completely and universal income for criminals unable to obtain a job after their release. The punishment for a crime shouldn't be unemployment/homelessness for life.

There are other professions such as in the medical field that can really damage a persons life as well. Not everyone has the money to sue or even win a malpractice case and lawyers won't always take a victim's case as pro bono. Persons severely wronged, deeply need a way to feel some remedy and or we will continue to see vengeance outbursts. Especially from persons that see others being remedied for what they believe was much lesser in comparison to what happened in their own situation and where they constantly think the only reason they're not obtaining a remedy is from grossly unfairer situations they're in because of the wrong that happened in the past.

I think the foregoing is similar to why there are so many school shooters in USA. People need a remedy from being wronged and sadly all we have is a remedy system for the fairly well off. That also caters once in a while to someone that isn't so well off.

It's crucial be able to hold government officials accountable. However, I think your argument is based on the premise that people only decide to kill others as a result of a carefully reasoned decision. This is not the case. There are plenty of legitimate ways one can take action after being wronged by the government, from appealing to a higher court to going to the media; killing people is not one of these.

People who kill others in situations like these rarely come to their decision based on fact and rationality. As much as we need more accountability, putting government officials - or anyone else - in a potentially life-threatening situation at a time where armed terrorists regularly make death threats based on baseless conspiracies is not a good way to do that.

What if you make a fair judgment and still destroy someone's life? Should they still come to your house and kill your child, or is that only allowed if it was an unjust ruling? Who decides if the ruling was just or not?

They have what you're advocating over in Mexico, where a judge that rules against the cartel can expect to be killed the same day.

Judicial elections are an option for accountability, setting up judges to be gunned down is not.

Judicial elections are also problematic - we've seen what lobbyists can do to Congress, and there's no reason to expect them to be more tame in a scenario where the Judiciary is also elected.

Nobody disagrees with holding judges accountable but from the context, what you're advocating for sounds like a blood feud and we all know how those tend to turn out.

The guy who did it is a lawyer whose case hadn’t even come before this judge yet.

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