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Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

I believe selective enforcement is a core part of policing in the US. No police agency has enough resources to go after everybody who breaks the law, so they make examples of high profile defendants to deter others.

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One of two things is true. Either they believe everyone should be doing 30 years (preposterous) or they know they are committing a grave injustice against someone.

There is no reasonable interpretation of selective enforcement.

Thats not how the law works. It's not code, its run by people for people.

I've heard this from multiple people explaining stuff to me -- they were all Americans.

Where are you from? If it's from continental Europe, I wonder if that's the difference. We get our laws from English Common Law instead of civil law (except Louisiana).

Can we get a brit in here to see what their conception of the law is?

How courts interpret legislation and precedent differs a lot between common and civil law jurisdictions, but that's got nothing to do with how policing operates. Police everywhere can choose not to take action unless you're talking about a zero-tolerance society with Stasi-like levels of monitoring.

"Selecting policing" is just "discretion", that particular phrase is possibly US-centric but the concept itself isn't.

I would imagine how likely courts are to convict has to impact that discretion for any police force that's judged based on some sort of metric.

Or is the US the only place that really does that?

I'm sure every police force takes that into account along with other factors, there are always laws that become outdated and are arrested for less, prosecuted less and convicted of less over time. And in common law jurisdictions precedent can impact the scope of existing law and change how police will enforce it.

I'm not American.

I misread as “the” people and was confused. Sad.

.... or crimes occur on a continuum of "technically bad" and "omfg bad", and all instances are not identical. Nothing about your dichotomy seems true in all cases, even if it is sometimes (maybe even often) obviously true.

Punishing someone more than they deserve in order to communicate a point to others, strikes me as a kind of political agenda, not justice.

The law is a political institution

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Focus on ‘unusual’. All the words in this document have a meaning.

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