Then: justice.gov/opa/pr/departme … rnment-and
Now: abcnews.go.com/US/louisville-po … d=97708844
Alt source: reuters.com/legal/us-justic … 023-03-08/
Live: fb.watch/j8szsJgbwU/?mibextid=qC1gEa
Consent decrees… not same?
justice.gov/enrd/consent-decrees
what’s the question here?
you should check out the consent decree w/ alabama dept of corrections it’s a doozie
Is it government overreach, like eminent domain?
it’s a matter of consent. i was once under a consent decree back in the 90s.
it’s where you did something that you could be in big fucking trouble for, and you are afraid to go to trial because the penalties might be more than you can bear. then you get a favorable prosecutor who says to you…hey man…if you consent to do the things in this decree, over this period of time or whatever, then when you’ve complied with it, we’ll just drop the case and let you move on with your life. we don’t want to fuck you in the ass in court for the laws that you broke, so if you promise to be good, and adhere to that promise, then you’ll be free to go.
if anything it’s the opposite of govt overreach. its the govt doing you a big fucking favor. it’s not compulsory, it is consensual, and if you don’t want to be a party to one or sign one, then of course you can use your right to a trial and see how that works out. by the very nature of how they work, most people who are under them are in fact guilty as shit and they know it.
okiedokie
also is eminent domain necessarily govt overreach in and of itself? or just sometimes?
well if the people of the city (etc) agree on what the land is going to be used for for the public good, and properly compensate the private owner, I don’t think the private owner should gum up what the people want for their city. But if it isn’t even the people who decided they need it, or the private owner is not properly compensated, then yes it is government overreach.
But so are crazy property taxes.
some would argue that the people elected the officials to decide those things for them, and in eminent domain cases owners are entitled to a jury when it comes to valuation.
i think its govt overreach to pay out more than 250k in fdic money to depositors who lost more than 250k in a bank collapse but they certainly are going to do it. have none of these tech startups ever heard of insured cash sweeps? like how tf you gonna put 1m in an account that has 250k fdic insurance and then expect to get more than 250k back when the bank fails? why is the govt paying out more money than the insurance covered?
like im not even a tech startup and i use an ics service just for the interest and it has 0 effect on liquidity and i dont even need fdic coverage beyond 250k because i dont even have 250k in cash but the interest is just free money and i do nothing for it
i sued a lady once when i was 19 and went to a jury and got awarded more than her insurance policy covered and the insurance company tried to just cut me a check for the max amount that her policy covered and told me to take up the rest with her. so i put a lien on her house and started the process to seize her accounts and garnish her wages. then she flipped out and threatened to sue her own insurance company and they ended up just paying it out.
state farm overreach
i know a lot of people default to the view that the police are the good guys who are there to stop crime and that sometimes a bad thing happens but that it’s either an accident or a bad apple or a mistake of some kind but let me tell you that if you grew up in or spend significant time in a majority black neighborhood you know better than that. bham is still in a state of defacto segregation with regard to the neighborhoods. some are 99 percent white, and some are 99 percent black. in the white neighborhoods a friendly cop might give your kid a popsicle and help your grandma bring her groceries up the stairs. they may catch your kid smoking weed and give you a call to come and pick him up. in the black neighborhoods they are more like an occupying force. they would search the grandma’s car and shut down the kid’s lemonade stand, and the kid smoking weed would get charged with possession, paraphernalia, loitering, resisting arrest and assaulting an officer if he stepped on the cop’s toe. he’d either go to jail or get hit with so many fines and fees that it would take him years to get out of that debt. this is what a lot of people don’t realize. the devil is in the details.
when i was a teenager they had a program called “operation maverick” where they were going to “clean up the streets” of my town. so they brought in 100s of cops from all over the country to set up roadblocks everywhere and just stop and search every car, especially cars full of teenagers. back then we only knew a few people who had cell phones, so we came up with codes to send to each other’s beepers so we’d know which blocks to avoid. for the most part we avoided them but a lot of people got caught up in all that and in big trouble for minor offenses.
then they had this brown van that we called “the bust van” which we were all very afraid of. if everyone was hanging out in someone’s yard like a cookout or a football watch party or whatever, sometimes the bust van would roll up and all these cops would get out with rifles and make everyone get on the ground. then they’d search everyone’s pockets and arrest some people for some weed, and then tell the rest of us “don’t let us see you in this neighborhood again” except guess what…we fucking lived there.
this was all happening when i was maybe 17 years old.
i think it was govt overreach. and i think it was disproportionate policing.
they’d go around arresting people in the hood and accuse them of being big drug dealers, even if they just sold a little bit of weed here and there…nothing major. then they’d put them in jail and use civil forfeiture to seize thier shitty hood shotgun houses and plow them down and take pics for the newspaper.
“WE ARE PLOWING DOWN THE HOUSES OF THE EVIL MARIJUANA DEALERS”
except the 2 guys i know who got their houses plowed down weren’t even doing anything major. they were selling like ten dollars worth of weed at a time.
lost story short. cops do really terrible shit. they literally shoot innocent people…a lot. they stack bullshit charges on poor people and on minorities when in other cases they might just call the parents. the spend 80% of their time policing 20% of the population. they specifically go after people who have less means because they know that people with money are more likely to win in court and less likely to spend time in jail.
im not even mad at people who don’t understand how the police really operate. im happy for them. im happy that they can and maybe have been able to live their lives in a place where they aren’t subject to this sort of thing and where it isn’t in their face all the time.
there’s a guy i went to school with who because of habitual offender laws will never be released from prison and the biggest crime he committed was using someone’s credit card at a gas station. he’s a drug addict and somehow there was never a treatment option for him. he caught 2 felonies about 9 years apart from each other, both for petty money shit. then when he was 3 months from being released they charged him with contraband, (he’d been in there for like a decade), then i guess he flipped out and they say he tried to escape. lost a case on that felony escape and now that’s 3 strikes so his release date is 1/1/9999.
i myself have been a defendant in criminal court more than a half dozen times, and all but one of those times i walked out the door acquitted, nol prossed, or dismissed. the last time they tried to give me min 10 max 99 for a bag of weed. that’s 10 years before you get a parole hearing with the assumption that you’ll do the 99. they are currently granting parole at a rate of about 1.5% in eligible cases, and the prisons are at about double the capacity that they were built to house.
so i’d do the 10, then if i beat the 98.5% odds of being denied parole then it’d get out. if not, then i’d be set off for 5 years before i could apply again.
but i didn’t have to go. i did a mandatory minimum 1 year “in their custody” without actually having to be inside a prison. how you might ask? by being white, and educated, and articulate and most importantly giving them an absurd pile of money. an absurd one.
the consent decree that i signed in 1995 was in a case where i was with these 2 dudes and 1 had given me a ride to my girlfriend’s house, i wasn’t old enough to drive. she lived in a nice neighborhood so i was there talking to her on the porch while her parents were asleep, and my 1 friend who drove was walking around and this other asshole stole a cell phone out of a car through a sunroof across the street. an old bag phone. i told the guy driving, “fuck this dude we gonna leave his ass on the street i’m not getting in trouble for that” so we jumped in the car and took off and left his stupid ass.
then we go up a steep hill to a red light and i hear a clunk and realize he’d thrown that phone in the back of this truck while he was running to try and jump in it while we were taking off. so i told the guy driving to throw it away. he said, “man that guy is kinda my friend and he’s already gonna be mad i left him, i gotta give him the phone he stole it fair and square”.
so i told this dude to take me home. then like 2 hours later the guy we left shows up at my house trying to make noise and wake up my parents and shit, i was like 15 years old…so i pointed a pistol at him and said if he ever came back around me i’d kill him.
so that was that and i went on about my like like fuck that guy.
then he went and told the people he stole the phone from that i stole it.
i had a french canadian public defender and i did not understand a word she said to me.
i never got to tell my story in court.
every adult in the room stood over me and told me that if i didn’t sign that consent decree that i’d be in big trouble and go to jail.
so i ended up on probation in the 10th grade for stealing some phone that i didn’t even steal.
a few years later someone set fire to that guy’s house.
I feel like I am now caught up on consent decrees from the perspective of someone who has lived experience. Thank you.
My lived experience with “the law” pales & never required ever having heard of a consent decree.
Seems to me a lot of “justice” is negotiated away from a “jury of one’s peers” — even falling to D.A. or whoever to even charge anyone.
Same reason justice is selective for those with means is why thinkdr’s Modern Monetary Theory favors increasing debt ceiling by leaning on banks to get stuff done OTHER THAN correct low-wage, high-price poverty/slavery.
Vomitous.
Someone? 