public_defender

I couldn't agree with this more, but it is mostly relevant to criminal cases and I think that almost all of the commenters here are thinking about civil cases.

Of course I agree with that. It's not an argument for relying more heavily on confession "evidence."

This is not true. Many states have what is called a corpus delicti rule, which requires that a confession be corroborated by other evidence in order to sustain a conviction. I am inclined to assert that this is actually the law in most US states, but I haven't researched it.

They blow up an orbital ring structure in Consider Phlebas and it definitely leaves one wondering who thought it was a good idea to build it in the first place.

FYI you cannot use ChromeOS without a Google account. You also cannot log out of chrome on ChromeOS.

Texas is probably required to track and publish the data as the result of a well-founded accusation that the arrest -> trial -> execution pipeline is racist.

Murder.

I hope you enjoyed the word cloud. I'll send you my bill.

Looks like lifetime memberships (mentioned in sibling comments) are a special offering.

https://home.omg.lol/info/lifetime-addresses

I have been thinking of setting up a pi4 as a wifi AP. Can you comment on the hardware performance? I am worried that the range or throughput might be poor, and thinking I might need to use an Intel ax200 or similar.

> working out of the box with Fedora is the same as being in the mainline (Linus) kernel.

That's not right. For example, in my case with wifi the microcode was named incorrectly and one of the other configs needed to be updated, but the drivers were there. Nobody has said what the problem is/is not in Fedora.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to confuse hardware support (e.g. drivers) for "working out of the box" with a particular distro. I have a CM4. It worked out of the box with RPi OS, but needed some hacking to get working with Alpine. The important thing is that it was possible to pull some configs from RPi OS to set up wifi on Alpine. The drivers were all in both kernels, so I assume they were in upstream, but had no reason to check.

I think the point of GP is that some hardware on these SBCs has no open source drivers and you can't get them, which is way different.

Also, again maybe I don't understand something, but the RPi OS is not "bastardized" in any special way. The whole point of the Linux ecosystem is that you bastardize things. It's actually good that there is a distro customized for RPi and that it submits some changes upstream but not all, right? I think GP was saying that they didn't want to depend on some weird hacks the manufacturer did to get closed hardware to work, which again is different.

1) It was a petty criminal matter.

2) All the advertisement bluster in the world melts away at the arrival of the first subpoena, search warrant, or national security letter.

I'm not saying that there must be no NordVPN logs, but I am saying that if they existed and they were subpoenaed, it would be really, really surprising if Nord didn't immediately turn them over.

I'm sorry this happened to you.

It can happen that way. It can also happen another way where knowing about him isn't enough to be excused. It depends.

The upside is establishing a counter-narrative in the media. The hope is to inoculate the general public with the story of your defense, so that people who have been exposed to your defense theory are more likely to be on your jury. I'm not vouching for the strategy, but it's far from (legal) suicide.

> I can swear to you that innocence act fools no one except people outside the field.

Full agree. But when I see this, I assume his target market is the single juror at his criminal trial who needs to buy it in order to prevent a conviction.

Edit: Unless it's a Bahamas jury trial (for a crime not punishable by death), in which case, he will need to convince four out of nine jurors to prevent a conviction.

Thanks. This is a good read.

> how many were petit larceny cases that resulted in jail time? How much jail time?

I don't think I've seen anyone get a jail sentence for a shoplifting petit larceny in New York. However, people commonly serve jail time before sentencing in these cases. There are two major causes: arrests and bail.

The DA statement in the article you cite says that people should be issued a summons for shoplifting rather than be arrested. It is true that this should happen, but a lot of police don't seem to agree with it and they have the power to arrest. I have seen more petit larcenies in DATs than under arrest at arraignment, but it's actually a pretty close call. People who are arrested can spend a few days in jail until they are arraigned.

At arraignment, the person will be released unless bail is set. Bail cannot be set in most misdemeanors in NY after bail reform. However regarding shoplifting, the legislature has passed the "harm over harm" carve out (referenced earlier) to allow a prosecutor to ask for bail if someone is, among other things, repeatedly accused of shoplifting. Having bail set in a misdemeanor like this is a big deal because a lot of people will serve more jail time waiting for a plea offer than would have been the sentence.

Regarding discretion to dismiss, this is a nuanced issue. Line prosecutors, unlike police, have astonishingly little autonomy. More specifically there is usually freedom to be more punitive but not less punitive. There are instances where discretion is pre-delegated and the prosecutor in arraignments can dismiss a case if they see a reason this would be a good idea, but this is extremely rare. What I was saying above is that petit larceny is not such a crime. Of course there are other ways to dismiss cases later in the process, but those require more work and are available to fewer people.

Anyway my original point, which I will stick to, was that shoplifting is not deprioritized or unprosecuted by the NYC DAs. They treat it as seriously as anything, and to my mind more seriously than they should.

It could be wrong, I have no idea from a statistical prospective. You would have to analyze the people who are arrested and figure out what are the mortality rates in those narrow demographics, which is not my field. We can assume maybe 20 people will die on Riker's this year[0] our of ~5865[1], so it's not a low rate. I am mostly motivated to counter the "people better off in jail" narrative, which is horrible and pernicious.

Another thing is that your hypothetical minimum security facility does not exist in NYC and is not going to be built, so we are dealing with Riker's for all pretrial confinement unless you are a child or very mentally ill.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/article/rikers-deaths-jail.html

[1] https://vera-institute.shinyapps.io/nyc_jail_population/

In polite company we say "lawyer."

> Aren't most shoplifters not even caught?

Maybe? I would tend to believe that but it seems impossible to know. I think companies tend to argue something like shrinkage == theft and theft > arrests, but that's pretty suspect since there are many other ways that inventory goes missing.

As to your other point, I think it's a myth that people lose faith in governmental administration and fail to report crime in this context. Maybe that happens with things like sexual violence, but not here where property owners have every economic reason to report theft without considering police availability or effectiveness.

I agree that police don't investigate crime like this (in cities), but in the corporate context they don't need to. This field is dominated by private investigation and security. People are detained with dubious legality by the "loss prevention" employee until police show up, then the store hands over 4k video of the person stuffing baby formula in their pants and walking out of the store.

This is correct in the sense that the police have the ability to "let someone off with a warning," or loss prevention/the cashier can look the other way, but my statement applies to any case where someone gets a ticket or is arrested. That's where the ratchet starts to tighten.

In the case of habitual, high-volume retail theft like in the article, people seem to be eventually arrested at a pretty fast clip, though it's obviously impossible to know the rate.

This is a reasonable comment if you're talking about stabbings or murders but not shoplifting. Allowing people to steal from retail stores with impunity doesn't make anyone unsafe.

Realize that I'm not arguing for impunity, just that incarceration should be off the table.

I am speaking of the perspective of having seen about 200 cases of this type in the last few years (this is a moderately low sample size among practitioners) in the place in question and from having discussed the issue with colleagues who have more experience than that over longer time periods in the same place.

You are free to disregard my "word of mouth" claim in favor of an elected prosecutor's press releases and true crime sensational stories in one of the country's most infamous tabloids. I just wanted to put some ink on the statement that what I described is "clearly not true."

> Getting a low-level criminal or junkie off the street, alive, is worth a lot.

Off the street and on to Riker's Island. A jail so dangerous that it has a high likelihood of being put into federal receivership in the next year. People are safer on the street. Full stop.

It clearly is true. I can actually watch it happen. You can too, if you go to arraignments in NYC. The line ADAs have no discretion to dismiss petit larceny (shoplifting) at arraignment. They need supervisor approval. There are other cases like driving under suspension (VTL 511 -- mentioned in GP) where they do have this discretion. There is a reason for the difference, which is that petit larceny is a priority.

Also, the DAs supported the "harm over harm" amendment to bail reform (CPL 510.10(4)t) for the explicit purpose of seeking bail in repeat shoplifting cases. And can you guess how they're using it?

You are conflating DA public statements with actual operational policy. It is nothing new that DAs claim to prioritize things that are not on their roadmaps.

I read this as a joke. Touché, you've scored a point on the public defender meme account.

In case someone reads this as sincere:

This type of cognitive dissonance is neither necessary nor allowed for a public defender. In the first instance the day-to-day reality of unjust governmental administration is so insane that, not only would nobody from outside believe it, but it becomes counterproductive to engage in rationalization fantasies like the parent describes. I don't need to concoct a reason to feel sorry for my client--there are too many obvious real ones. I also don't need to feel sorry for every client to do my job well.

In the second instance, I am actually confronted by evidence all the time in a high-stakes adversarial environment. My client is going to jail for stealing diapers. If he makes up a story that he's not reselling them on ebay and I believe that story, I'd better be sure that I'm not going to get some PayPal statements in discovery the night before trial.

Expert in stolen goods here.

I was talking to a NYC colleague the other day about how there are trends in favor of not punishing people for certain criminal activity in the city. We were talking about driving with a suspended license, but I asked about shoplifting. She said, "Oh, no. That's on the opposite trend. Not only are they prosecuting it to the maximum, but they just changed the law to make it easier to hold people on bail for shoplifting." She made it clear that shoplifting was never a low priority for prosecution, but now it's a higher one.

I understand that the claim in this article is that aggregators/sellers/fences whatever should be surveilled and prosecuted (more), but just wanted to add this tale from the courthouse and emphasize that the street-level shoplifter will be the target of most policy interventions here, which is the least effective and least humane strategy.

Both can be true. Being the street-level operator for a crime gang isn't exactly a union job. The people doing the actual shoplifting are variously unhoused, mentally ill, substance dependent, and desperate. It kind of depresses me how people think it's Kurt Russell with an eye patch stealing Ensure from Walgreens.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

"Just resist psychopaths" is an ableist, reductive paradigm. Of course many people can't just resist. People have families, care responsibilities, and many are indeed conditioned to accommodate.