Seems to me - based off of the recent story about the “affluenza” kid who got a light sentence, and the rapist who also got off with 6 months (whose father had claimed his rape amounted to just “20 minutes of action”) are indicative of judges whose long legal-tenures have utterly warped their minds away from common-folk common sense.
Just about any average person in America would find the idea of "affluenza’ being something deserving of sympathy to be utterly loathsome or scornful - yet, clearly, a judge buys that argument.
Do judges just, for some reason, become sympathetic to people that average Americans would find loathsome, or somehow, find the most ludicrous arguments, convincing?
This isn’t a Pit thread, but is still a bit of a rant - and a sincere question.
I’m pretty sure we have at least a couple of other judges out there, maybe even three or four, who continue to exercise good judgment despite their long tenure; it’s just that you haven’t heard about them because their rather ordinary and reasonable performance didn’t make the evening news.
Most importantly, there are thousands of judges in this country. When one or two do something that is outside normal behavior, that’s when the news gets interested. When someone receives a typical sentence, you might see news about the event, but the judge isn’t going to be mentioned - they were just doing their job. So media reports are heavily biased in favor of judges whose actions are questionable, which is the same for all professions. You aren’t going to see a news article about the hairdresser who gave you the nice, simple cut that you wanted at a reasonable price; you’re going to see the story about a hairdresser who cut some outrageous symbol into a person’s hair. That doesn’t mean that hairdressers are lunatics.
Second, judges have to follow the law, and the evidence presented in court, which may not be accurately portrayed in the media. I once served on a jury, and ruled in favor of a tobacco company. Could the ruling be spun in the media as “the jury is pro-Big Tobacco”? Sure. But the truth was that the plaintiffs had very flimsy evidence, and one of their key witnesses could not remember the most significant point of his testimony. It was painful for me to have to decide against them, but the evidence left me no choice. Also remember that judges are usually precluded from commenting on the cases that they have decided, so we rarely get their side of the story.
Why do you think that the judges in those cases are ‘warped’ away from ‘common folk’ thinking? A lot of people think that good, upstanding (rich, white) kids should not have their life ruined just because some slut got drunk with him one night, or because he tried a little alcohol and got in an accident. (For clarity, I don’t agree with either position, I’m pointing out that they’re not uncommon). A lot of common folk think that their kind of kid SHOULD get a break, and while they may say that they think rape is bad, they mean ‘stranger in a dark alley’ rape, not ‘got drunk and fingered an unconscous girl’ rape.
Or the flip side is equally true- we’re all familiar with the McDonald’s little-old-lady with the hot coffee in the crotch lawsuit and the correspondingly absurdly high judgment that the jury awarded her (2.86 milllion bucks) What people aren’t aware of is that the trial judge nearly immediately whacked that back to 640,000.
One of the reasons we have an insanely complicated legal system is to bypass “common sense,” because common sense has a poor relationship to actual facts.
The whole idea of “excluding evidence” from a trial seems absurd, at first blush. It’s limiting the jury’s access to “the whole truth.” Until we learn why the exclusionary evidence rule came about, and then it makes right good sense on its own part.
And also that McDonald’s knowingly served coffee at a temperature unsafe for human consumption, and the women ended up with permanent scarring on her genitals because of it.
A judge serving in a particular jurisdiction is probably going to see the same people coming in front of him time after time, on offence after offence. He’ll know that many of them are basically unperturbed by what kind of sentence they get; a spell in prison is not a big deal to them.
In cases like the ones mentioned in OP, though, it’s a totally new experience for the defendant. The judge is likely to feel that he can teach the kid a lesson, and deter him from future such conduct, just by giving him a taste of what prison is like.
I’m not saying this is right but this is the attitude I’ve witnessed from judges in similar cases.
I think the lesson that Brock Turner learned was that if you’ve got money and connections, you don’t have to worry about facing any serious consequences even when you commit a major felony. I don’t see how that would deter him in the future.
Which is just what I was about to say. If McDonald’s sells you a cup of coffee, you should not have to worry whether drinking it might literally kill you.
Journalism is all about hunting for something that can be written up as interesting material. The vast majority of court decisions are so boringly sensible you never hear about them.
There are two ways for journalists to make court decisions interesting. The first is to only report the outliers where something weird happens, and the second is to only report those facts which make things sound more interesting than they are.
My colleagues and I play media bingo with media portrayals of cases we are involved in. If we can find a single paragraph without a large inaccuracy we win. Very often there isn’t even a single sentence that doesn’t get something major wrong.
But strangely, one will almost never find a media item that gets the story wrong in a way that makes it less interesting.
I’d be interested to know what sort of large inaccuracies you and your colleagues find in news stories on your cases - not in a snarky way, but just because what a journalist considers a “large inaccuracy” and what a lawyer does might differ in some way.
It’s a bit hard to generalise and I can’t talk specific cases for obvious reasons. Reasons people are convicted are often wrong; so someone might be convicted on some very minor ancillary offence and found not guilty of anything major but the story will be to the effect “guy charged with big well known crime found guilty”. Excusing factors raised by the defence that the judge took into account totally left out, anything the prosecution said given prominence. Misquotes that totally change meaning. Omission of qualifying clauses. Numbers that drop or add a zero (or zeroes). In civil claims defendants who dispute damages described as disputing liability.
In my experience, what you say is correct; a journalist considers something to be a large inaccuracy if it will result in defamation proceedings or make the story seem less interesting. Anything else doesn’t matter. Lawyers consider something to be a large inaccuracy if something is inaccurate, and large.
I once heard a journalist give a lecture to lawyers about interacting with the media. He said quite baldly that bothering him about inaccuracies will only annoy him and that we shouldn’t do it, and he was quite likely to refuse to correct his story just to punish anyone who dared to complain. He made it quite clear that the only sort of corrections that interested him were those that his readers were interested in; so if it added to the pathos or human interest of the story then he would correct. If it merely resulted in someone’s life getting trashed because his details were wrong, what the fuck did he care?
Or even to coach a tiny little fact or itty bitty guess in so much cotton wool it’s difficult to see what the actual fact was, of that it wasn’t even a fact but something someone thought about out loud.
What’s your point? I was just saying that sometimes judges fall on the side of what would be considered “common sense” against juries run amok.
$640,000 for a cup of hot coffee is still an astronomical payout, but it’s not the ridiculous, especially in 1994 dollars, nearly 3 million punitive judgment that the jury passed down.
My point was that often we only hear one side of the story- in this case, everyone heard about the hot coffee in the crotch and a nearly 3 million dollar payout. Nobody actually heard that the trial judge immediately lessened the amount, and that the plaintiff and McDonald’s settled for an undisclosed sum before an appeal could come up.
I suspect that some of these “warped” judges are falling afoul of the same situation, only in reverse.
I’ve actually dealt with both journalists and lawyers. My opinion:
At least, back in the day when there were full-time professional print journalists with editors, print journalists got things basically right most of the time, but not always. In other words, of lawyers’ disagreements with print reporters, 75% of them were things only a lawyer would or should care about.
On the other hand, TV almost never got things basically right. And forwarded e-mails are of course 110% wrong.
This is allegedly a forum devoted to fighting ignorance, and ignorance is the basis of the belief that that was a jury run amok. If you go to a restaurant and buy a cup of coffee, it should not be standard operating procedure to give you a cup of coffee that will kill you if you drink it. That that was the case at McDonalds is why they had the book thrown at them.