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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28299 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The whole case seems like a Toxoplasma of Rage classic. A scumbag whose guilt for the murder is near certain, but at the same time procedural errors in convictions get guilty people off all the time, or at least delayed. It's a surprise that the anti-death penalty people lost on this one as they rarely seem to take such high profile defeats. But for me the big question is why this awful, guilty murderer has been made a cause celebre. Sure, I just referenced toxoplasma of rage, but that only explains public attention. Why did the innocence project and other anti-death penalty campaigners choose this case to focus on? It's clearly going to be a disaster if anyone pays the slightest bit of attention!

Some of this is just a tendency to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. There just aren't that many death penalty cases to start with, and something like a third of them are in states that basically never will actually execute them (California and Pennsylvania haven't executed any inmates in over a decade, and Pennsylvania in this millennium), and some of the absolute worst ones get cleared up relatively 'quickly'.

If you go to the Innocence Project's death penalty page right now, the first three examples I get are :

  • Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, where there's an absolute mess of evidence, but some of it points to an alternative killer... but a lot of the stuff that strongly points to the alternative killer either has an alternative credible explanation (the alternative killer being a descendant and sometimes-resident of the victim's house explains a lot of possible DNA) or only were produced long after it became a cause celebre (the alternative killer's then-boyfriend's now-wife). There's probably an ineffective assistance of council argument here, and I could believe that the alternative killer was the real one, but this is the stuff of reasonable doubt or True Crime Podcasts, not claims of obvious true innocence.
  • Kirk Bloodsworth, pretty clearly innocent, and they found the guy who actually did it, complete with DNA evidence. A little soap opera, but there's not really any question.
  • Kennedy Brewer, same deal, slightly less soap opera, slightly more bad CSI ("bite mark analysis").

And the top-line changed while I read these cases, moving from Williams to a Robert Roberson shaken baby case that's... uh, at best a 'raises some doubts'.

Which makes it really weird mix ... if you thought people were reading the Innocence Project page to find examples of clearly innocent people on death row.

But the Innocence Project's point is a broader-spectrum criticism of punishment and criminal justice in general. Something merely being controversial or having even the slightest doubts do that, and that's a much wider field.

There is no one on death row in America today who was wrongly accused because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time due to stopping to change an old lady’s tire on his way home from volunteering at the orphanage. Anti-death penalty campaigners simply don’t have cases of innocent upstanding citizens to take on as a cause célèbre, and, well, the death penalty has literally never been abolished by popular vote, anywhere in the world, countries which abolished it would bring it back in a heartbeat if there were a referendum. The innocence project and CURE and for whom the bell tolls know full well they’ll lose a principled argument. So they’re going to blatantly lie about this guy being a scumbag.

the death penalty has literally never been abolished by popular vote, anywhere in the world

Ahem.

That wasn't a death penalty abolition, technically. It was codifying existing law fifty years after the last hanging.

What a cheat. It was a constitutional referendum to formally ban capital punishment. If that doesn't meet your criteria, what would?

A vote to get rid of the death penalty currently in use or having been used in the recent past. Ireland was just enshrining existing law in the constitution.

also Switzerland - unsurprisingly given the ubiquity of referenda in that country.

Because they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered.

Remember, these are the same people who thought rittenhouse should have let himself be beaten and shot rather than have the gall to defend himself, all because he decided that rioting and looting were wrong

Are they, though?

Rittenhouse haters insisted he was a murderer, and that didn’t earn him any sympathy.

The "crime is good" crowd makes an exception for self-defense, which is only valid when used against cops.

There is no “crime is good” crowd. There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

Said group assumed Rittenhouse was a provocateur looking to play cop. They probably also assume the state cuts corners and commits injustices in cases like this one. Neither of these is an endorsement of crime.

I remain unconvinced that morally or practically the distinction matters, though in tone-policing forums such as this it may be worth distinguishing.

There is no “crime is good” crowd.

Criminals are a "crime is good" crowd, including Seth Rogan and Chesea Boudin's entire extended family.

There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.

I do have a hard time accepting the positions of people who are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their beliefs or immune to the logical conclusions of their beliefs.

I believe it's Chesa Boudin.

Friend/enemy distinction

and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.

The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".

I think you’re applying too much charity to a sneer at the outgroup.

It's possible, and the naked phrase alone is certainly low-effort. On the other hand, I think there's a point there that deserves more than you're given it. If the problem is how that point is expressed, fair enough, it should be expressed better. But if "better" is undefined, then it becomes a fully general counter-argument. Hence why I'm replying, trying to tack away from arguments over the phrasing, and toward what appears to be the underlying issue.

I think that if we go to reddit, we can find an arbitrarily-large number of people who believe that Rittenhouse is clearly a murderer, and that this guy is clearly innocent. These people will be disproportionately likely to care about Rittenhouse's "victims", and they will be disproportionately likely to know little, and to have little interest in learning, about this man's victim, or indeed his previous, non-murder victims. Further, I think these same peoples' views on a lot of other questions of justice will strongly correlate: they will reliably treat people provably guilty of multiple violent felonies as though they are entirely innocent, and they will treat people provably innocent of any crime at all as though they are crazed murderers. Likewise, they will consider moderately questionable uses of lethal force by the authorities as clear murder, and entirely unjustifiable uses of lethal force by the authorities as obviously good and correct, based entirely on tribal logic.

If I'm correct about the existence and general views of the above cohort, "they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered" seems like a reasonable encapsulation of the problem. Further, if I'm correct, it seems to me that this is a pretty important problem that certainly bears discussion, because it would seem to imply that our justice system isn't going to get better, and in fact is going to get worse, with consequences that flow through to a whole lot of other flashpoints in the culture war.

I think this is mostly a result of sanitized coverage of the murders themselves. They simply don’t deal with the particular crime as brutal, in fact it’s usually pretty common to downplay those details in public. If the public saw the crime scene full of blood, gore, splatters of brain etc. they’d be in favor. Instead the victim was shot (passive voice), and didn’t suffer, and the scene was not that bad.

There was a period of about a month where it looked like there was exonerating DNA evidence, until the DNA on the murder weapon turned out to be the prosecutor. By that point the left-wing noise machine was in full swing and couldn't be stopped.

Yeah this. Confirmation bias. Everyone "learned" this guy they had never heard of before was wrongfully convicted and then nobody could update with contradicting information afterwards.

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