You Commit Three Felonies a Day
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.
I thought it made the whole piece. It's quite clear to anyone who follows federal cases that this is exactly what is going on, and it is rather obvious why anything that enables this is perverting justice.
(The reason is that "intent" is well defined with respect to murder/manslaughter, but not with newer crimes.)
Here's the statute: http://law.justia.com/arizona/codes/title13/00713.html
This simultaneously increases revenue and endangers everyone on the road.
Speed cameras seem to go through a similar process, but are now (at least where I live) referred to as "saftey cameras" and brightly decorated so that you're slowing down at accident blackspots not getting caught out by sneaky placement.
I can see them positively affecting traffic because I have seen how backed up traffic can get when a cop pulls someone over for a speeding ticket.
Spelling mistakes == commenting from my iPhone.
To make the roads safer, the speed limit needs to be lowered to 25 on city roads. Licenses need to be suspended for running red lights and for speeding.
Instead, the cities just want to make a quick buck off of offenders. (Even this has backfired, as it turns out that cars can't speed, only drivers can, and the Constitution requires that the driver be offered a trial. Oops.)
They increase the frequency of traffic accidents at intersections (both because people are concentrating more on "making the light" than they are "not hitting something" and because people slam on their brakes to prevent running a yellow) and do nothing to make them safer.
Anyway, this problem will hopefully be moot in ten years or so. If cars aren't driving themselves yet, just send a message to individual cars telling them to stop before the intersection. When the ones allowed to continue have cleared the intersection, give another direction a green light. No need to speed to make a yellow or slam on brakes.
Which I'd say can be justified. Very private information that can be revealed by a wiretap and then "leaked" can destroy a life almost as bad as death can. If the former is done with the intent of really messing up somebody's life and the latter is caused by stupidity, I can see how someone would want to punish the wiretapping harder than the car incident.
The specifics here don't matter as much as the fact that two reasonable people can disagree over which crime should be given the higher punishment. There isn't really a concept of absolute wrongness in it, only disagreement.
(On another note, are fines always lighter sentences than prison? Even using some reasonable conversion key. What if you're a poor, unemployed person with no hope of finding a job for quite some time? Being indebted for a long time or serving some prison time?)
Anyway, why are we discussing politics on HN?
I'm indebted to my Econ 101 professor for teaching me that this is not the case. He was discussing the decision "You have a pristine prairie next to a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart wants to pave it to make it a parking lot. What are the pros and cons of this?"
Someone pointed out that, if you turn it into a parking lot, you can never get the prairie back, but if it turns out you really need the parking lot you can make that transformation at a later date. My teacher said "Ah, but after it is Tuesday, you will forever lose the use of the parking lot on Monday if you haven't already built it. You can't ever get that day back."
This concept is widely applicable -- for example, many pro-life folks say the death penalty is irreversible and that this is a strike against it. I happen to be pro-life but am not persuaded by this, because prison is also irreversible. After you've locked someone up for ten years and discovered, whoops, he was innocent, you can free him but you can't free him ten years ago.
(This is a philosophical point with serious policy implications: if you buy it, you'd want to shift your resources from opposing the death penalty qua death penalty to ensuring fair trials generally.)
If I tell you your wife cheated on you with someone else. Is that statement really reversible? You're either going to hate my guts for lying or hate hers for cheating. You may find peace with it, but you can't un-hear that statement.
(And I may be a bit odd here, but I am not the jealous type. If you want to sleep with someone else from time to time, then do so. It's fun.)
So my point is... I'm not even sure what we are arguing about anymore.
Ending a healthy person's life without their consent "can be" less severe than intercepting their email... because life is not always 100% enjoyable? I still don't buy that.
Have you ever been dead before?
They write so many laws, even without considering regulations and State and local laws, that you can't even READ them all, much less understand them. Where do you think the "tyranny of the lawyers" has come from; they've been doing this for decades.