I want to circulate a petition to let a certain judge know that if he lets a certain convicted criminal off with no jail time at his sentencing hearing, a lot of people are going to be exceptionally pissed off.
Do you have experience with making your own online petitions? Which service would be best for this? I’m looking at ePetitions.net, but I don’t know if there’s something better.
All suggestions or advice welcome.
One bump on this before I assume they’re all the same and go with ePetitions.net…
Doesn’t matter. Judges do not make sentencing decisions based on internet petitions. Odds are the judge will never see it, and even he he does, he’ll throw it away.
Thanks for the advice, Oakminster. However, I still think this will be effective and am looking for advice on which service to use.
Why do you think online petitions will be effective? There’s no evidence that they are given any weight, especially not in a legal decision. If you want to present a petition to the court then ink on paper is the way to go.
Having said that, since I don’t think anyone will look at them, it really doesn’t matter which service you use.
Seeing as how no one is apparently in the mood to share opinions on online petition services, can a mod or admin please close this thread? Thanks.
I’ve worked closely with the offices of elected officials, and I can tell you that such things are almost always just thrown away. And this is by people who depend on voters to keep them in office – a judge who is generally insulated from the general public would pay even less attention to an online petition.
In terms of the attention paid to them, communications are ranked roughly as follows:[ol]
[li]individual personal visit to your office[/li][li]personal visit to your office as part of a group[/li][li]handwritten letter mailed to your office[/li][li]typewritten letter mailed to your office[/li][li]computer printed letter mailed to your office[/li][li]letter faxed to your office[/li][li]individual personal email to your office[/li][li]individual phone call to your office[/li][li]phone call to your office (forwarded via some phone-your-legislator service)[/li][li]form letter (copied, filled out & mailed in by some person)[/li][li]physical petitions signed by people[/li][li]bulk email (filled out & forwarded via some website)[/li][li]emailed petitions[/li][/ol]Also, anything from a constituent in your district gets more consideration than something from someone living elsewhere. In some offices, only constituent mail is counted.
In most legislative offices, the elected official does not personally see most of the mail – they get a summary from the staff of how many communications the office got pro- or con- on each issue. And the office staff are very experienced at recognizing any form of bulk letter, email, or phone tree communications. Those are flagged, and discounted in those summary reports.
Some typical ones, or the more interesting or outrageous ones will get passed to the legislator. But not always to the constituent’s advantage! I once saw one that was from an NRA member, about a gun control issue:
The writer had copied an NRA suggested letter directly, without even realizing that he was supposed to fill in the blanks in some spots. That letter did get passed around the office, and shown to the legislator. But I doubt it had the effect on him that the writer wanted!
Thank you.