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There needs to be a way of controlling activist judges. Why the court is even able to decide what amount the bail is, is beyond me.

Of course, I'm not even mentioning the part about being thrown in jail for what is tantamount to thought crime. That's a whole 'nother issue.

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EDIT: I'm not sure why my comment has been downvoted? Incase you were confused, I was referring to this here:

"In April, a grand jury in Comal County, Texas, indicted Carter on a charge of making a terroristic threat, and a judge set bail at $500,000."

See, even though the Jury found him guilty, the Judge set the bail enormously high. This kid did NOTHING. He exercised his first ammendment rights, and got a 500k bail for it. The real problem here was the Judge, who gets to set the bail after the fact. I wonder what the jury would have concluded if they had been allowed to decide the bail?

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In reference to your edit - the phrase "activist judge" is a bit of a dogwhistle for conservatism; it's easy to click to downvote before really digesting what you said.

That said, an independent judiciary is an important part of the separation of powers on which American government is based. While I personally find this entire thing reprehensible from soup to nuts, the judge's power to set arbitrary bail really is the way the system is supposed to work (the kid getting beat up in prison is not the way the system is supposed to work - except that plenty of Americans need a lot more civics education and actually do like to think of people getting raped in prison as extrajudiciary punishment for the suspicious).

Also, an indictment is not a ruling of guilt. A grand jury is convened to decide whether there's a case at all. I personally think this grand jury should have their citizenship revoked until they've passed a battery of examinations in what America stands for, but sadly, that's again not the way the system works.

> battery of examinations in what America stands for

I think we should have a refresher on what America does stand for, because I think it has changed quite fundamentally in the last <x> years, regardless of what your political angle is on the subject.

"I pledge allegiance to the wealthy of the United States of America, and to their police force that beats and lies, one Nation under God, unaccountable, with liberty and air travel for few."

So basically what it always stood for then

That's not true at all.

No, not what it stood for. Look at the Declaration of Independence - it explicitly states that people have inherent rights (that kings don't grant the rights) and that those rights are inherent to everybody, not just those in a particular country.

That is quite literally what America stands for, as stated in our own declaration, and in 1776 it was explosively innovative and inspired the entire world.

Unfortunately, we've forgotten that whole rights-belong-to-non-Americans thing, and that's a travesty. You can trace how it happened, and none of it is a happy story.

why not go the whole hog and start thinking in terms of what the whole of humanity stands for and not just America.

it's time to move past territorial / tribal groupings.

for extra brownie points we could start thinking in terms of the whole biosphere.

Sure, everyone's always had an idea of what we should do, but for a while there, the US actually in many ways did it.

These things don't last long though.

Are you serious? Until well after the Civil Rights Act, the US was substantially lagging a ton of countries in liberties and opportunities for your own population, and for pretty much the entire period since the US has done it's best to oppress various other people (assortment of wars, CIA sponsored coups etc.). The US has just been better at marketing itself on a freedom angle based on claimed aspirations that has never been followed through.

The problem is that half the population is below average in terms of mental ability and education.

A bigger problem: the state's attorneys and judges should know about the Bill of Rights, and they are the ones with the actual power here. With such a high bail it appears this particular judgeship was granted erroneously.

> The problem is that half the population is below average in terms of mental ability and education.

Isn't this a problem everywhere, though? Why do we only hear this issue WRT the U.S.? (I freely admit it could just be because I live in the states)

It's the poverty!

People in other countries get healthcare when they need it. They get assistance when they need it. Therefore, they have extra mental cycles to use to consider the reality of politics.

In the US, we make sure our poor people have to work two jobs so they can't stop to do a damn thing about how screwed they are by participating in our democracy.

Rwanda has a basic universal healthcare system. Everyone pays an amount according to their economic status, and everyone gets basic healthcare.

Achieving a lot when you have little would leave one to believe that having lots lets you achieve a lot. I'm some respects the US hasn't managed to achieve much at all. Is this what you mean?

Because the stupid things backwater parts of France do isn't worth making news?

Half of any population is below average on any (and every!) metric. That's why they call it an average. Right?

Actually, wrong: that's called the median (they are the same for distributions which are symmetric around the average like the normale distribution, but not in the general case) EDIT: not "only" symmetric

(not necessarily symmetric)

You're right... fixed

Usually the word average means arithmetic mean, but the median is also an average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

Actually, average can mean median, mode or mean. I was using (I thought obviously..but perhaps not) the median definition. The point stands - it's odd to say that the problem here is that half the people are of below average intelligence. Since that's (roughly) what you'd expect.

The problem instead is that our "rights" are treated as privileges that can be revoked when the powers that be deem it convenient. Our rights should be rights regardless of our intelligence. Though perhaps the responsibility for securing those rights falls most heavily upon the cleverest among us..in which case the problem isn't that there are folks of below average intelligence, it's that those particularly blessed with keen minds aren't doing enough to defend the rights of us all.

Ok, sorry - I just learned that average is used as a synonym for arithmetic mean only in "colloquial language" - I thought it was actually a synonym (probably because in my mother language average is translated to the the word "media", that is "mean"). My mistake.

All modern IQ tests that I am aware of have normal distributions (ie, the mean, median, and mode are all the same) by design. If one of several IQ measures is not your cup of tea for scoring mental ability, that is fine, but I highly suspect that whatever you pick instead will also have a normal distribution.

Not really. Perhaps you have confused different methods of "averaging" (average, mean, etc).

Imagine an "education" scale of 1-20.

If you have 3 persons with 12 and one with 20, then the average is 14 -- and you have MORE than half of the people below average.

Another example I've seen: the average wealth of a room with Bill Gates and a hundred homeless people is a couple hundred million dollars per capita.

And even the mean, if I am not mistaken, can be totally misleading. E.g you get a room with 51 millionaires and 49 homeless people. The mean value would be millions, but it's not exactly representative.

Presumably you mean "median" (i.e. the wealth of the poorest millionaire in your example).

> it appears this particular judgeship was granted erroneously.

This particular judge, Jack Robison, was elected. Repeatedly.

He was also reprimanded by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2009 after he ordered a man jailed for 30 days for calling him a fool (in a public restroom, not in court) — which is self-evidently true. http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/judge-reprimanded-f...

Yeah, true. Thanks for the informative comment.

"found him guilty"

You may have just misspoke but to clarify grand juries do not determine guilt but are used to determine if charges can be brought in the first place.

He was placed in jail for 6 months, so no matter what the technicalities are that seems a lot like a de-facto guilty verdict.

AFAIK, in the less-civilized states it's not expected that most people will pay the entire bail amount directly. The standard course is that they put up 10% or so (and the judge sets the total amount expecting this) and call a privatized "bail bondsman" to put up the rest (and charge a hefty fee). You see, it's more fair this way, because you have a choice of which entity will screw you sans trial.

The 10% is the non-refundable fee. So for a 500k bail, you are out 50k, not something that everyone can do.

I've never understood the logic behind that. As long as you don't violate your bail provisions, why wouldn't all of your bail be refundable?

Because unless you have $500k sitting around, your choices are to sit in jail until people-who-go-home-every-day decide it's time to have a trial, plea, or contract with a private company to loan you the $450k and pay their massive fee. Once you realize how this end of the system works, it's quite hard to tell yourself that the words "innocent until proven guilty" mean anything.

In most of the states where a person will pay a surety bail agent that 10%, the amount (10%) is required by law and not set by the bail company.

The term "hefty fee" implies this is arbitrary or similar to a loan shark.

There are judicial elections. Don't know if this particular position is subject to election.

Almost all positions for judges are subject to partisan election in Texas, from the Court of Criminal Appeals (highest criminal court) to the Texas Supreme Court (highest civil court) down to the Justice of the Peace for a specific precinct. The exception is cities: most cities appoint municipal court judges for two- or four-year terms, as decided by the City Council and per the city's Home Rule charter. Municipal judges are elected in a minority of cities.

Doesn't that lead to judges pandering to the public to get re-elected? Here in Belgium judges are appointed for life (which then has a lot of problems when they're not as competent as they could be, but does offer protection when making unpopular decisions).

Yes, terribly. Our federal judges are appointed for life. Our state judges are mostly elected, which makes state prosecutions in places like Texas a clusterfuck. And lots of people defend the states' rights to be retarded, because federalism.

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