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  It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of 
  people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that 
  wouldn't tug the heart strings as much.

Perhaps we could aspire to have a law that works right in outlier cases, not just on average?

One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.

That said, with three strikes laws, you don't need to resort to sob stories. The statistics are evidence enough: about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent offenses. That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.

No, that's not inevitable. That's why judges should have discretion. They can look at the outliers and figure out the circumstances during sentencing.

>One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.

What if you are the next edge case in this system? with nobody to remember that you even exist, if its fair..

Just one person beiyng this edge case is enough to put the whole system down.. as every engineer knows this is what we call a bug, and can make the whole system irrelevant, and work agains its own purpose..

And that is what happens to the justice system.. the worst thing is that its all about property.. its f#$% stupid.. its unproportional, and minimize that is pure lack of humanity.. and its the real reason why things are still working that way.. because if you are not one of those "edge cases" you really dont care

And thats so many human lifes wasted, not only the people behind bars, but also their families, how they kids will grow up.. how can they support their families..

No, one person being the edge case is definitely not enough to put the whole system down.

If we get, say, 1000 edge cases every year - then it's completely acceptable unless you can provide another system that will have much less edge cases. And if you're not sure, you don't switch until you are sure. If you simply "switch off" the system, then you get random 'mob justice' which whill have much more problems than the current situation.

The big difference here is, mandatory minimum sentencing is an aberration which is engineered from the start to create more injustice. There is a reason that in a normal case, sentencing takes the history of the individual and the circumstances of the crime into account, instead of following a rulebook saying "Theft: 5 years in prison, no early release".

Three-strike laws exist to quench the mob's appetite for blood (as public execution is sadly no longer acceptable, the mob has to settle for life sentences), and get politicians get elected on a fearmongering & repression platform. But on a humane level, it's not far removed from judicial amputations.

It's a justice system. Justice requires doing something sane with edge cases. The three strikes laws don't do that.

Go and make a rational case to voters and tell me how that works out. Rational people already know. I suspect this is to convince the irrational.

Rational people have no idea the justice system is so messed up.

> That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.

The problem is not convincing rational thinking people. Are there really some nontrivial group of informed rational people without an ownership stake in a private prison company who genuinely believe that three strikes laws are good policy?

The problem is not the rational thinking people at all. The problem is politics and rational ignorance. It's the swarms of busy people who don't have the time or the education to understand the statistics, who consequently go back and vote for the people who enacted these laws.

I get where you're coming from. The world would be a better place if all policy decisions were based on evidence and reasoning rather than emotion. But when you have the prison lobby heaping the corpses of teenage girls on their side of the scale, you need to put something visceral on the other side to shock complacent people into realizing that something is very wrong here.

Politics is a popularity contest. It's important that the side with the best argument wins, but how do you get that to happen when people have limited time and limited resources and the winner is decided by voting rather than correctness?

If the last 25 years or so have taught me anything, it's that politics is _never_ about rational, thinking people voting for their own best interest. It's pretty much just emotion and/or fear for the vast, vast majority (of the tiny minority of people who actually bother to vote).

Irrational emotion bred these laws, they will only go away via the same pathetic process. The ACLU is just playing the game with their appeal to emotion.

The biggest problem with broad judicial discretion is that you get wildly varying outcomes with identical facts depending on which judge you get and even what kind of mood he's in.

If anything the system still has too much discretion (in the hands of police and prosecutors) that lead predictably to discriminatory outcomes.

The problem with restricting judicial discretion is that a judge always has a living breathing person in front of him or her, and a sentencing committee never does. This leads to inflated sentences across the board.

If only we could have a system where a real, live flesh and blood person could make decisions regarding punishment upon a guilty conviction... we could call these people, I know, judges.. they could judge on a case by case basis and make appropriate decisions.

I know, now the problem lies with these judges having poor decision making skills... if only there were a process to removing or overriding their decisions.. like an "appeals" process.. or a way of electing new judges and "voting" them in and out of office...

Neah, that's crazy talk.. we need absolute maximum/minimum sentencing guidelines like three strikes so we can keep those privatized prisons full, and making money.

instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.

People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing.

> people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing

Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.

It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.

I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics.

The ACLU, for example, was a leading plaintiff working to get the Citizens United ruling in favor of freedom of speech including corporate advocacy. The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.

And the NSA reform bills in the Congress have about equal support from both parties.

>The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.

Could you tell me specifically what definition of "strong supporter" you're using here? I can't think of any reasonable one that would make your claim true. Supporter, maybe.

But a "strong supporter" is not someone who endorses a watered down version of the Second Amendment, and then spends zero effort defending infringements of that.

Disagreeing with your interpretation of the Second Amendment does not mean they do not support civil rights. Nor does spending their money and time defending civil rights that don't have massive organizations devoted to defending them.

Yeah, I get that the ACLU's actions regarding the 2nd Amendment are defensible.

That wasn't the topic.

The topic was the claim that the ACLU is a "strong supporter" of the second amendment. Do you know a definition of "strong supporter" that is appropriate for the ACLU's actions regarding the Second Amendment?

No, I don't want to hear about how great the ACLU is.

No, I don't want to hear about the ACLU really does support civil rights.

No, I don't want to hear about how their position on the 2nd amendment is reasonable.

No, I don't want to hear about all the other people who can protect the second amendment.

I want something responsive to my question: in what sense is the ACLU not just a "supporter" but a "strong supporter" of the Second Amendment?

Don't have anything to say about that? Then please stay out of the discussion rather than changing topics and blurring the issues. Thanks.

>Don't have anything to say about that? Then please stay out of the discussion rather than changing topics and blurring the issues. Thanks.

The topic of this thread is actually that we have a lot of people serving life in prison for non-violent crimes.

Your post is now 8ish levels deep and asking people to prove that the ACLU is a strong supporter of 2nd amendment rights.

This seems like a pretty big topic change and blurring of the issues.

I think they're a strong supporter of the Second Amendment as per the way they interpret it; they have filed a number of briefs in support of cases that fit their definition.

Let's stop with the farce: your complaint is that you don't like their interpretation, and so you choose to change the topic and blur the issue on a completely different thread to grind that ax of yours.

No, my complaint is that there's a difference between "supporter" and "strong supporter", and that if the latter is to have any meaning at all, the ACLU doesn't meet it.

How do you differentiate a "supporter" from a "strong supporter"? If I firmly believed that the First Amendment only protects pro-government speech, and filed the occasional legal brief in defense of those prosecuted under this interpretation, would that make me a "strong supporter" of the First Amendment? Would you talk about how crazy wicked cool it is that a nutty right-winger like me paradoxically has a thing for protecting the first amendment?

Or, to avoid the issue of weak interpretations of amendments, how about if I had the "normal" 1st amendment views, and had a "pro-Bill of Rights" group that spent only a token amount of effort protecting infringements on speech (or the other 1A stuff), and never to represent any such client? Still a "strong" supporter? Or just a "supporter"?

In a smaller example, the ACLU recently supported my father-in-law's small church in its suit against a local government ordinance restricting their ability to pass out literature on public sidewalks. Religious proselytizing usually falls more under the domain of the right than the left.

People sometimes like to paint their side as "for freedom" and the other side as "wants to restrict you", but the reality is far more complicated, changing issue-by-issue and occasionally covering legitimate tradeoffs where both sides might be considered "for freedom".

> biases towards the left wing

The ACLU Is a Conservative Organization - Noam Chomsky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tebAFbBb0gQ

I think the problem is that modern conservatives have gone so far to the right that organizations which are traditionally conservative are now considered left wing.

   Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where 
    they might wander into a felony conviction

Ohh I think you should be shocked at the number of felonies a person could commit on the course of everyday life. Felony is not just used for serious crimes. Almost every state have what are referred to a "catch all" felonies that can be brought against just about any one at any time if you piss off the right person in power.

dont fool yourself into think the legal system is anything other than a tool for oppression and control

what felony conviction can you get in the course of regular life? I do not have a single friend who was threatened with one much less was convicted.

It's really not that complicated.

Piss off the right person, and you may find yourself getting pulled over on some deserted road where officer Clancy "discovers" a felonious amount of a controlled substance concealed in your car or on your person.

I guess your life is way more interesting than mine. You can also add that NSA will tap your phone/email/web activity and find child porn, CIA will track all your foreign trips to find that you talked to Bin Laden and PETA will report that you feloniously tortured puppies.

Vast majority of white/asian people in this country are so far removed from that life that chance of getting underserved felony is as likely as getting hit by lightning. It can happen but definitely not three times in the row.

That is because the Vast majority of white/asian people are simple sheeple doing what their masters in government tell them to do, never rocking the boat, never expressing any opinions.

When government says Jump, they respond with "How high master" , the government says "Give me 50% of your labor" they say "Yes Master"

The vast majority of people, not even white/asian, just people, are useless sheep being lead complacently to slaughter

Oh? And I suppose you're different than the rest...

instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics

When that starts working I'm sure advocacy groups and politicians might give it a try.

You're construing the facts against the convicted. You didn't even finish the sentence you quoted. After he went to jail, that guy turned his life around and became a productive valuable member of society. They say he killed someone accidentally because there's an important distinction between accidental and intentional homicide, not because it's an easy mistake to make. He's exactly the kind of edge case that shows the stupidity of three strikes laws. Instead of being an irredeemable criminal, he was a criminal who actually showed clear signs of rehabilitation. Really not someone who should be shoved in jail forever at the taxpayer's expense.

I agree. While I sympathize for the people in the stories, the publication by ACLU is much like typical spinning of facts done by marketing firms and politicians.

> Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.

AFAICT, it's about neurological differences, not racial or cultural differences. White people with low IQ or poor impulse control get shafted just as hard, they are just a smaller proportion of the population. Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color.

"Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color."

I thought it really funny to be so "politically correct" when speaking of black people, yet quite happy to refer to "people with less color" as "trailer trash."