This fact tells how much the Judicial system needs improvement. The fact it depends on who's sitting on a chair to determine whether a journalist should be charged for helping the public. Unbelievable...
The way the governor handled this situation really showed how much of a liability he feared this story would be to him and his party politically. Instead of examining the underlying conditions of the state agency responsible for the data breach, he chose to go after the messenger.
Given that every single time a company gets caught like this, the first thing we all point to is how stingy they are when it comes to security. A conservative governor doesn't want to be in a position where the solution to the problem is to spend money, so he went after the journalist instead.
https://twitter.com/govparsonmo/status/1448697768311132160?s...
> "Highway Patrol's Digital Forensic Unit"
This could have been a joke. I'm sorry, but can these people be serious?
Really, the digital forensic unit is under the umbrella of the "Highway Patrol"?
I bet they're all into decoding HTML source codes all day long...
Maybe it's the only state-wide law enforcement agency?
The judiciary, legislative, and executive branches of govt., as well as the other independent institutions of civil society, such as academia and the press, all must be strongly independent of each other for a democracy to survive.
In an autocracy, all of the institutions are coerced to bend to the will of the executive.
In this case, the executive (governor) made it very clear that he wanted this journalist prosecuted, a blatant attempt to bend the press to his will. In this case, it wasn't even the judiciary, but the prosecution, which is still in the executive branch, so nominally under the governor, who basically told the gov to go pound sand.
So, whenever you see executives undermining the independence of other branches or institutions, be VERY suspicious; it's a dead giveaway that they are interested in only their own power and not working to benefit the citizens they serve.
What crimes require a grand jury is state-specific.
About half of states require grand juries for some crimes. Of those, a bunch (minnesota, georgia are good examples) restrict grand juries to crimes that can be punished by life imprisonment/death require grand jury indictments. Others require them for any felony (New york is a good example)
People who watched a lot of law and order think grand juries get everything, because in new york, grand juries are required for all felony cases.
The other half of states do not require grand juries for indictments.
My recollection (take with grain of salt) of Kansas is:
1. A prosecutor can, but is not required to, present to a grand jury for a felony case. They can also just indict directly
2. Citizens can actually empanel a grand jury. It's something like 100 people min + 2% of the voters in the county.
3. If that grand jury indicts, prosecutor can still dismiss it, but it requires leave of the court (rather than them just being able to do it out of hand).
A technical violation of the law was not prosecuted as a result of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion not to pursue a prosecution which was not in the public interest.
Grand juries are not a solution to this problem. One glance at the shockingly high percentage of cases in which grand juries indict should be sufficient to cast doubt that they are truly filtering out bad prosecutions. That the proceedings occur in the absence of the accused and therefore deprive them of procedural fairness is another problem.
The responsibility properly lies with the prosecutor.
For helping the public... Helping protect teacher's private data.
What if the prosecutor was politically influenced against him? I don't know how, but there's got to be a better way.
This part I was not clear on. I was under the impression that what the reporter did was not a violation of the law. Or does term “technical violation” have a specific legal meaning that I’m not aware of?
Suppose there's a law that says you can't film other people without their permission. You catch a thief breaking into someone's house, film them, and give it authorities enabling their identification, then delete the footage. I'd describe this as a technical breach of the law. It probably shouldn't be prosecuted.
This is kind of analogous to the present situation, a bit of a rough analogy I admit. Whether or not a law was broken, the journalist did something that was a net positive to society, with no real victim except a red-faced politician.
Citation needed. I’ve seen no evidence that there was even an arguable violation of the law,
In the article linked the prosecutor expresses that opinion.
"there is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law"
Ultimately there has to be a judgement of intent which at some level requires subjective assessment. In this case it is blindingly obvious that the reporter was acting in good faith so ti seems unlikely any reasonable prosecutor would pursue this case, or if they did any reasonable juror would convict.
In any event, I fully support the journalist.
> I'm not in a position to help improving it, but my impression is relying on a single person is not a good idea.
> Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.
Having to face judicial charges - in this case criminal ones, perhaps - would be a tremendous stress and financial loss to this journalist. It's unacceptable that we subject citizens to face this kind of risk at the hands of a single person.
This is intentional, the governor explicitly wanted to inflict such pain to a citizen. I don't see a path to meaningful change in how the legal system is weaponized against the public as long as wealth is the primary driver of power in this country:
The legal system has always benefited the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
In practice, grand juries almost always vote to indict, unless the perp is a cop.
There are all sorts of tradeoffs involved in how this sort of thing is done, and why, and those tradeoffs have evolved over thousands of years of legal systems existing.
In this case, the common tradeoff is that this is an elected official who is accountable to voters for the decisions they make. There are states where they are appointed. There are states which require grand juries.
All of these have tradeoffs - there is no "best", nor do statistics say that any of them end up any more fundamentally fair than each other. Nor do any of them have a significantly different rate of indicting objectively or subjectively innocent people (last i looked).
It's unclear exactly what you think a system should look like - i would argue any system with sufficient safeguards is not going to look very different than a preliminary hearing anyway.
Particularly your complaint about the stress/loss/etc seems unavoidable. That occurs starting with when people are investigated in the first place.
But I think it's still healthy to voice our concerns in a respectful and civil way.
I respect your view that we we should only voice a concern when we're in a position to directly help building a solution, I just don't find it (personal opinion) a healthy conduct as a citizen.
It's not healthy conduct to express strong opinions on things that you have zero experience or knowledge about.
Healthy conduct would instead be to ask questions and try to learn about those things, prior to holding a strong opinion. Or leave them alone if you don't have the time.
This unhealthy conduct is precisely one of the huge problems in society today, and i'm somewhat surprised you can't see this.
See, e.g., people in the US holding super-strong opinions about universal healthcare despite having zero knowledge or experience with it.