What hits me the hardest about this story is that, what if an HN post of mine strikes the wrong nerve and next thing they're coming for me? Maybe next they'll be coming for you. Or 15 years from now my kid makes a dumb post and they come for him.
The Supreme Court was pretty clear this kind of speech is protected, and yet here we are with Justin behind bars. By the way, how the hell does bail get set at $500,000 for a single Facebook comment, no matter how insensitive or inciteful?
You might be interested in contacting the DA who filed the charges, Jennifer Tharp, http://tharpda.com/. Apparently she made her first comment on the case yesterday, although I can't find a direct link to her written statement: "Comal County District Attorney Jennifer Tharp says in a statement that Justin Carter could get 'community supervision or probation' if that is determined to be in the 'best interest of the defendant and society."
What Justin should get is sent home with an apology, and perhaps a nice settlement check down the road. I hope while Jennifer is out enjoying her 4th of July, celebrating our independence day, she can spare a moment to think about how she's managed to trample the constitutional freedoms that so many Americans have given their lives to defend.
I better be careful not to wish any ill will upon her for her role in this travesty of justice, since, you know, I wouldn't want to be accused of making 'terroristic threats'. So let's just say I hope it's raining in Comal County today.
At the core, I believe it's my fellow Americans that have become frightening. They represent the rotting culture that accommodates our increasingly violent, extralegal form of government, the one now almost entirely unchained from the Constitution.
The sheer apathy; the willingness to hand over fundamental liberties with little to no fight; the willingness to defend perpetual war; the willingness to suffer any indignity (eg molestation at the airport) just so long as one can go home at night to the couch and watch Leno; and so on.
People joke endlessly about America's expanding waistline, mismanagement of personal and national finances, abuse of prescription drugs, and terrible education scores. It's all part of the same sickness, that goes hand in hand with the governmental abuses: it's a populace that has willingly become numb, and is ready for an iron boot to its neck, and no coincidence that's exactly what it's getting.
Show me a people unwilling to be vigilant about their liberty 24/7, and I'll show you a government happy to lord over them with absolute power.
We live in a post-literate, lawsuit driven society where such officials are simply following the path of least resistance.
I hope the parents have some really good lawyers. This thing may have to go up the chain to their Senator and perhaps a federal court of appeals, before this kid is exonerated.
As for that woman who turned him in to the police and effectively ruined his life, I'd say she deserves a nice, fat civil suit.
I think fundamentally the woman did nothing wrong, if it was truly a case of an unrelated person showing concern. If it turns out she had some more nefarious reason to throw Justin to the wolves (there's no evidence of this) then have at her.
A more tech literate police force would have pointed and laughed, but that's a pipe dream. Where I feel the system truly failed is in getting past the DA, past the grand jury, and past the judge with the $500,000 bail.
The onus lies with the authorities to distinguish between real leads and moronic, no-threat-at-all leads, and to not trample on the rights of innocent people while doing so. Unless the lady that reported him knew for sure that the authorities would grossly misbehave like this, I'd say she's fine. She's likely just a moron; blaming her lets the police and the DA off too easily.
Or at least to be doxed and harassed for a few weeks. Let's hope 4chan picks that ball up and runs with it. People need to stop being so fucking hair-trigger paranoid.
You're talking about the not-an-American-citizen woman?
We do lock more people up than any other country, and it is shameful, but that doesn't mean that everyone who wants to get tough on crime is talking about locking children up for making bad jokes, or imprisoning their neighbor who occasionally smokes pot. That, my friend, is being out of touch with reality.
I think he might graduate high school soon and go off to college, so that represents a flight risk.
And as funny as that is, I'm willing to bet that the above really was the reason given.
That's the difference between an obvious joke and... something different. Not that it justifies the situation entirely (or maybe at all), but would perhaps explain the reaction. Consider a similar poster who did an AMA on reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1hl4gi/ive_been_raided...
After reading the actual transcript (http://pastebin.com/Ldtj6mhx), many Redditor's sided with the police.
So - not to take the side of the incarceration, but I certainly find it odd that I can't find the actual FB threat / comments (yet?).
Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.
lol
jk
I'm not sure if I'd actually say it was a joke rather than him just lashing out, but I highly doubt he was even remotly serious and disagree with him being held on that alone.
Obviously I accept I don't know all the facts of the case but I wouldn't be suprised if it really was that stupid. We've had similar cases in the UK.
I think I’ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them.
Hard to make a judgment about any of this without the full context. But being held without trial is definitely a heinous misstep of justice.
http://www.today.com/news/teen-charged-held-months-over-terr...
Well, my conclusion then is that many redditors are absolute mouth-breathing fucking retards. This transcript is dripping with obvious sarcasm and hyperbole. Anyone who can't see it should kill themselves.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129...
Terrorism is less likely to happen to you than a great many extremely unlikely events, I can't find a citation right now but I suspect it's less than being struck by lightning, yet the risk justifies... this?
The odds of being struck down by a careless driver must be vastly higher, yet I don't see people who text as they drive being sent to jail for >= 10 years, or those with driving licenses who are suspected of being higher risk (older people, those on higher insurance risk bands, etc.) being monitored illegally (or 'legally' based on dubious laws) and/or shipped off to a coaling station [0] where their legal rights are effectively suspended and they are tortured [1] to get information about their alleged membership of a boy-racer organisation.
Oh, and if this law was in effect in my country (UK), I'd be serving several years in jail. The irrationality of this kind of bullshit hasn't prevented people from trying to ruin people's lives over it, however [2].
What I'd like to see is the humourless 'people' who report this kind of obvious bullshit prosecuted for wasting police time and perhaps even harassment (I can't think of anything more harassing than trying to send somebody to jail + near enough ruin their life over something that is obviously not serious), the prosecutors who actually take it seriously losing their jobs and the politicians who implement these laws being publicly grilled on them.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_bay#US_Control_of_Gu...
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#T...
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/toddlers-killed-...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129...
> Nevertheless, a woman in Canada, who inexactly described
> herself as a “concerned citizen,” ...
>
> The heirs to the constitutional settlement of the late
> eighteenth century are as entitled to its bounties as
> were its architects — idiot boys included.
Issue number one: The problematic ways that the prison system deals with assault and mental illness among inmates.
Issue number two: Whether the potential sentence for a crime purely involving speech, rather than actions, should be so severe as eight years in prison.
Issue number three: Whether the speech in question was Constitutionally protected satire, or a criminal threat.
Issue number four: Whether the defendant should have gotten some slack from the justice system -- i.e. why the police/prosecutors/court involved haven't determined by now that lesser charges/penalties are appropriate.
I'm sure there are more.
I cross-posted this comment from another HN submission on the same case with only a few upvotes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987867
It's the same reason they're ok with torturing suspected terrorists. Better to err on the conservative side for the entire country than to respect an individual's rights and risk the next 9/11.
I'm bringing this up as a problem, not as a justification. I'd be interested if anyone knows how to fix this.
That's the problem. A jury of his peers would throw this out no questions asked.
> Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech
> Excessive bail shall not be required
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial
Okay, so the speedy trial clause has been adapted de facto to mean six months, but maybe if he forms a law suite for free speech and excessive bail and wins he could be set for life.
An intelligent chief of police and prosecutor should have looked at the kid's background, maybe dropped by his house, and said, OK there's no "there" there. Unless there's a history of violence, or record of mental illness, or sociopathic behavior officially noted, etc. Which as far as I know, there isn't in this case. Just pure blind, stupid bureaucratic grinding an individual with their jackboots, simply because they have the power.
But at the same time, I have to ask where the line should be drawn. Our babysitter's boyfriend was arrested and jailed (charges of making "terroristic threats" again) for leaving a bomb threat in the bathroom of their high school His stated reason: he wanted the day off. He's harmless, but ridiculously stupid. However, he did make the threat. Even if it was an empty threat, he has to be held responsible for the cost of evacuating the school, bomb-sniffing dogs and police searching and the general disruption that ensued.
In the case of this story, though, I'd like to believe that the police or the DA would have had the balls to say "this is just a dumb kid shooting off his mouth. We told him to be careful and let him go."
The proper thing to do - as said in the article - is for the police to investigate if he was serious. And you or I would - depending on lots of context on whether we thought it a remotely credible threat I guess - report it for them to investigate?
The problem seems to be on the police end, not the concerned citizen (of another country) end.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/07/01/was-a-...
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[1] This article seems to quote the intact message that got Justin in this trouble: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129...
If this kid was trolling Runescape now nobody would care
Every teen has at one occasion thought: I feel like killing [everyone in school, my team, my so-called friends, my brother, the neighbour dog, ...]. Writing such a thought down gives it extra power. A screen doesn't confront you with people, which would make your brain stop and think, so it is easy to misjudge whether you can and should press 'send'.
Monitoring that speech and acting on it, directly by the government or indirectly via 'concerned citizens': that way lies police state insanity. It means the system, and many of the people in it, is in denial of the complex, inconsistent nature of humans. They want clear rules, easy judgments, binary divisions between right and wrong. They lose sight of what 'being human' means: a huge variety of things, not all of them pretty, but all of them human.
I believe most people would never fathom ideas so evil, and yet this guy broadcasted it in the most public space in the known universe - FACEBOOK.
The guy needs correction, badly.
Most people would never fathom ideas so evil? Obviously false and useless hyperbole. Which is why you would deserve the downvotes.
What you fail to grasp is the entire concept of protecting speech, why it's so essential to a functioning democracy, and why your personal opinion of a paragraph of text being 'violent' or 'disturbing' is completely irrelevant.
We're talking about locking up a young man behind bars. Taking away his liberty, possibly taking away his ability to earn a living. It's not a stretch to say that his life is on the line, because of how a paragraph of text made you feel.
All this is further compounded by the highly political decision about what type of speech may be 'too violent' or 'too disturbing' to be legal. I can't fathom how an informed American can honestly argue that we should criminalize the act of typing a few words on your keyboard, and posting them on Facebook, when those words don't constitute an intentional and imminent threat to a specifically identified individual. (see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio)
