> Authorities charged him with making a terrorist threat. If convicted, he will face eight years in prison.
So terrorist threats with nothing to back it up is worth 8 years in prison? Does that seem right to anyone else?
So terrorist threats with nothing to back it up is worth 8 years in prison? Does that seem right to anyone else?
So "terrorist threats with nothing to back it up" aren't necessarily worth 8 years in prison, but terrorist threats could be, under maximally aggravating circumstances. Say you were an actual terrorist going to great lengths to make plausible threats in order to terrorize the populace.
Remember that terrorism isn't about bombing or shooting or killing. As Bruce Schneier said, "Terrorism isn't a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds". Making threats is the crux of terrorism.
What's ridiculous is charging a kid who clearly wasn't making the kind of serious threat that these laws were intended for.
(I'm making some suppositions here - my case would be stronger if I had dug up the actual laws and charges.)
I think the most relevant items are "threaten[ing] to commit any offense involving violence to any person or property with intent to:
(2) place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury;
(5) place the public or a substantial group of the public in fear of serious bodily injury"
Which are certainly serious things to do.
There is a serious question on proportionality here. Kids do and say stupid things. You cannot bar them from their rights while forcing them to attend school to "protect" them, meanwhile throwing the book at them for every minor stupidity or bad division they might undertake.
Lately I hear more cases of ruining lives by charging minors with ridiculous crimes than school violence... Protecting the youth...
When I get FU money I'm going to hire designers to make "Never talk without your lawyer" posters and get that message across.
I agree that someone making a credible terrorist threat needs some form of punishment and rehabilitation. I don't think the sentence about beating hearts was a credible threat, but I don't have all the information.
It is weird to me that most young people are seen as "evil", not "stupid". Often the reaction should be to just tell them not to be stupid and explain the havoc they've caused. We shouldn't be locking them up.
A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit.
That doesn't mean that the cop had to shoot the child though but I don't know the details to the case you're referring to enough to comment one way or the other.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/dad-charged-new-jersey...
Toy guns in the US are now required to have bright orange flashing on them to ID them as toys. Of course a criminal could put bright orange paint on a real gun to make it look like a toy, and some do (http://publicintelligence.net/baltimore-police-department-gu...) but since most criminals want to intimidate people with their guns it doesn't happen that often. It's more common, I suspect, for people to modify toy guns to make them look more real. Some people do so to threaten people, sometimes there's a case of 'suicide by cop' where the person calls the police or brandishes the painted-to-look-real toy weapon in public and then points it at police when they show up to investigate, who unsurprisingly tend to shoot rather than waiting to see if they'll get shot.
It probably should, since that is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Furthermore, painting such a broad stroke of a nation with ~314 million people and thousands of political jurisdictions, with their own gun laws, is absurd.
You extremely difficult be part of a system where you see legitimate criminals everyday and not develop a posture that everyone that comes across your desk deserves to be behind bars.
I'm curious about your wording in your comment. I may misreading your intentions but do you find absolutely nothing wrong with someone being in jail for the past 3 months for making a threat followed by "lol, jk"?
By the way; what does it mean to question his motivations anyways? If he came out and said he supports Justin's arrest, what does it matter? Heck, I'd love to have someone say so. Maybe then we could have an interesting discussion on the matter.
I disagree with a lot of things people say here on HN. But I still love to hear people rationale's for the things they say.
The problem is that the courts are so busy with other cases that it has taken at least three months so far to do that (and probably more) for the trial to start. Have they even had a bail hearing? It wouldn't surprise me if bail was denied.
The fact that some people get charged with serious crimes and then they have to be in prison for months/years before their trial could start (even if the lawyers were ready) seems like a miscarriage of justice.
This is also why plea bargains are supposed to be so common, to avoid clogging the courts.
I accuse MBCook of really heinous threatening things (that i don't dare repeat or more people will feel threatened). Please lock MBCook up until we can prove that MBCook can't possibly be a danger to society.