A man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
A Bank Robber, 45
'They originally charged me with murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery, but I'm really just a bank robber with really bad luck. You see, my buddy and me were robbing this bank, and when we come outside there is a cop waiting across the street and he starts shooting. He shoots my buddy, but I don't know he's dead so I pull him into the car and drive away. When they bust me, they charge me with murder, kidnapping, and the robbery.
I ask my attorney, "How the hell can they do that? All I did was rob a bank"
He says the law says if you are committing a felony and someone dies, a bank teller has a heart attack or something, you can be charged with murder. He tells me they charged me with murder because my buddy got killed.
He says the law says when I pulled my buddy into the car and drove off, I kidnapped him because I was taking a body from the scene of a crime. That's how they got me for kidnapping.
He says the law says that I can be charged with all three even though I didn't kill nobody and I didn't kidnap nobody.
I say the law sucks.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law
"Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated."
Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?
This guy tried to help his buddy. He should be charged with what he actually is responsible for. His buddy sealed his own fate.
If he asks that in general, I would think being a Good Samaritan would take precedence over lots of crimes. For example: speeding or driving through a red light on your way to a hospital with a heavily wounded passenger, or jumping into a pool where it is forbidden to swim to save someone from drowning IMO should not be punished.
Felonies may be different. For example, pulling a huge man in the line of fire to save two others? Highly questionable, IMO. On the other hand, this article seems to indicate that pulling someone from the ledge he wants to jump of or even preventing someone from falling out of a tree legally is kidnapping. If so, I would hope one can't go to prison for such acts.
As long as the decision is up to prosecutors, no.
I don't think any jurisdiction has a "Good Samaritan" law which makes it so that trying to provide assistance after the fact negates liability one would have for criminal acts that make you liable for the injury in the first place, including effects of injury that the attempt to provide assistance was intended to prevent but failed to.
If you don't have representation you basically get shafted.
lots and lots of these
The same stupidity is on display in states that don't elect their judges or prosecutors.
The problem is that there is no incentive for actual justice. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor pay for the incarceration. Nor do they care for how long the individual is incarcerated.
Might be nice if they were given a limited number of years to distribute among their convicts. A little scarcity might to do the system some good.
That's brilliant!
Calculate the number of judge sentence years based on prison places, want harsher sentences build more prisons, tie the cost of incarceration directly to judges sentencing.
I say committing major felonies sucks. Doesn't matter if he thought bank robbery was "harmless", it is and the consequences demonstrate why. Throw the law library at him.
It's not different than if I were speeding recklessly, zoomed by some old person who gets scared, runs off the road and dies.
Maybe they shouldn't be charged with murder, but maybe manslaughter? Their actions directly contributed to the death of someone.
It's vastly different. The old person in your example is not a willing part of your crime.
Frankly the concept is absurd. Innocent bystanders and responding law enforcement that are killed in the commission of the crime can be said to have been murdered, but willing participants have died primarily as a result of their own actions, which is not murder under any sensible definition.
In other words, you and I could agree that if you don't pay me the $1000 I loaned you, I can break your legs, but I'll still get charged with assault if I do it.
The euphemism is "suicide by cop", yeah.
>This seems like a perfect example of felony murder.
When the deceased was committing a felony themselves, why can't they take 100% of their own felony murder charge? We don't need multiple people to face full consequences for a single act.
If you view punishment retributively, as a blood price that must be paid, that argument makes sense -- when you have multiple people available to take the cost, only one of them should need to (of course, if you view it that way, its hard to see how the person who died can, if felony murder has a blood price, be said to pay it.)
But, while retribution is no doubt part of the basis of punishments in the American system, its not the sole basis. If two people act together to commit a murder directly, we punish them both as principles. If two people act together to commit a felony in which someone is one of them -- whether or not it is one of them -- why shouldn't both be fully liable (whehter or not both can be punished) for felony murder?
A crime doesn't necessarily have only one principal, and when it has more than one, we don't generally only punish one. And if it has multiple principals and one of them is not subject to the jurisdiction of the court, or immune to punishment for some other reason, that doesn't absolve the other principals of punishment. I don't see why felony murder, presuming that we should have it at all, should be an exception to that rule.
1) "It's A's fault that B got killed"
2) "It's B's fault he got himself killed"
I doubt you will get much agreement with #1 (I would expect responses like "did A talk B into it?") and I'm pretty sure you will get lots of agreement with #2. The law (effectively #1) is incongruous with our prevailing notions of morality and responsibility.
Its literally a textbook example -- its one of the standard examples used in teaching the felony murder rule.
The "justice" system is completely out of control.
[1] http://www.denverda.org/News_Release/Releases/2006%20Release...
Others share audio via calls from prison[1].
* Steal a radio, you're stealing from a person.
* Run a Ponzi scheme, you're stealing from a group of people.
* Counterfeit a nation's currency, you are stealing from the people of that country.
So, to answer your question: Sure, counterfeiting is just theft.
And Hitler was just a killer.
Scale matters.
I think you got to the heart of the matter when you wrote "Scale matters". Murdering millions of people is a bigger deal than murdering one person. Theft of millions of dollars is worse than theft of one dollar. The problem I have is the distinction is made not based on scale but by the means of theft. I suppose the idea is that is is worse to steal one dollar each from a million people than a million dollars from one person, but I disagree with that conclusion.
I totally understand how somebody might look at that situation and say "gee, he did only rob a bank because the guy who died was his accomplice", but at the same time... he robbed a bank! Had he not robbed it, that life might not have been lost and a body would not have been taken from the scene of a crime.
If you want to argue that the quality of one's lawyer plays a large part in the charges, hell, I agree with you and I think that sucks. But, I'm not about to toss out the legal system because a criminal had a shitty time in court. Fuck this guy.
If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive...
As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.
>As someone who was once an illegal immigrant
This is perfectly analogous. People in countries illegally sometimes engage in identity theft, illegal labor, and a variety of other things so they can stay in the country. The fact that someone "had to" so they could remain illegally in a country isn't a mitigating circumstance. I'm not at all insinuating it should escalate until you get shot, but if you get caught, you're culpable for every law you broke. Why would you not be?
Like, this is the simplest thing in the world. If you don't want to leave your friend's body behind if he gets shot while robbing a bank, don't rob a bank. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway. It's a threshold that everyone can meet. If you take the body, well, now you've committed another crime. I actually think that law makes a lot of sense.
Years ago there was a movie review site called moviecritic.com (a demo site for early collaborative filtering technology). After you rated a movie from 1 to 10, it would show you your rating for several other movies and ask you if you're sure. Half the time you would think "wait a minute, no, I really didn't mean to rate this better than The Shawshank Redemption" and adjust the rating.
A guy robbed a bank. His friend who died understood the risk he was taking; his death is morally "on his own head", even if the "unlucky" robber may have a hand in it. The punishment for this needs to be put next to the punishments for "violent rape", "assault+battery", "willful murder" and adjusted accordingly. Otherwise the whole system feels unfair and arbitrary.
I don't think anyone is suggesting anything other than reform of how we prosecute laws in this country, there is an obvious imbalance at play here and cases like this highlight the problem.
Second.. sure, fuck that guy; but what about his family? His children? The community? Just because you put one person in jail does not mean that suffering and loss ends there.
What is the function of the justice system? To fulfill our base needs for revenge? Or is it a tool to improve society? If it's the latter, then "fuck that guy" is not a useful response.
What does it matter? He robbed a bank! Someone died! He chose to break his contract with society. If I did that, I would expect zero considerations be made for my two kids. It is my responsibility to never put them in such a position.
Who's going to raise them? A single mother, if they're lucky. Think she's going to have an easy time re-marrying with an ex-con husband? How about getting a good job in the era of background checks? Think she was highly educated to begin with?
Taxpayers at large are going to foot most of bill for this domestic disaster. Further, these children are now more likely to end up in jail themselves. Now society gets to pay another $30,000 a year per child to house, feed and care for another inmate.
This isn't strictly touchy-feely stuff here, there's a hard cost to society when you jail people without any thoughts towards true justice. It's stupid, ineffective and perverse.
What is true justice?
Whatever justice is, it cannot be forfeiting our own empathy and humanity.
I'm sticking with "fuck this guy".
If you really want to bear a cross, I can think of a few better candidates for your poster boy of injustice.
Where was ours when we drove him to that crime?
> I can think of a few better candidates for your poster boy of injustice.
Unlike some people, I don't feel it is morally appropriate to pick and choose who gets justice.
And I don't disagree with you! I hate injustice like you're referring to as well. But injustice is not some exchangeable capital. We can't correct one by neglecting to punish another.
And it seems that this type of systemic overcompensation is exactly what is going on in your justice system.
I wish that persecutors would use same zeal to persecute all the crimes. Including police crime and white collar crime. Then, perhaps it would dawn on you that such random and strict distribution of justice is no justice at all.
Your argument is moot.
What if his friend wasn't dead, but in fact died in the car as he was driving away from the scene? What if his friend's life could've been saved by treatment at the scene? Moreover, did he have a plan for saving his friends life or was he simply trying to get them both away from the police? Furthermore, being charged with something is not the same as being found guilty of it. The quote begins, "They originally charged me," so I'm guessing some of the charges were dropped? Even then, it comes down to a jury to decide guilt.
I binge-watched a bunch of prison documentaries recently (in particular, Into the Abyss and the series by Louis Theroux are very good). They shed a lot of light on the terrible aspects of the U.S. prison system. Interviews with inmates, though, also make it clear that a lot of these people:
a) Know next to nothing about the legal system outside of their own interpretation of whatever their lawyer/judge has told them. Think of explaining programming to someone who doesn't regularly use technology, and then they go and explain it to someone else.
b) Maintain their innocence even in the face of extremely damning physical and forensic evidence to the contrary. Into the Abyss has a great example of this.
I have fundamental problems with the adversarial justice system, but it's nonetheless important to be critical of what convicts say about their own situations. They're obviously going to be biased - even if they are innocent.
This is another deplorable aspect of the US justice system. The vast majority (something like 95%) of convictions are not from jury trials, but from plea bargains. Piling on charges is one way prosecutors force plea bargains on suspects.
It's likely that the prosecutor charged this guy with everything he could find in order to induce him to plea to a lesser charge to avoid the hassle and uncertainty of a trial.
But hey, private prison operators need to make money and police/DA/any part of the justice system profits from being "tough on crime"...
Thank God I'm German, even if you end up killing someone you'll at most get 15 years (okay, there are some exceptions, but they're literally exceptions, not like US where exceptions tend to become standards).
It is interesting to note that the judge made good comments about how unjust this seemed, but was unable to do anything about it. That says a lot about our judicial system.
Probably because felons don't have the right to vote. So no politician or anyone else cares much.
http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2014/08/do-convicted-felons...
In most states, voting rights are restored upon completion of the sentence. In Maine and Vermont, prisoners have the right to vote.
Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia make the loss of the vote permanent.
Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Germany/Uni...
Murder rate for 2011 (Homicide rate per year per 100,000 inhabitants): Germany: 0.86. USA: 5.
That's nearly 6x as many murders per capita in the USA than Germany.
We lock people up as a punishment just like your parents may have sent you to your room when you were acting up. We do it under the thinking of they won't do it again once they've paid their debt but that thinking is flawed on SO many level. Among them are:
1. Prison does NOT reform people in fact it pushes many deeper into a life of crime
2. Even after they have "paid their debt to society" they are still ostracised and disadvantaged
3. Unlike your parents there is no mercy/compassion in our judicial system AFAICT or if there is it's only directed at upper-class white males....
I don't know if it's valid, but it certainly a reason why we lock people up. "An eye for an eye" is a universal principle and I assume victims expect some type of revenge. Maybe that's something we should refrain from in a perfect world, but I don't think we're there yet!
I think that concept is fundamentally flawed... I don't think it's sustainable or really fair.
Vengeance is never a good agenda. Eye for an eye is an universal sadist principle.
How much they have varied from the Victorian method of prisons depends on the country, from Scandinavia at the one end,to the UK at the other.
No, it's not. It's a common desire, but it is not universal. And plenty of victims of various crimes don't want revenge, but to just put the whole affair behind them.
It's one of the established reasons: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. The following are all from Wikipedia:
----
Deterrence is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from offending.
Incapacitation in the context of sentencing philosophy refers to the effect of a sentence in terms of positively preventing (rather than merely deterring) future offending.
Rehabilitation is the re-integration into society of a convicted person and the main objective of modern penal policy.
Retributive justice is a theory of justice that considers punishment, if proportionate, to be the best response to crime. When an offender breaks the law, justice requires that they forfeit something in return.
----
The U.S. certainly puts more weight to retribution - in my opinion, too much weight - while European justice systems are more interested in rehabilitation, sometimes being ridiculously naive.
Regardless, the length of the prison sentence has no bearing on the mourning process.
The sad truth is the American people simply do not care. Period. If you are a criminal you are a nobody and you get everything you deserve in the eyes of many Americans. People sit and rot in prison for the stupidest of reasons or technicalities and then when they get out we are surprised when they sometime return to a life of crime? They don't know anything else and the rules of their parole are often impossible to adhere to without support. Like having to interview for jobs they know they won't get just to satisfy their parole terms. We really need to get more people out of the prisons and back on the streets with reasonable parole programs. However this is the "terrorism" argument all over again, no politician wants to sign his/her name to something like this because ONE single fuckup will have it all blow up in their face and potentially ruin their career....
Full Disclosure: I work for a company that, among other things, provides electronic monitoring to jurisdictions as an alternative to incarceration. That said any views expressed here are my own and not that of my employer.
30 years ago, the Cold War was still in full swing. Mutually Assured Destruction was still something people were afraid of. The world wide web was still about 10 years away. USA for Africa's "We Are The World" was just about to hit #1 in the charts. Big hair and legwarmers were fashionable. Half the people that use this site hadn't even been born yet. 30 years is an incredibly long time.
Actually, I was thinking about it a bit more this morning, and found another interesting 30 year stretch: from the declaration of war in WWI to the close of WWII in Europe (VE Day) was about a month short of 31 years. Taking it to VP Day is about 1 month into 31 years.
So both world wars and everything that happened in-between took 'only' 30-ish years. :)
This guy is a good argument against these long sentences, it doesn't make any sense for a society to keep this guy until he dies in prison for taxpayer money (not even considering the cruelty of it). Especially when he didn't commit a murder.
If you're robbing a place and your punishment for being caught is effectively life in prison, what reason do you have not to murder all the potential witnesses to improve your odds of getting away with the crime? All you have is morality, and I don't want to rely on the morality of criminals.
I know that the deterrent effect of prison on criminals is highly debatable, but if somebody is robbing me, I don't want all of the incentives given to him to point towards murdering me too.
That said, 10-15 is more than enough for this kind of crime.
Indeed. When he gets two-three murders worth of time without murdering anyone, you really have to question the proportionality of the whole thing.
They both definitely deserved jail time. I'm certain the crimes had an impact on the people they robbed and threatened.
And I agree, 10-15, MAYBE up to 20 is proportionate. 90 years is not.
And it's not only from a moral standpoint - the economics of it are ridiculous, too. The social harm done from two robberies is not worth the cost of locking someone up until they die.
Really? I thought it was about correcting/reforming.
Joking aside, I think that using prisons just for isolation is a waste of tax payer money.
Just think about at the case at hand, we are wasting the money needed to keep this guy in jail for another 8 decades with no actual reasons.
edit: fix grammar
In fact the only place where I saw "Correctional Facility" was in US-movies and series, I thought it was some fictional name or something like that.
(It is also clearly apparent that some criminals are unreformable - telling the difference a priori remains the hard part).
Yes, he's been reformed. Just not in a good way. Not in a way that does anything to try to fit him back into society.
Maybe everybody should go to prison for a while to stop crime before it even starts.
Disproportionate penalties may be as likely to harden them as reform them. What you get out isn't a repentant model citizen. Unless your goal is to let these people rot and die and just release corpses.
For me, "the less you discourage" reads less clearly than "the more you encourage". I realise that the two aren't identical in meaning, but I would have chosen the latter because a compounded minimization ("the less you don't do x") is generally less immediately clear than a maximization ("the more you do x").
This is compounded by your opening of "Another side of this". This can mean "another aspect of the problem you describe which agrees with your point" but it can also mean "another aspect of how sentencing should work that comes to a different conclusion". For many, the latter is more intuitive ("two sides to every story" etc etc).
Not passing judgement on how you worded your post, just explaining why someone might misread it.
Maybe I should take it down -- initially I thought you were talking about discouraging crime w/ a big punishment, but in fact you were talking about discouraging a criminals restraint because they're already going to get nailed in a big way...
I think I'll take mine down and let your original post stand.
Edit: or I'll just leave it so the flow is preserved -- there's a thread here now that explains everything. Let the downvotes fit the crime though, please ;)
Actually it makes it easier ... there is upper limit on how much you could punish a person. And if the penalties for stealing pack of gum and high treason are the same - well ... why bother with only the first.
I would not be so sure about that. We, humans, are extremely creative when it comes to hurt each other.
In Heat, Al Pacino's character summarizes this attitude in a quick line (paraphrase): "Once it escalated to a murder-one for all of them, why not pop guard number two because ... what difference does it make?"
The scene is an armored truck holdup and a loose-cannon member of the robbers' crew shoots one of the two guards (By accident? Or is he a psychopath?). After this, the second guard needs to die, as a living witness, because the entire crew is already exposed to first-degree murder charges. Simple risk management.
(Great movie, too. If anyone else is reading this and wonders wtf it's all about, go check it out.)
There was an ancient Chinese general, who lost a battle. The punishment for failure was death. The punishment for mutiny was also death. The general learned of this, and lead his soldiers in a revolt.
I have a problem with a single mother spending a night jail over an unpaid parking ticket.
In Canada, you can kill someone and get only six years.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/killer-of-thai-welder...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/glowatski-sentenced-to-six-yea...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/northern-sask-man...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/kenny-gr...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/ryan-hickey-sent...
Edit: I mean get caught, do my time and be on my way.
Also, in any country in which the justice system is broken, you can murder people and get away with it by getting a job as an executioner. What your state considers a lawful execution is regarded as murder in the eyes of the sane world, and so you're getting away with murder.
Public unions in many states (California being the major example) lobby for longer sentences all the time. Many spend more money than private companies. It's a humans acting selfishly problem, not a corporate problem.
The profit incentive we use for prisons (occupancy number) is the wrong profit incentive. We should pay on capacity and recidivism numbers (bonus after some number of years).
It reminds me a bit of something that happened to the brother of a former colleague of mine. He was an animal rights activist that allegedly, in protest, set off a bomb at an animal testing facility. The bomb went off at a time when no one was there. If he'd done it a few years earlier, it wouldn't have received much attention. But it happened shortly after 9/11 and the sentiment in the country was to stop terrorism at all costs. And so he's been on the FBI's most wanted list ever since. Don't get me wrong, setting off bombs is a serious matter, but I have a hard time believing that a stupid juvenile prank that only resulted in property damage puts someone in the top 10 most dangerous people the FBI could be pursuing.
Timing can be a bitch and the justice that someone receives is often more about the vengeance that society is yearning for rather than what the offender deserves.
The lives of the victim and those around the victim are forever altered, yet under German laws, the life of the murderer can go back on track and conviction be effectively hidden...
Private prisons have a strong profit motive to increase the number of people behind bars until we have the kind of situation we have today in the U.S. These are folks who can afford to pay lobbyists to create the kind of sentencing that leads to 98 years for 2 robberies, and criminalize non-violent or victimless 'crimes.'
Here's a Last Week Tonight segment on the broken prison system in the U.S.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pz3syET3DY
That being said the US puts far too many people in jail, often for far too long of sentences.
I tried to find some comparable statistics and I found that 5-10 % of all 15-20 year old males in Sweden have been -suspected- for a crime. I doubt that all of them were actually arrested.
A much bigger influence is probably things like prison guard unions. They have the same sort of profit motive to increase the number of people behind bars, and that applies just as much (probably more) to state-run prisons.
Wow. Just wow...
It's a very sad thing to read.
The COP program was done away with, but someone should revisit those horrific sentences given to teens that effectively take their entire lives away. Guilty, yes. But 90+ years for a case where no one got hurt? Wow.
If you are in America, you should try and contact that governor his family is lobbying. I would, but I'm not living in this country.
Edit: and edit ninja'd...
But assuming "equal" charges, is involving three people 3x as bad as involving one? Is "forcing people to move" 2x as bad as just robbing them?
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/07/unfreed
A bit more than simply asking them to move to another room.
Makes you start to think about what the proportionality of these sentences actually work out in the eyes of the victim of the crime.
In some way the victim wants them awarded the biggest punishment possible, but at the same time that punishment comes out of their pocket in taxes that go to keep this person behind bars for an unreasonable amount of time.
I don't know what the numbers are but that sounds awfully expensive to me and if I was an employee at a video store that got robbed I really don't think I would like all that additional burden on the economy as retribution for a few minutes of fear.
According to Wikipedia [0] the "intentional homicide" rate in the US is 4.7, in the UK 1.0 and in Germany 0.8. Shouldn't those numbers be reversed if the European system was releasing "avowedly unrepentant murderers" back onto the streets?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
You might as well infer that the european rate is lower because we release murderers.
The statistics you quote don't support either view, I believe.
And why is he not rubberstamping such when the prison situation in US is cruel, sadly not unusual and definitely unjust.
2) You are mistaken if you believe all or even a substantial minority of the governors would ever agree with your views in this matter.
1) That governors as a whole have these powers.
2) That "hints about their power" would prompt them to act in the manner he wishes.
The governors don't need hints about their power in this area, they are well aware of it. They don't fail to exercise it as he wants them to because they need a "hint", they fail to exercise it as he wants them to because they do not agree with him.
I'm not addressing the thread as a whole. I'm addressing this little corner of it. I'm under no obligation to address the thread as a whole in every comment I make, and doing so would be both pointless and tiring.