I predict some heavy rioting in the near future.
Just to add some perspective : the woman had been in trouble with the law before when a policeman doing a traffic check photographed her car for speeding.
She stopped on the highway, put the car in reverse and drove back to the cop to argue with him, endangering many people, as mentioned in the article.
So it is obvious that his lady has some serious impulse-control problems.
BUT, I think what is the most annoying thing in this case is that the Maroccan boy that died had been on trial the day before for an armed roberry where he threatened a shopkeeper with a gun and held a knife to his throat.
The DA asked for a sentence of 24 months.
And this lady tried to defend her own properties from an obviously dangerous criminal and gets 30 months?
Dutch law is getting to become a bigger joke by the day.
If you kill somebody in the Netherlands you will probably only see the inside of a jail for about 7 years, tops.
And if you get mugged on the street and defend yourself by knocking somebodys lights out you get thrown in jail.
Meanwhile the division between the muslim community and the average Dutch is getting bigger and bigger, resulting in creeps like Geert Wilders, who uses this to his advantage to get votes from people scared of Muslim extremism.
I really need to get out of this country.
[QUOTE=Quartz]
If someone stole your wallet, you’d run after them, wouldn’t you? Suppose you tackled them and they hit their head on a stone and died; how is this different? No one is saying that she reversed over him repeatedly.
[/QUOTE]
Well, the judge seems to think she was a skilled driver and intended to crush the kid against the wall, and didn’t think it was just an accidental result of her pursuit.
Actually he wasn’t crushed against a wall, but got caught between the car and a tree.
He died of a broken neck.
[QUOTE=Scoundrel Swanswater]
Meanwhile the division between the muslim community and the average Dutch is getting bigger and bigger, resulting in creeps like Geert Wilders, who uses this to his advantage to get votes from people scared of Muslim extremism.
I really need to get out of this country.
[/QUOTE]
Where would you even go? Everywhere else is worse.
[QUOTE=Muffin]
The difference is the greatly increased probability of major injury or death when one uses a vehicle to make the tackle.
[/QUOTE]
Not to mention a vehicle that is being driven in reverse through a busy city street tends to increase the probability of major injury to innocent bystanders.
What she did was utterly irresponsible, regardless of how much the victim had it coming. For one, she wouldn’t have had the ability to know then and there that this kid had such a long rap sheet - that’s information that came to light after the incident, not during. All she knew, at that time and place, is that a thug had grabbed her bag and made off with it. Can you really justify the use of excessive and deadly force when dealing with a non-violent theft?
[QUOTE=Mahna Mahna]
Can you really justify the use of excessive and deadly force when dealing with a non-violent theft?
[/QUOTE]
Yup.
[QUOTE=Mahna Mahna]
Not to mention a vehicle that is being driven in reverse through a busy city street tends to increase the probability of major injury to innocent bystanders.
[/QUOTE]
Good points too of course. You can make an argument that what she did was worse than what the kid did. And I’m just talking about her reckless actions, let alone that they did in fact result in a death.
[QUOTE=Mosier]
Where would you even go? Everywhere else is worse.
[/QUOTE]
I am not sure that is true today.
It is certainly true for about 10 years ago, but the Netherlands has been circling the drain for the last 8 years or so.
I think that just about any country in Europe is better at the moment.
[QUOTE=Maastricht]
They would know, but they would probably turn a blind eye anyway, be in denial, make lots of excuses, point accusing fingers, etcetera.
That failure by the Muslim community to publicly accept even a small part of the blame for the wrongdoings caused by a small group of their youngsters, is a big part of the irritation many Dutch feel towards “Muslims”.
[/QUOTE]
After having read this, it reminded me a lot of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, but I definitely can see the point of the hostility toward outsiders who (even with a small minority) aren’t following the rules in such a manner that it disrupts the native group’s lives.
We have less blame in America for one specific ethnic group or another, but we do have quite a bit of intolerance on both sides of the fence. There are a lot of apologetic whites* who seem to be feeding the handful of militantly anti-white minorities’ arguments against whites and “white privilege”, and there’s a lot of in-group/out-group behavior with more recent immigrants from certain areas of the world. Some immigrants are happy to assimilate to “American culture” while outside of their homes, and others don’t really want to be a part of any of it and others want to be halfway between, begrudgingly adapting to “American culture” while still openly disliking what they’ve adopted. It’s a tough balance for those immigrants who hold on to their culture but still embrace an American way of life. I see smaller conflict regularly within the “which language to use” issue in the workplace; it seems to be an especially gray area for a lot of Spanish speakers when dealing with a workplace that has enough Spanish speakers that it’s convenient while not alienating the non-Spanish speakers. (Some seem to forget that there are non-Spanish speaking people or that native English speakers tend to view not speaking a language they understand as a deliberate exclusionary practice.) It’s really too complicated to get into and relate back to the situation at hand in this thread.
[QUOTE=Ice Wolf]
The case seems to me to be what we’d call here “reckless driving causing death”. That involves a maximum fine of $20,000 and/or five years in prison. The 30 month prison term for this woman may well get bargained down, anyway, but I think it looks fair.
[/QUOTE]
I’d consider this to be a case of reckless driving as well, and think her sentence is fair. The thing that does irk me about this situation is that there are people in the Moroccan Muslim population who are threatening her to the point where she has to go into hiding and the government isn’t making any attempt to punish those who pose a threat to her well-being. A law isn’t just unless it applies to everyone, and I’m pretty sure that threats to minority populations in the Netherlands are taken more seriously than they’re taking the threats against the Dutch woman.
[sub]*There isn’t really a good categorization of this other than “people who feel white guilt”. This certainly doesn’t reflect a large enough amount of the “white” population to be a de facto description of the “white” community as a whole.[/sub]
[QUOTE=Maastricht]
They would know, but they would probably turn a blind eye anyway, be in denial, make lots of excuses, point accusing fingers, etcetera.
[/QUOTE]
This is hardly unique to Moroccans, or Muslims. There are examples of parents turning a blind eye to their children’s misdeeds, even when those misdeeds are criminal, all over the world. I’m sure you could find many parents of criminals who think their kids are basically “sweet good kids” or are “misunderstood” from all sorts of different cultural and religious backgrounds.
Did she know that this boy had been on trial for armed robbery the day before?
Did he threaten her with a weapon?
If the answer to both of the above is no, his prior trial for armed robbery is irrelevant. She had no way of knowing that he was anything other than an ordinary unarmed purse-snatcher.
[QUOTE=Ludovic]
Yup.
[/QUOTE]
If everyone just took care of their own criminals, like this woman did, we wouldn’t even need courts and police! Think of the money we’d save!
[QUOTE=VunderBob]
No it is not. In roughly half of the states, you can shoot someone who is in your house, uninvited and threatening you with bodily harm. YOU CANNOT SHOOT SOMEONE WALKING ACROSS YOUR YARD, and that’s true in all 50 states.
[/QUOTE]
I understand that you want to believe this, but it’s functionally not true. Yoshihiro Hattori was shot to death while walking away from a front porch after ringing the doorbell and getting no answer, and the shooter was acquitted. So in Louisiana, at least, which is one of the 50 states, you can in fact shoot someone who is doing nothing more than walking across your yard, and get clean away with it. Whether it’s against the law or not is moot if there is no penalty.
Sailboat
[QUOTE=Mosier]
If everyone just took care of their own criminals, like this woman did, we wouldn’t even need courts and police! Think of the money we’d save!
[/QUOTE]
Nah, we’d spend it all at the auto body shop.
Sailboat
[QUOTE=Mosier]
If everyone just took care of their own criminals, like this woman did, we wouldn’t even need courts and police! Think of the money we’d save!
[/QUOTE]
What’s moral isn’t necessarily ethical. You can “justify” it morally, as was the question, by assuming the guilt, and when you still have the thief red-handed as the case here, guilt is more easily verified. But for the betterment of society as a whole, we should not allow stuff such as this to go completely unpunished, even if it is moral to kill thieves if they are guilty.
[QUOTE=Sailboat]
I understand that you want to believe this, but it’s functionally not true. Yoshihiro Hattori was shot to death while walking away from a front porch after ringing the doorbell and getting no answer, and the shooter was acquitted. So in Louisiana, at least, which is one of the 50 states, you can in fact shoot someone who is doing nothing more than walking across your yard, and get clean away with it. Whether it’s against the law or not is moot if there is no penalty.
Sailboat
[/QUOTE]
The fact that the shooter went to criminal trial and was acquitted, and then lost in a civil trial means nothing? Peairs went through legal, emotional, and financial hell, and is paying to this day for a monumental f*k up. Sorry, this is not a case of open season on tresspassers.
[QUOTE=glee]
In the UK, pursuing and killing a fleeing purse-snatcher would be a crime (presumably ‘manslaughter’ if the car was provably deliberately aimed to kill and ‘causing death by dangerous driving’ if it wasn’t.
I don’t like thieves (but he didn’t use violence).
I certainly don’t like vigilantes, especially using a car to ram (which could easily kill other people)
I don’t like stirring up threats using racial prejudice and ignorance.
Snatching valuables out of a car should be a death sentence, carried out by a civilian?
Would you be as content if the woman had shot him on the street?
[/QUOTE]
You’re right; his hand should have been cut off as is customary in his community.
Seriously, although I cannot condone her actions, I have a hard time finding any tears for a thief who, had he not been killed, most certainly would have continued his thieving ways, maybe eventually killing one of his targets.
[QUOTE=Scoundrel Swanswater]
BUT, I think what is the most annoying thing in this case is that the Maroccan boy that died had been on trial the day before for an armed roberry where he threatened a shopkeeper with a gun and held a knife to his throat.
The DA asked for a sentence of 24 months.
And this lady tried to defend her own properties from an obviously dangerous criminal and gets 30 months?
[/QUOTE]
He wasn’t “obviously dangerous” to her, unless she happened to be some sort of psychic.
The purpose of laws and penal systems is not to take care of what karma misses. It is to maintain order and the safety (and rights) of the public.
It doesn’t matter what he did the day before. The DA’s job is not to make value judgments regarding the victims or homicides. His job is to enforce the law, and this woman is guilty of manslaughter at the least.
Sure, she was acting in the heat of the moment, but she certainly had time to consider her actions as she chased the guy around town.
30 months sounds right to me,.
“Ali El B. on the other hand, was an example of the core group of two thousand or so second-generation Moroccan immigrant young men, that have been causing so much trouble in recent years in Amsterdam and that have been giving all other Morroccan immigrants a bad name.”
Curious, has there been any discernable increase or decrease in this type of crime since the incident? Has the immigrant community issued any condemnation for what would appear to be common acts of lawlessness or is it all just cut and dry allignment based on race?
[QUOTE=BwanaBob]
You’re right; his hand should have been cut off as is customary in his community.
[/QUOTE]
Err.. do they cut off hands in the Dutch Morrocan community? Or in Morrocco?