Hacker News Reader

Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

With Ortiz's political aspirations this seems like the worst response she could possibly make. It seems to me that the public would respond better to something like "we'll review our practices to ensure we're best serving the public." They could then just sweep it under the rug and wait for the public to forget. If it came up again they could then they could issue a statement along the lines of this one.

View on HN

I live far away from USA, so I don't know any specifics, but I happen to live in a country where "the public" elected to power a party that openly tried to transform a country into a police state. It's debatable what impact their time in office had overall, but they gained popularity thanks to exactly the same stance Ortiz presents here and maintained it (popularity) for three years thanks to many similar cases. Granted, the victims were chosen much more wisely - a doctor, a politician, a beggar, to name a few - but handling of their cases was even worse, because they were used as a propaganda and displayed in the media from the very beginning, along with a video of breaking door and cuffing said doctor on the ground for example. The politician in question even committed suicide when the police tried to arrest her, and we were told that this was perfectly normal occurrence and that nothing is going to change.

And this is perfectly normal, European country we're talking about...

So no, I don't think this is going to negatively impact Ortiz career, it's possible that she's even saying this in hope of gaining popularity.

I know this seems improbable, but then winning the election by said party seemed improbable too in 2005 and then actually happened. It's easy to look at one's social circle and think it represents "the public". Well, it most often does not.

You're exactly right. Many people in conservative states would interpret her response as tough on crime.

It's not red/blue. She's trying to build a political career in Massachusetts.

I guess Hungary

I guess...Greece?

I guess Norway

My Google-fu leads me to say...Poland.

I just spent half an hour trying to find a conclusive result in google using just the data I included in the post and couldn't. Can you say what queries you used to get to this guess? Were you completely unfamiliar with the matters I described before attempting the search? What did you assume while searching?

I'm not saying you're right (or wrong) but I'm really interested in the process.

I used the name half of the email address in your profile. From there, I looked through the places that had that username. None of them gave very much useful information until I came to http://www.racjonalista.pl/index.php/s,47/k,32138 . From there, I looked up what PL represented, and it's Poland.

Addendum: Also, Googling your HackerNews username, on my second page of Google shows more .pl domains where that username is found.

The Internet can be scary.

Nothing really scary here, I just didn't think of adding data from my profile to the queries :) It's stupid, because if it wasn't my profile and my post I would probably do it the same way. I tried to google the country using only the informations included in the post but I somehow forgot that I'm the author and the fact that I live here was in the post too. Oh well, it happens ;)

Thanks for explanation and for hinting to google results for my username - I haven't tried that one for too long.

Similar to sukuriant, I googled the name half of your email in your profile, clicked on your Trello profile, copy&pasted the text from your first entry (I did not recognize the language) into Google. Google Translate told me it was Polish.

Also, on your twitter account (same username as on Trello), you mention Warsaw a few times.

I was completely unfamiliar with the matters you mentioned in your comment.

Ok, this is getting scary - the twitter account I used exactly once during a hackathon a year ago (we were mining geolocation data from tweets...) and since completely forgot. I try to control my online presence but it seems that I need to get more serious with it unless I want such things to float around forever. Thanks for explanation :)

Party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_Justice

Leader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaros%C5%82aw_Kaczy%C5%84ski

Cases mentioned:

1. Doctor: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawa_Miros%C5%82awa_G%2E . Police action cryptonim was "Mengele".

2. Politician suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Blida

There were many more such cases. Recently other parties want Kaczyński to be brought before State Tribunal.

That was my thought process. But she obviously thinks so highly of herself that she can stand up to the American public and defend her position, even though things obviously went sideways.

This is not someone we want in a higher office.

Wait, because she stands by principals rather than the whims of the public, we DON'T want her in office?

9/11 happens: people panic and demand action. School shooting happens: people panic and demand action. I want a leader who DOESN'T succumb to the panic.

I think you mean "principles"...

I only say that because, in my view, it is more important to understand what the principles ARE that a person stands for than to support someone for standing by them.

A lot of people have stood on principle. From George Washington to MLK. From Castro to Pinochet. From John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis to Pinkerton and Harriet Tubman. We cannot support them all. As Lincoln said, "...both MAY be, but one MUST be wrong..."

It's the principle that makes a person worthy of your support, not that the person stands by it.

I would argue both are necessary... though I may not agree with someone standing by their principles, I at least have a better chance of respecting the person. I also acknowledge that personal experience can change one's opinion... but those politicians that flop week to week sicken me.

She's not standing by principles, she's self-justifying.

I'll give you 9/11 and Connecticut, but this is different. This woman has ZERO principle or sense of morality. No one is panicking over the death of Aaron Swartz, but many are angry. Angry over overreach that is (finally) getting some attention. The furor over Ortiz is mainly due to her relentless pursuit of a poor boy who was suffering depression and also facing many felony charges that he would be stuck with for the rest of his life. That is why people are angry. The root cause is BECAUSE of the government, not because the government itself failed to act.

The leaders are not succumbing to panic. The "leaders" (whom I should actually call "rulers," because one day they decided they should rule instead of lead) are succumbing to their own mistakes that the American public is now waking up to and demanding action.

I get the core of your argument but we put humans in these positions of power because we believe they are able to use a non-scripted judgement in determining which cases deserve attention.

On a broader note I believe the way the law was written is worse than what Oritz did - but she was in fact trying to hand-chop an apple thief in order to make an example. The decision to go after Swartz and to pursue a high (the maximum?) penalty was clearly wrong and she deserves all the public scrutiny directed at her office.

Prosecutors enjoy a broad array of tools to do their job. It is up to them to use these tools sensibly or risk Congress taking them away.

AG Ortiz needs to go not only for the prosecutorial bullying but also because she was dumb enough to expose how these tools are abused by prosecutors around the country.

Smart politicians will get rid of her soon, they don't want to risk this to grow to the point Congress needs to actually do something about it.

In the second case I don't see it so much as people panicking and demanding action; more like people saying "I told you so, now will you do something about this?"

But anyway, yeah I'd like my public officials to recognize when they are wrong and to adjust their behavior. If her principles make her bully defendants and she wont adjust, yeah, I don't want her in office.

The people saying "I told you so" are wrong. School shootings hardly ever happen, maybe 3-4 times per year in the whole nation. There's statistically no way to tell if they're going up or down; it's just noise.

The counterargument to that is "3-4 times a year" is 3-4 times too many, that we're not spending enough time and effort to address.

If 3-4 per year are too many, why do we ignore that thousands of gang-related shootings that occur each year? That is not background noise, it is the bulk of homicide in this country and despite a recent reduction, we still see thousands of shootings each year (and tens of thousands of murders with other weapons).

The real problem with the response to the Newtown shooting is not the call for gun control, but that the call focuses almost exclusively on guns that are rarely used in crime: rifles. The Newtown shooter had two handguns, and just a few days before the shooting, a handgun was used to murder a man, in broad daylight, on a New York City street. So on the one hand, you have the exceedingly rare case of a lunatic shooting children using a rifle, and on the other you have the exceedingly (and unfortunately) common case of a criminal shooting someone with a handgun. Which of these sounds like a more urgent issue to you?

For what it's worth, handguns are a target for thieves. After a newspaper published a map of handgun owners in New York, there were at least three cases of houses being burglarized with a clear goal of stealing a handgun. Criminals buy handguns on the black market; they are not buying rifles on the black market, and even when they do buy rifles, they rarely use them because it is too hard to hide such a large weapon. Despite the media's mischaracterization of the Newtown shooter's rifle as a "high-power military-grade weapon," it is the less powerful cartridges like .22lr and 9mm Parabellum that are commonly used to kill.

The panic over, "It looks scary and some lunatic killed people with it," is nothing but a distraction from the real problem we face in America. If we can only muster enough political strength to make stricter regulations on a single class of firearm, we should tighten the restrictions on the handguns, which people strangely find to be less "scary" (nevermind that it is deadly, right?) and bizarrely enough want to distance themselves from regulating (after all, by restricting guns, we don't want to restrict the right to defend one's home with force -- unless you are using a scary-looking gun to do it).

Let's be reasonable about this: we have a real problem, and a not-so-real problem. Let's address the real problem first.

Two questions, which are also applicable to the actual topic of the thread: 1. How much time and effort are you willing to spend to prevent those 3-4 rare incidents? 2. How do you know if the measures you take have any effect? If there is only 1 school shooting in the next year, that's not statistically saying anything. It's equally possible that you just got lucky that year.

How often did school shootings happen 15 years ago? What has changed that makes school shootings 3-4 times per year acceptable?

Almost anything happening 3-4 times per year is acceptable. It's so rare, that almost any other cause of death is more likely. For example, you should be several orders of magnitude more concerned about children dying from the flu than about them getting killed in a school shooting.

You don't want a leader who stands by obviously wrong principles. Unfortunately half the public doesn't care whether the principles are good.

If the status quo is misguided complacency towards flawed conditions, isn't it positive to react to a dramatic and traumatic event that puts a spotlight on how broken the current system is?

Shall I assume you intended to say principles? Or is it a tongue-in-cheek jab at a corrupt hierarchy?

By making herself look so deplorable it will take the attention away from how prosecutors and the judicial system works and instead focus on how SHE worked as a prosecutor in our judicial system.

With as much public outcry as there's been regarding this, I think it's inevitable that she will resign from her role as a prosecutor. By doing this though she may save Stephen Heymann's job and easily be able to land another (probably better paying) job.

Which is worse? - saying "we'll review" and do nothing, or arrogantly saying "we were never wrong" and still do nothing. In the end though, it looks like nothing is going to change.

It would be nice to have a leader who says "Yes we were wrong, I apologize. Let me fix the system" and actually fix it.

The very least she could do, is stop making more statements.

Perhaps she is trying to cater to the far-right, law-and-order types who say things like, "Aaron Swartz was committing a crime and he knew it, so of course he should be prosecuted, just like anyone else!" You see plenty of that attitude on HN.

She is an Obama appointee. In Massachusetts.

Not exactly a recipe for "far right".

Only if you have zoomed in so far that you think the Obama administration is not on the right wing. Let's put it this way: the Obama administration gives hand-outs to corporations as a matter of policy, makes use of drones to kill US citizens without waiting around for a trial, supports and continues to rely on paramilitary law enforcement teams, and generally ignores calls by the American public for meaningful change (but immediately acts when wealthy corporations ask for change). Where on the political spectrum would you say such an administration lies?

None of those have anything in particular to do with "right" or "left" as they are commonly understood, not even the "handout to corporations" part.

CYA is more likely.

Half the public agrees with "might makes right" and Obama is a centrist. I think Ortiz's office will continue to have carte blanche to extort plea bargains using disproportionate threats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com