I feel like she's owed damages, not just dismissal.
What motivates a DA to charge someone with a felony over a VHS tape?
A similar situation is when DAs stack on extra charges for a crime. The addon charges almost never make sense to the actual crime too, it always reads more like a gotcha. It turns what should be a Class C misdemeanor into a Class A, extraordinary fines, and jail time.
The lack of accountability of public offices towards citizens is problematic. I think is a general apathy in government jobs. It doesn’t matter how incompetent you are, and how many people you hurt - you’ll never go “out of business,” tax payers will pay for your mistakes, and you won’t be held responsible for the impact of your actions. So why even try?
There ought to be some feedback loop that forces the public sector to improve itself.
There is. We live in a democracy. Work to elect better and more accountable officials. If none exist, consider running yourself.
Setting expectations of "don't like it? Well quit your job, give up 12 mo of your life to campaign and fix it yourself!" is not healthy for our society.
But this is by design since policy affects all.
Direct action matters, and to dismiss it as "not my responsibility" is shirking the entire point of democracy.
I have tried in the past as well. Political apathy is a very real, very dangerous vulnerability in our system of government, and is being exploited all the time.
The word "we" is pulling a lot of weight in that statement. All politics suffers a free rider problem. We'll fix it if we fix it, sure, but I don't have to be part of that.
Government was created by man. It's a good idea that where we can improve them mechanically, we should strive to do so. Same as is done for everything else created by man.
Imagine if kids in later life had to live with the a sense of guilt knowing that their parent could be in jail because the forgot to return a video tape they wanted to watch. Would make a now adult turn a whole childhood into latent anxiety worries and were does it end.
Not everyone is being slapped with the same charges.
We also have a special class of speeding ticket for a dumb “parkway” freeway that rich white people lobbied for and received a 45 mph speed limit by state constitutional amendment. Any ticket in this zone for speeding between 45-55 mph is a simple $100 fine that is not even recorded or reported to insurance. This means the speed limit is effectively 55 mph, and an easy way around the constitutional amendment.
This freeway is I35E between downtown St Paul, MN and Mendota Heights, MN.
"Tough on crime" sadly has a long and sordid history of similar convictions.
A VHS tape could quite well be a lot more expensive than you would expect. If the studio expected that a tape would be mostly rented by consumers rather than bought by consumers they would often price it very high.
> can
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/16/923844907/when-shoplifting-is...