@vikorr,
vikorr wrote:I don't edit quotes - they are quotes.
Then I misread it. I do that from time to time, especially when I'm tired. It's 6 AM here, and I'm up late, not early.
If our dispute about the Texas lady cop is almost resolved, I took you up on that Georgia jogger case as well:
https://able2know.org/topic/556745-62#post-7130985
"They did have a good reason for arming up, hunting him down, and (if they did so) pointing guns at him."
"They suspected that he was a burglar. And people have every right to protect themselves from burglars."
@oralloy,
See, the issue I have with that is not the belief per se, but the fact that you don't go about articulating why you believe it is honest, within the context of what occurred. If you addressed each issue she would have faced in her decision making, and how at the end of that, you came to the conclusion that she was in fact honest...then there probably wouldn't be an issue. But it appears you just want to take her at face value.
As I said previously, people faced with the consequences of their bad choices (or similar) will often make up self serving stories, so it is not a wise thing to take at face value. She may have had an honest but very unreasonable belief...
but what are your grounds for you believing it to be an honest mistake - other than 'everyone makes mistakes'?
@vikorr,
I believe that she is telling the truth because that is the only thing that fits her actions.
She had no reason for deliberately entering the guy's apartment and killing him. There is no evidence that they were bitter enemies.
I have not heard anyone make any case that she did all of this with the actual intention of killing the guy.
@oralloy,
Ugh, try at least to engage in a series of reasons that lead to a conclusion where you think it was honest:
- she was a police officer
- she joined to protect the public
- she had no record of excessive force (I don't know if this is true or not)
- she didn't even know the neighbour, so had no beef with him
- the unit she went to was in the exact same spot as hers, only a floor different. This is a simple enough mistake in itself.
- the had come home from nightwork
- her mind would have been heavily fatigued
- some people in the same situation become delusional with fatigue
- the door was open
- she suffered a fright
- she may only have had the mental focus left to on the man she could see sitting in the lounge
- that mental focus may have resulted in tunnel vision (etc)
- at each stage she engaged in things that in her state were understandable, and therefore
- her mistake was honest
Again, my issue with your statements is the lack of reasoning you provide for arriving at them, and the ignoring of context. It makes for roundabout, and often enough nonsensical conversations. In the above, her lack of processing of the context (surrounds, furniture etc) is explained by fatigue, rather than ignored.
@vikorr,
I did. I just gave four reasons for my conclusion.
If someone makes a plausible argument that it was not an honest mistake, I'll reassess upon reading that argument.
But at the moment every single thing that I've heard about this case points towards an honest (though unreasonable) mistake.
@oralloy,
Quote:I believe that she is telling the truth because that is the only thing that fits her actions
a conclusion / judgement. Conclusions & Judgements require reasoning. There isn't any.
Quote:She had no reason for deliberately entering the guy's apartment and killing him.
This is an assumption at this stage. Likely correct. And yet by itself does not make the mistake honest. The rest face similar issues.
Of course this conversation may depend on how you define a honest mistake. Because you could define any mistake as honest, hence it being a mistake. If there is a difference between an honest mistake and a regular mistake then, it is that the person making the honest mistake didn't ignore anything...they just made an honest mistake. Ignoring thimgs that jar is always done out of a desire to not deal with the disfunctional information. It in my view, is never truly about honesty, because doing so has the potential to deceive yourself. Being honest relies as much on the practice of being honest, as the actual criteria itself.
ie. This could all be semantic word games.
@vikorr,
I regard all actual mistakes as honest mistakes.
A dishonest mistake is a deliberate act and therefore is not a mistake.
@oralloy,
We disagree then on the usage, but in the end a semantic disagreement isn't much of a disagreement. Then the disagreement was really only about whether mistakes are reasonable or not.
Do you two think it’s an “honest mistake” if a twenty year police veteran draws a service pistol and discharges it three times then says she meant to draw and discharge the taser that was worn on the opposite hip (that weighed far less and was colored bright yellow, and that she trained for years not to mix up with her service pistol)?
@snood,
Yes.
Yes also in the case of Oscar Grant (same thing happened).
I make no judgements as to whether the honest mistakes are "reasonable mistakes" or "unreasonable mistakes" however.
Here is an example of why I am sold on Larry Krasner, DA. Shaun King writes:
Larry Walker - a staggering 39 years after he was wrongly convicted in Philadelphia.
39 years.
I spoke to his family this morning who said he just couldn’t believe how much he enjoyed green grass and the sound of children laughing - things that he had nearly forgotten in prison.
The man was sent to prison as a soft-spoken 22 year old baker when JIMMY CARTER WAS PRESIDENT. I was 2.
And his family never stopped fighting.
He lost so much. I don’t even have words for what this man lost.
But I’m grateful to @LarryKrasner and the Conviction Integrity Unit for coming to an agreement to set this man free.
Again, thank all of you for voting for Larry, donating to Larry, and volunteering for Larry. We helped make this possible.
@snood,
Pulling a trigger times can never be a mistake - anyone who's ever fired a handgun knows that - from the kick in the hand, to the extremely loud bang...let alone the weight and colour differences you pointed out (which last still could be mistaken if there is adrenalin running through your system, and you don't look at it because it is pointing down)
But I'm also pretty sure that police in the US get trained to fire in groupings of shots, which further suggests deliberate use of a firearm in line with training.
While I can understand a person making a mistake on the draw - it has happened multiple times, particularly if I recall correctly, in the early years of tasers...once the trigger is pulled, there is no mistaking whatsoever what has happened.
But you should separate your aim of 'honest mistake' - I don't use 'honest' as a descriptor in anything where a person has ignored things that cause them to deceive themselves. To me, such usage in these sort of circumstances is driven only by a desire to make something sound as innocent as possible (ie. not think about what is ignored in the decision making process), rather than fully dealing with what is present.
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:
I have not made any personal remarks on this thread. If we can't tell our minds without hurting others' feelings I'm sorry.
Agreed! That is what I thought.
When they talk about Tulsa 100 years ago, just remember there is Rosewood, FLA, and dozens of similar incidents in our history.
@edgarblythe,
That’s true. I think Tulsa might have been the worst. Not just in loss of life, but loss of 35 square blocks of thriving black-owned businesses and homes.
There were 500 regular white citizens temporarily deputized to participate in the destruction. So this was crime committed by the city and state itself. One white participant was quoted by an interviewer as saying “they told me to take a gun and get a nigger.”
And no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for any of it. And they tried to erase it from history. Paved over the mass graves.
They never taught this when I was in school.
It’s the same way they’re trying to prevent the 1619 Project from being taught today.
I hope you don't think I am going too far afield with this, but to me it's an important link in the struggle for justice.
Across the span of any given year here in the United States, nearly 10 million people are arrested and jailed. It’s a staggering number. The world has 200 countries, but the good ‘ol land of the free represents 1 in 4 incarcerated people. We are the incarceration nation. And 95% of all of those cases come through the office of your local district attorney.
POINT BLANK: We don’t reduce mass incarceration without them. In fact, I believe this so strongly that I don’t think any other single person in your city or county is more important when it comes to the crisis of mass incarceration and even police brutality than your local DA.
As you likely know, I dedicated the past few months of my life to make sure that we re-elected Larry Krasner as the DA of Philadelphia. Together, thanks to 10,000+ donors, thousands of volunteers, and our brilliant staff at Real Justice, we were able to not only help Larry win, but it ended up being a landslide. We reached millions of people across social media, email, text messages, phone calls, and door to door canvassing. And when it was all said and donee, Larry Krasner beat the monster Carlos Vega by 33% - doubling Vega’s votes in Philly - giving Larry a mandate to continue his work in the city. For us, this was way more than a political victory - it was an emergency. Philadelphia has been the single most incarcerated big city in America for generations. It’s a Frankenstein that took Philadelphia hundreds of years to build and it damn sure is going to take more than one term for Larry Krasner to help deconstruct it.
Many of my friends in the abolition movement have abandoned district attorney races altogether - saying that being a part of them compromises their values. I understand what they are saying - in theory - because DA’s are indeed a part of the carceral system. They will try and convict people. But ignoring these races, or worse, working against DA’s that want to deconstruct the system from the inside out - is a grave mistake. In just 3 years, Larry Krasner reduced the number of children prosecuted by 50%. Tell me another way to do that in 3 years? His office has exonerated more innocent men in 3 years than any other office in the history of the country. His policies have reduced the number of years people will spend in prison by nearly 20,000 years. He has decriminalized dozens of policies that weren’t really about safety, but were about poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, and more.
In Pennsylvania, where Republicans control the state House and the Senate, damn near all change is local. But even in many states where Democrats control the state government, they are often so moderate that they do next to nothing to reduce incarceration in the state. In either case, the power and leverage of local district attorneys to not just reduce mass incarceration, but hold police accountable and create real fairness in the administration of justice is unmatched.
When we started our organization, Real Justice, 4 years ago, we knew that DA’s were essential - but 4 years later I believe it now more than ever.
Who is your DA? What do they stand for? How long have they been in office and what’s their history? What are their policies?
Because here’s the thing - while we’ve won races now all over the country from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Austin, Boston, and Chicago - we’ve only won in 20 cities. That means 2,280 cities and counties are left. We’ve got work to do.
For me, the next race is in Manhattan and the candidate I know and trust is civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi. She’s brilliant and if elected, she will not only be the first woman elected in the history of one of the nation’s oldest DA’s offices, but the first person of color, the first Muslim, the first civil rights attorney, and so much more. Remember, this is the office that wrongly convicted the Central Park 5 - and with her election - she will bring fairness and justice to Manhattan in a way it’s never seen before.
Shaun King
@edgarblythe,
Democracy grows by showing government and justice are by the people and for the people!
This is something that has been sliding more right of center for the past 30 years, IMHO!
