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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26360 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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I can say that at the state level, there is a tactic law enforcement uses with regards to confidential informants/insiders/undercover officers to avoid blowing their cover is to put them through a prosecution that inevitably results in probation, on paper, which means as long as they don't get arrested again they'll never be in a jail but at least it looks like they got punished along with the rest.

To be a proper Bayesian I'd need to hear the base rate for how many J6 Defendants got probation sentences, but this does nudge up my belief that Ray Epps was, in some sense or another, involved with the Feds.

Isn't this at odds with the other view that much of what the J6 defendants did wasn't felonious?

I think the Bayesian thing is to find other defendants whose conduct was substantially similar and compare what the DOJ recommended across that class.

That would be a complicated comparison: if we presume that Epps is a fed, there are probably more, many we would not know about. Who's to say which J6 Defendants on probation are part of a cover-up and which are genuine protesters who got off relatively light?

Yes there's a whole analysis to be done here, but I'm going to go with the basic assumption that <50% of the crowd are involved with Federal agencies and see what that does to the expected convictions.

According to the Washington Post:

Of 244 felony sentencings for all charges, the average sentence has been 41 months, or about 3½ years, The Post’s data shows. For those charged with lesser misdemeanors, about half received a jail sentence averaging 58 days, while about a third received probation and 18 percent were ordered to spend time in home confinement.

But there's not a lot of good sources for how comparable behavior is: see another, albeit longer, probation sentence today for one example. But some people have gotten probation after entering the Capital building proper.

Sentencing also depends on an individual's prior criminal history, which is one heck of a confounding variable.

I'd focus in on the ones who have ZERO prior criminal convictions who still got prison time as the ones who are almost certainly not Feds, and compare their behavior to others, then compare severity of punishment.

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