That's the stuff of nightmares. I hope the real Woods sues the system that put him through this.
It's highly likely that at least one lawyer is already salivating over this, and will help him to sue, but I’m not confident that the real Woods will benefit.
This was a nightmare story, and I would hope that the fake Woods gets real jail time.
We seem to have come full circle. One of the big reasons for the enormous homeless population, is because all the mental hospitals were closed, in the 1980s and 90s.
I think that news stories about [very real] abuses in these hospitals, along with the cost to maintain, were responsible.
You can yell "Get a job!" at schizophrenics, all you want, but it won't make them employable, or even able to live on their own.
There are a number of mental illnesses that can be treated, and recovery is possible, but that only accounts for a fairly small percentage of the severely mentally ill. I know a large number of folks that have done it, but for every one of them, there's a hundred more, that couldn't get it.
It's just that treating mental illness is hugely unpopular with the vast majority of folks that don't have any family or associates with mental illness, and even more unpopular with folks that have undiagnosed mental illness (It's quite possible to have a long, productive life, with some forms of mental illness -it can even be helpful, in some careers).
Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act (the result of a commission under Carter) as part of his "small government" mantra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
Reagan was elected as a conservative backlash to Carter's progressive policies. We're talking about someone so petty he ripped functioning solar panels off the roof of the White House.
They leaked water, something you do not want happening in a historical property.
Reagan made a lot of terrible choices, removing leaky containers from one one of our nation's most iconic historic buildings is not among them.
A lot of the abuses were IMHO caused by underfunding.
Eugenics by free market.
That hit harder than I expected, for someone whose loved ones were crippled by primarily schizophrenia. Even two generations back, such people would be cared by family or community, but now they have practically no one. The system is working as intended, it seems.
Sad.
The worst that ever happened to non-violent me was being poisoned with a painful, nauseating antipsychotic. That caused me to be more depressed and the psych wards are boring in america compared to countries that have computers or at least FM radios. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ufnii4xlirvvnhlwegorf/quackLa...
It sounds like he wasn't homeless and mentally challenged when he originally met Keirans many years prior. Perhaps it was the string of false warrants, debt, and other criminal use of his identity that caused him to become homeless and mentally challenged. It's very hard to get and maintain employment when you show up with outstanding felony warrants and poor credit during a background check or records search.
Reminds me a bit of the movie Trading Places.
Honestly once you're at the whims of an overzealous psychologist you're boned. Potentially. I hope the real Woods gets to sue everyone involved in declaring him mentally incompetent, that declaration took away his rights as a human being.
(He did. He follows me, too; it was back in the days of auto-follow-back scripts.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/24/th...
Smart people know what a psychiatric ward is, a sane perso recognizes a serious threat when confronted with one.
> Smart people know what a psychiatric ward is, a sane perso recognizes a serious threat when confronted with one.
Lying is a mortal sin. I try to avoid sin, even if doing so seriously harms me.
Plato said something like: "All sin is a form of mental illness that seems to make one or a few people better off in the short term but makes all humans poorer in the long run."
I very much dislike lies, do not want to lie and would rather tell the truth even if it may harm me, but I'm not sure about the absoluteness of such an approach. A few days ago I was reading a book about a christian family helping Jews during WW II (Corrie ten Boom) and I was quite lost when Corrie marveled at the realization she doesn't have to do what the authorities say, or when she lied to the police. I would like to believe telling the truth would be better, but .. it seems suspect. Telling Nazi Jews are hiding in my house .. very much not sure what to think about that.
Note for casual readers: We are not here to live a comfy life, so, even if saying the truth leads to bodily mortal consequences for another, I can't with 100% certainty say lying would be the right thing to do.
It seems to me, there are cases when even God used / instructed Jews to use deception or something very close to it, to scare off attackers or make them kill eachother in a frenzy (different times), so I am dumbfounded on what is right.
Even God puts Himself behind a veil, for our benefit, so going around pushing truth for the sake of truth can not be correct. That would be one extreme. But I'm not sure what the criteria is.
Do you have any thoughts, or basis on criteria, when is volunteering truth / answering truthfully if asked / refusing to answer / deceiving / lying good or not. Or maybe even what is to be considered lying?
> (He did. He follows me, too; it was back in the days of auto-follow-back scripts.)
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/24/th...
Those in the mental health field will admit that they do not even consider the possibility someone is sane or rational. They start with the assumption that the person they are talking is mentally ill, and try to form a diagnosis from there!!
Imagine if the police assumed everyone they questioned was a serial killer and believed their only job was to match at least one cold case to that person.
This is how the mental health system works. Avoid it. Teach others to avoid it.
If I had the power, I would diagnose everyone in the mental health field with delusional disorder.
No. This is just as bad.
Mental health docs assume there’s something because you’re seeing them. You, or someone else, has enough concern about your mental health for you to be in their presence.
For the same reasons, ER docs tend to assume you’re sick in some way.
Are they always right? No. Are they never right? Also no.
Are crime rates significantly lower in US States that have the death penalty? Are crime rates lower in States that punish more severely compared to States that punish less severely?
The state of art in preventing crime is to focus on rehabilation and education, not punishment. So it would be novel if the statistics prove that punishment works better.
There's always room to improve the system, but the way to do that is to make it resilient to individual failures, not by placing more pressure on the individual not to make mistakes.
Trivially, if you have no criminal justice system, no innocent person would go to prison; it's as foolish as claiming there would be no poverty if there were no human beings. But crime would increase. The bulwark against those who do not live according to moral principles, who do not respect the law, would be removed, as such people respond only to the fear of punishment.
And the law and the justice system are also instructive. Part of their purpose is to teach. You will not teach justice without being just, and that entails punishment. The severity of the punishment is proportionate to the severity of the crime precisely because it signals and communicates to the perp that severity. It is feedback, hence instructive. A just person already accepts such punishment as just.
It is far better to focus on reform, but in order to do that, you first have to have a good understanding of what the law is all about. And I admit: our criminal justice system does need improvement and reform.
Also, judges can be malicious too.
And while all jobs include at least some element of dealing with people trying to deceive you, if I'm an embedded engineer dealing with a vendor overstating the low-temperature performance of their embedded compute module, the stakes are a lot lower.
I'd rather have a system that occasionally let someone go free because of insufficient proof than occasionally have people be imprisoned when they are actually innocent.
What do you think the dash cams are for?
And therefore, for proper function of society:
- Judges should be exposed to penal jail sentences if an innocent goes to jail,
- Judges should also be exposed to penal jail sentences in case they release a criminal sooner than the maximum sentence and they commit a new crime.
When a criminal is released 18 times by judges, and they slaughter a dozen people on the 19th time, you know you’re in France. And that’s somewhere you don’t want to be.
As far as being penalised for not predicting the future actions of an individual person, not so much. That would effectively mean that every person would be sentenced and required to serve the maximum penalty for any violation, even though those maximums were intended to be doled out to only the most egregious offenders.
Perhaps much more granular and specific sentencing guidelines with objective qualifiers so that sentencing was more predictable?
You have to be careful here. Doing so can create perverse incentives that undermine justice. If a judge or a jury face such penalties, they will be inclined to reduce the penalty or feel compelled to find the defendant not guilty as a fearful precaution, even in cut and dry cases. And would you punish innocent jurors where unanimity is not required?
I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
This isn't a solution. It is a wish. Obviously, we all would like it to be the case that innocent people are never punished. But first, is the rate of false convictions of the innocent actually egregiously high? This article gives an example of one case, but it does not follow that we are facing high rates of false convictions, especially for serious crimes that carry serious penalties. Second, is there a way to reduce false convictions, especially in a way that doesn't comprise the system in some serious way?
> I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
Perhaps, perhaps not. You risk incentivizing behavior among judges that subverts the justice system.
4% may sound low to some, but when people's live are on the line that's terribly high. If a plane had a 4% failure rate it would be considered a colossal failure.
That's a desirable effect. Your argument is the very reason the 5th amendment exists. Making it easier to find someone guilty is a BAD thing, not a good thing.
And the hyper-cautious effect isn’t because of fear of getting it wrong. It’s fear of retaliation whether right or wrong.
All legitimate government power is supposed to come from the people, I feel like that's often forgotten, especially when it comes to the least accountable branch of government.
This started more than 30 years ago. The internet as we thinking about it did not exist. Computers were just going around. Most it was physical copies which could not be centralized/shared at scale till the internet came around.
I am just trying to think about what kind of system would account for all the changes that have happened and prevented this while also accounting for the reverse where the real person suddenly had someone trying to steal their identity also accounting for the fact this system has to be valid for the future. Maybe it is a failure of my imagination, but I can only think of ways to do it for the current state of the world, assuming the world never changes.
Any system you'd build in this mold, the criminal justice mold, would be the same or a clone of the current one, inheriting the same flaws. The prosecuting agency would be lenient towards Type I errors, because few people care; and I think in the net it'd increase their occurrence, by severely penalizing Type II errors.
edit: (And to the point out the obvious in plain sight—look at the very newspaper story we're discussing. The "criminal that got away with it" is in the headline/title. The "innocent person horribly abused by indifferent criminal justice" is mentioned in passing about 21 paragraphs down).
If it's a law that's unpopular enough, it's not enforceable pretty much anywhere. Even less so in the US, because of the staggering number of civilian owned guns.
Tanks can go through some of the doors, especially as long as you know there isn't a basement. So if you have a small segment of a population you need to go through doors on, sure.
But if it's enough of the population, then tanks don't work to enforce the laws.
It doesn't scale.
The military as a whole doesn't work well as a police trying to enforce laws, but even if it did, it wouldn't be the tanks. It would be door to door with infantry.
And 7000 IFVs, and 15,000 APCs, and 25,000 Mine Protected Vehicles, and also a bunch of fixed and rotary winged piloted and unpiloted aircraft carrying PGMs, all of which can go through specifically chosen doors, and, as with the tanks, all of which can send something through many specifically chosen doors (or windows, walls, whatever) in a fairly short period of time.
Not good for arresting people, bringing them to trial, and providing due process, but that's not the only means of raising the expected cost of non-compliance with the law so as to coerce compliance.
It's a volunteer force. Might simply refuse the orders as unlawful, might repeat 1861, depending on the law.
I'm told "fragging" comes from the weapon of choice used by conscripts in Vietnam against unpopular commanding officers.
Furthermore, determining the law is not the same as determining the outcome of having that law on the books. The law is permissive about many immoral behaviors, at least in part because the enforcement of laws regulating such behaviors would cause greater harm than the behavior in question. Prudential judgement among lawmakers is necessary to determine what should and should not be regulated.
Personally, I see no issue with increased accountability on both of these fronts. If you sign up to be the person who gets to decide whether other humans are put in a concrete box for years at a time, you should be willing to face the highest levels of scrutiny for your decision making. And if you are wrong there should be harsh punishments for your failures.
I don't know how better to phrase this. I fully agree with your values—but look at the state of things, it's right now even a contentious issue whether innocent people should be jailed or not. (That is, whether criminal defendants should enjoy their constitutional right to pre-trial bail, or if they should be put in a cage without trial, without conviction—the majority seems to lean in that direction, in the name of safetyism. The topic of "bail reform"). It's a complicated game where everything is genuinely awful and there's no clear path towards making things less awful, and a lot of the naive ideas counterintuitively make things worse. Political pressure on courts definitely would make things a lot worse, at this point; dead certain. What can one do, in such a world?
The first step is transparency. Put every bit of evidence for every case on the public record so everyone can see it online.
Sadly, The System will not allow that. Truth is the enemy of The System.
On the positive side, if he was using his social security number for 35 years, he’ll be fully paid up for the real Woods to draw at retirement.
If the court has any credibility, they should first jail the fake one for a long time, then make things like his ss payments restitution for the real woods.
Also document forgeries are not a thing (when I see TV shows where teenagers try to buy alcohol using a fake driving license that really feels "American").
Really, I am not sure why this kind of illegal things are unheard of in EU, but there might be some sort of systematic reason.
I've been the victim of identity theft eight times since the Equifax breach, and at some point, I felt like I was just feeding cats to coyotes [0] and stopped fixing it. Unsurprisingly, it stopped. Why spend the effort maintaining excellent credit and not getting credit for it?
The only thing people used my credit to do in all cases except the last was open retail credit cards and max them out at baby clothes stores and lingerie shops. You couldn't believe the trouble I was in when those first bills came.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
This perception likely comes from your selection of news sources. Identity theft is not unique to the United States.
Stories like the linked one are not common at all. The rarity is actually why it’s a noteworthy news story.
> Also document forgeries are not a thing (when I see TV shows where teenagers try to buy alcohol using a fake driving license that really feels "American").
Again, TV shows are not representative of what happens in the real world. We have far more advanced IDs than decades ago when they were more easily spoofed. We also have routine undercover checks against gas stations and grocery stores where agents attempt to purchase alcohol with fake IDs. Depending on the state, the penalties for failing to check obvious fake IDs can be quite significant including suspending your ability to handle checkout jobs for a period of time.
American news media and TV shows are not representative of daily life here.
That's such an odd thing to say. This is just the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel
There is no long trail of credit and debt that will chase you, requiring validation and checks at every step in your life. So getting someone's identity doesn't change much. getting anything from a phone subscription to student loans, to getting jobs is basically equal no matter what. They aren't allowed to block you except in rare situations. They aren't allowed to request a lot of the information you would need in the US.
And if your identity get's stolen in Europe the systems in place are way more flexible and reversible. So if a theft is found, it's effects are reasonably easy to undo.
Ever noticed how identity theft in the US is never directly stolen items or money? It's all about getting access to systems (credit / accounts / banking).