Comment by michtzik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michtzik | Hacker News Reader

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I strongly disagree with your thinking that the author can't make a better case. The previous sentence before the one you quote is this:

> Freedom Project’s executive director at the time was David Heppard who was convicted as a teenager for taking part in the gang rape of a pregnant seventeen-year-old.

And here's what the author COULD have said:

> On February 18, 1994, Heppard and five of his friends spotted a five-months pregnant 17-year-old who is referred to in court filings as “J.H.” Cecil Morton III, one of Heppard’s co-defendants, proposed raping J.H. Morton stopped the car and he, Heppard, and a third member of the group forced the pregnant girl into the back seat. She begged them not to hurt her and Morton threatened her into silence with a machete; someone in the vehicle told her that if she didn’t shut up, they would kill her unborn baby.

> They drove her into the woods where five or six of them raped her orally and vaginally. J.H. was then forced back into the vehicle completely naked and was ordered to direct them to her apartment. Some of the boys threatened that if she failed to do so, they would murder her and dismember her corpse.

> Along the way, Heppard orally sodomized the terrified girl a second time and she was raped by two of his co-defendants upon their arrival. As the pregnant 17-year-old girl was being raped for the third time that night, the boys who weren’t otherwise occupied robbed her apartment, stealing a number of items belonging to her and her boyfriend. They then left the apartment, telling her that if she ratted them out, they would come back to kill her.

> Once the boys were gone, their victim called a friend, who contacted the police on her behalf. Coincidentally, Heppard and his partners in crime were pulled over by Pierce County police officers at the same time the rape was reported. A call came over their radio regarding the assault, but the cops did not make the connection between the rape and the teenagers they were questioning; however, the rapists heard the report and were now aware that their victim had contacted the police. Heppard and Morton allegedly began plotting to have the girl murdered, but were arrested before she could be silenced.

That's a horrible story, but pulling it out seems to indicate you didn't understand what the GP was trying to convey at all. The point was that to use a crime from twenty years ago for which a person was convicted and served time for as indicative of problems with the current project he's the head of seems to indicate they could not not find anything relevant to the project itself to criticize. Doubling down on the details of that crime doesn't change that or counter the claim at all.

If you want to make a claim that rehabilitation is impossible, or that he's not rehabilitated, then do so. If you want to state that it goes to the point being made in the article, that hiring felons with a violent history is common, then do so. I don't think the article is indefensible, but these additional details without context to make them relevant don't add much.

Yeah, for anyone else still questioning, if an article about former president Donald Trump's foreign relations with Finland during his presidency opened in the starting paragraphs with:

"Donald J. Trump was found by a jury to have committed sexual abuse and forcible touching of E. Jean Carroll. By her own account, Carroll said that on her way out of the store she ran into Trump and he asked for help buying a gift for a woman. After she suggested a handbag or a hat, the two reputedly moved on to the lingerie section and joked about the other trying some on. Carroll said they ended up in a dressing room together, the door of which was shut, and Trump forcefully kissed her, pulled down her tights and raped her before she was able to escape. Trump has also stated in the past that 'You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.'"

You would rightly consider this to be yellow journalism, as it has nothing to do with Trump's foreign relations with Finland despite being despicable.

This would be a more compelling argument if the person you were referring to, who was 16 when this happened, wasn't open about their criminal background (it's literally part of their pitch at this nonprofit, which is significantly about prison reentry) or had in the intervening (checks) thirty years been accused of some other relevant offense.

Instead, it's just another instance of exactly the discrediting rhetoric I'm talking about.

What makes this worse is, this nonprofit does not look like a compelling use of public dollars, and an effective case could probably be made against it on the merits. Instead, it's just culture war bait. Since we're in a 50/50 culture, that means the entire argument is a push; we'll have to wait for someone else to move the dials on whether we fund organizations like this.

Okay, I'm here to learn.

> open about their criminal background (it's literally part of their pitch at this nonprofit, which is significantly about prison reentry)

Can you point me to any resource where Heppard expresses remorse about his so-called "criminal background"?

If you were here to learn and have a curious conversation, I don't think you'd ask me to respond to a rebuttal of an argument I did not make. That's fine, there's no reason we need to engage further on this! Our premises might just be too far apart.

I definitely agree with your final sentence.

I am confident that a majority of people would think that a $3 million no-bid contract shouldn't be given to a non-profit whose executive director committed the crimes described at length above, even if it is expressly noted that it was 30 years ago when he was 16, and with no other arguments at all. (In particular, I am disagreeing with your "50/50" claim as well as the general claim that this is "culture war bait".) There's a reason this happened in Seattle -- it wouldn't fly in most of the country, or the world.

I really was curious to learn a little bit of how we could see the world so differently. I literally watched multiple videos of this executive director, but I came away holding my beliefs even stronger (that his prior criminal history was enough evidence, and I thought it was unlikely his activities since would change my mind). In particular, I believe the reason he hasn't "in the intervening (checks) thirty years been accused of some other relevant offense" in because he was physically incapacitated from doing so.

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