It’s funny how so many years later, the anger and the anger over the anger about OJ Simpson’s acquittal in California still lingers. The subject came up on the smoking docks of the company I worked at in Estacado. I can’t remember how Simpson came up, but almost immediately the two white participants in the conversation rolled their eyes at the idiotic California jury while the black guy immediately jumped to Simpson’s defense.

During the waning days of the trial, I was taking a sociology class where the case came up relatively frequently. The class was unusually white (I don’t remember a single minority, actually). After it had been announced that the jury had come to a verdict and before the verdict was announced, they took a hand count of how they thought the jury would rule. All but three said that they would find him guilty. I was one of those three. More-or-less from the moment that the demographic breakdown of the jury was announced, I was sure that we were looking at a hung jury. Once the jury was unhung, though, I knew that it wasn’t in favor of acquittal. Not within the three hours it took for them to come to their conclusion anyway. Shortly after, we heard the football players yelling down the hall “Not guilty!” “The juice is loose!” Having almost no black student population, the football players were the only pro-OJ demographic.

My sociology professor would relate to us the next day that she cried when she heard the verdict.

I am in the school of thought that Simpson was about as guilty as they come and I don’t believe that the defense team sufficiently knocked it down. I was of the school of thought that he got away with it because he was black. The jury was stupid.

The further away from it all I get, the less sure I am of any of that except for Simpson’s actual guilt. I still believe that I would have voted to convict and I don’t think I would have been wrong for doing so. At the same time, some of it comes down to what qualifies as “reasonable doubt”. I am not 100% sure that Simpson did it and to the jury that may have been enough (focusing on the word “doubt” rather than “reasonable” where I would focus). It’s also noteworthy that while I read daily articles on the trial and got commentary from my biased mother, I wasn’t in there for eight hours a day while the all-star defense team pounded, pounded, pounded away at the case to create just enough doubt to get an acquittal. Sheck cross-examined the DNA expert for something like eight days just hammering away at the DNA evidence to the point that it probably became difficult to hear all of the reasons that the evidence might-maybe-possibly not say what it clearly seemed to say without coming to believe that there were some holes.

The other thing I have chilled out on is the racial angle. Simpson did not get away with it solely because he was black and had eight black jurors. That’s not even enough for an acquittal and given that the non-black jurors came up with the same verdict in three hours suggests that it wasn’t purely racial. Beyond that, though, I think more important than Simpson’s race was his wealth and celebrity neither of which are attributable to his race (in any direct way). Set up the same evidence with either a poor black defendant or a rich white one and I would give the latter greater odds of acquittal. Then lastly, to the extent that the black jurors did unilaterally decide to line up in racial solidarity and the other four caved or were similarly biased), it’s worth pointing out that with a jury pool that was 40% white, there was only one white juror. That’s likely another attribution to Simpson’s deep pockets. None of this is to say that race did not inappropriately benefit Simpson, but it’s not clear to me that it was determinative at all.

So after all this time Simpson is going to jail anyway for a somewhat unrelated crime (I say “somewhat” because if it hadn’t been for the first, he wouldn’t have been in the position that invited the second). I’m sure a lot of former football players that I once knew are heartbroken.

Postscript: Generally speaking, race is a subject that we don’t cover here at Hit Coffee. I am making an exception here, so we’ll see how that goes. I ask that comments please show respect towards disagreeing parties. Accusations of racism, actual racism, and derogatory nicknames of the participants in the trial or the surrounding controversy are discouraged. Thank you in advance for not making me regret bringing the subject up.

Drudge linked to this a while back to a case in Texas wherein a woman was arrested for running a sex operation out of her spa and a cop was fired for having sex with her. It’s a rather bizarre story and unfortunately I can’t quote it lightly, so the blockquotes are probably a tad excessive. It ultimately comes down to a “He said, she said”.

She said:

After an abusive marriage and tragic life in China, SuJun Han believed she had found some hope in Beaumont: a good-paying job and a businessman boyfriend.

The job got her busted and the “boyfriend” turned out to be a cop.

“I’m at the lowest point in my life,” said Han in an interview with The Enterprise last week in Houston. Han was charged with prostitution in May when police raided her VIP Spa in Beaumont.

The 45-year-old China native says she was operating a legitimate business, and the only sexual contact she had was with two men who turned out to be Beaumont officers – and her passionate intercourse with one of them was for love.

Han says the raid three months ago on her VIP Spa added more dark punctuation to a life peppered with abuse from men, including at the hands of a husband who forced her to give away her firstborn daughter.

He Said:

Breiner is one of two officers suspended indefinitely without pay for engaging in sex acts during the undercover investigation. Breiner is the only officer trying to stop the city from suspending him, saying that because he did what he was asked to do, the punishment violated his constitutional rights.

“I don’t agree that he should have had sex. I don’t agree that (Lt. Curtis) Breaux told him he should have sex,” Coffin said.

Breiner has said all along that Breaux told him he would have to have sex with the women to make the case.

Breiner added that the other undercover officers didn’t want to participate in the sting because they didn’t want to have to testify in open court. Also the officers indicated their wives wouldn’t allow it.

Lt. David Kiker is the other officer who was suspended without pay for having sex. Breaux and Sgt. Robert Roberts were suspended five days for failing to notify department heads of the lengths the officers would go to pursue a felony conviction.

Breiner testified to experiencing manual stimulation, oral sex and vaginal penetration with women at two spas.

Assistant City Attorney Joseph Sanders asked Breiner if he enjoyed having sex with the women.

At first he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. At times when Breiner responded to the attorney’s questions, he raised his voice and answered questions with a question.

“If you are asking if I had an orgasm, yes. It was a job, sir,” Breiner said. “I didn’t have pleasure doing this. I was paid to do it.”

Sanders also asked Breiner if he had a problem getting aroused.

“Obviously, you haven’t listened to the tapes. Yes, I did,” Breiner responded.

There’s a saying that the truth usually lies somewhere between… but it’s kind of hard to believe either of these are really telling the truth. Just because I think she’s lying doesn’t mean that I think he’s telling the truth.

There was a short time in Colosse when the Republicans were on the rise in city government. They couldn’t seem to swipe the mayor’s mansion, but they got quite adept at picking up lower profile races where the Republican voters were well-organized and the Democratic voters complacent and not always knowing that the guy that they see all those signs for is an icky Republican. They managed to win even city-wide elections despite the Democratic tilt of city politics in addition to a handful of Republican-leaning districts. With a couple surprisingly conservative black Democrats and a not-popular mayor, they even had a majority on the council for a couple of years.

The funny thing about the Republican city councilman is that they almost all looked exactly the same. Unusually young-looking handsome white fratboyish men with dark hair and a winning smile for the cameras. I followed politics closely and even I couldn’t always tell them apart. When one was term-limited out, another would step right in and take over the same role as seemlessly as Girard Christopher took over for John Haymes Newton as Superboy. Coincidentally, both actors looked a lot like Colosse Republican city councilmen.

Anyway, this post in particular involved Councilman Trevor Gaines. One night Gaines left a strip club that he’d been cut off for drinking too much. While driving, he swerved off the road, hit the railing, and ended up with a flat tire. He was walking down the road to his mother’s house, which was apparently nearby, when someone pulled over to offer aid.

• If you’re a city councilman, it’s not good to be caught drunk driving, much less doing so in a way that results in your car kissing the rail.
• The people that stopped to help him almost certainly didn’t know who he was, so all he needed to do was refuse the help and keep on walking.
• If he could just sleep it off, he could return and pick the car up the next day. Or perhaps it would have been towed, but that was preferable to a DWI.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t moving very fast physically or mentally. He didn’t really manage to get away completely before onlookers started gathering. He told the Samaritans, “No, thanks! I can’t get caught here because I am drunk and I am a city councilman and I drove my car into a rail!”

Though he’d cleared the first, he was apparently hadn’t made the second stop on the above logic train.

He pleaded it out for a fine and community service announcements. You might think that his political career was over, but shortly before election day he had a stroke of good luck that got him some sympathy votes: The newspapers found out that his wife had been sleeping with another Republican city councilman. Maybe she thought that the Republican City Councilmen were as interchangeable as I did.

There is a story in Colosse about a man going around and impersonating a police officer. He hasn’t done anything awful yet, but whatever his motives are they are assumed not to be good. The police are “reminding” everybody that any time you’re pulled over if you have doubts over the authenticity of the officer to find a well-lit and/or well-populated place to pull over. It’s considered a rule that as long as a person doesn’t make an attempt to flee, they should be given latitude as to where or when to pull over.

The problem with this is that when you’re being pulled over, you don’t know if the officer in the car behind you knows and understands this rule. Further, you don’t know that even if the rules should cut in your favor, whether you are doing yourself considerable harm by invoking them. It’s sort of like how you legally can’t be asked various questions on job interviews such as what your wife does but if you ever invoke this it’ll hurt you all the same (I had a post a while back on how my employers keep asking me what my wife does and they’re not supposed to do that, but I can’t find the post).

The first time I was ever pulled over I was sixteen and scared out of my mind. I was in the left hand lane and I didn’t know whether I was supposed to find some place on the left to pull over or to pull over to the right. We hadn’t gone two blocks before the officer was blaring “Pull over to the right or you will be arrested!” I got my answer, got pulled over, got a lecture and ultimately didn’t end up getting a ticket (I think that he thought I was a drunk driver which of course I proved not to be).

Of course, that pales in comparison to the case of Dibor Roberts. She was on a rural desert road when she was caught by an officer going 65 in a 50. She didn’t want to stop in a dark area and so slowed down and continued to drive. The officer ended up pulling in front of her and stopping (which is against protocol, apparently), busted threw her window, and allegedly got into an altercation with her that resulted in his foot getting run over and her getting arrested, tried, and convicted of assorted crimes. The officer says that he did what he did to “get control of the situation” and that it was her fault for not successfully communicating to the officer that did intent to stop at the next available, well-lit opportunity.

Noteworthy here is that the authorities in Colosse and indeed the website of the Arizona jurisdiction where Dibor was pulled over don’t actually say anything about having to communicate your intention to stop in order to avoid getting your window smashed out and going to jail. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good idea to signal or turn on your hazards and it may be common sense to do so, but common sense slips one’s mind in high stress situations. And if it’s so obvious, of course, it should be mentioned as part of the whole schpiel about waiting to pull over every single time.

Granted, generally speaking when cops talk about this they’re talking about unmarked cars. It’s extremely rare that impersonators will actually mark their car up. However, when we’re talking about a “well-lit” place, we’re assuming darkness. Whenever I’m pulled over at night I can’t read the markings on the side of the car. I can’t in the daytime, either, though I recognize police cars by the bumper on their grill, other equipment and the full-class sedans they usually ride in. Of course, I should note here that sometimes they go out of their way to make it harder to tell.

I am getting worried that between Web and I this site is becoming anti-cop. I certainly don’t intend it to. Though I think sometimes things get out of hand I think that cops are in general a good group of people. My wife’s cousin, who hosted our rehearsel dinner years ago, is a state trooper. When I was dating Julie, I got to know a lot of Phillippi cops because her father was a volunteer fireman and there was a lot of overlap. Tracey’s Dad was a cop. Until I realized how temperamentally unsuited for it I was, I considered going into police work. I don’t envy them or their job. I just get a little annoyed sometimes when they sometimes say “You need to trust us” (in this case not to go berzerk if you don’t pull over right away) and then pull stunts like the Roberts case and line up in support of officers that do.

All of these posts are kind of old, but Transplanted Lawyer had a host of good ones last may (one of which in response to a post here):

Age of Consent Laws

Some young people probably do have enough maturity to deal with sex; some people over the age of eighteen do not. The psychological factors that go into that sort of thing are astonishingly complex and functionally impossible for an objective third party to evaluate. That’s why the only possible way to handle the question of how old should we require someone to be before we agree that they can consent to sex of necessity must be totally and completely arbitrary. Maybe as a moral matter we can create constructs to handle particular situations, but as a legal matter it’s simply too big of a mess to ever be anything but an arbitrary distinction that often will have little relation to case-by-case realities. {…}

Eighteen years is as good an arbitrary age as any other reasonably young age one might come up with. Here’s why I think that — the age must of necessity be above the age at which one’s body attains sexual maturity, because the harm that the law seeks to avoid is mental, emotional. One needs some time to come to an understanding of what one’s body is capable of doing, and that takes practical experience, not theoretical knowledge, of what sexual maturity feels like. What does it feel like to be sexually aroused? You can read about it in a book all you like, but until you experience it, the descriptions don’t make any difference and aren’t particularly meaningful. So the law needs to set the line at some point late in adolescence. Eighteen years is an age by which we can be reasonably certain that most people will have entered puberty and picked up a few years’ worth of experience with their newfound sexual maturity and awareness.

I still disagree with TL on the subject in part because he has a lot more faith in judges (and prosecutors) than I do. In order for the judge to be able to look at the situation, it has to get to him. Many defendants will probably plead out simply because the judge has the ability to drop a two-story house on him. Particularly if he’s caught as having done it. It’s low-hanging fruit for prosecutors and there’s no telling how any given judge will read the situation.

No Heart Balm Here

If there was going to be a “heart balm” case, it would be Askew v. Askew (1994) 22 Cal.App.4th 942, referred to here by Eugene Volokh. Basically, the wife admitted that she lied to her fiance about loving him, being attracted to him, and enjoying sex with him. Based on his belief in her statements, he transferred five pieces of property that he owned individually into the marital estate. The couple then divorces and husband sues wife for fraud, asking the court to undo the dedication of the property into the marriage. The court says “no way,” because that sort of thing — even though, in a commercial context, it would obviously be fraud — it would open up a huge can of evidentiary worms for future courts to sort out.

This one is my favorite post of the three as it brought to my mind a subject that I hadn’t thought a whole lot about.

An Hour Of Traffic Court Will Do You Good

The first thing you might want to think about if you have to actually try your traffic ticket is — why would the cop lie? An unbiased traffic judge doesn’t start out thinking anyone is lying, and the police officer gets to testify first. That’s a powerful advantage for the state. The officer gets to set the stage, describing what was going on, and a well-trained officer uses that opportunity to explain why the defendant’s (alleged) misdeeds were dangerous. If you’re going to actually win on the testimony, you need to find some way of getting past that.

Secondly, given that the judge is not inclined to think that the cop is lying, simply contradicting the cop is, as a practical matter, not going to be enough to defeat the state’s burden of proof. Your testimony that the police officer was simply incorrect about something will not be credited. The officer has been to traffic patrol school, the officer is trained in observing traffic conditions and records his or her recollections very quickly after the ticket is written. You very likely have not done this. Therefore, the officer’s testimony about the circumstances of the ticket is likely to be credited over yours in the event of a simple red-light-green-light contradiction. {…}

I don’t particularly like finding people guilty of traffic violations. But it has to be done. I would like to find reasonable doubt if I can, and sometimes I ask searching questions of the officers to see if there is any doubt. But as a defendant, you have to give me something I can hang my hat on. You have to do something more than just say “Nuh-uh” when the police officer says you ran a red light, were speeding, or otherwise committed one of these infractions.

Ahhh, a subject near and dear to our hearts. I agree with TL that even in Ticket Towns the vast majority of the time the people that get pulled over were breaking the law. Sometimes the law simply exists to be broken (“Speed traps”) and sometimes not, but generally speaking there are too many people that are perpetually breaking the law for them to bother to trump up charges on people that are doing no wrong. As for the lack of incentive to lie… well there’s fundraising and the fact that most of the time there is little to nothing that we can do to refute what the cop has to say. There is unfortunately no real way for the system to tell when a cop is acting in good faith and when he isn’t.

One minute Clancy and I are driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming going somewhere between 70 and 75 in a 75mph zone.

Several minutes later, a local Sheriff’s Deputy is telling me that I was going 91mph in a 65mph zone.

In between time, I was driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming and noticed that the car behind me wasn’t Clancy. I turned on my right blinker to let the car that was not Clancy’s pass. Instead, there were flashing red, white, and blue lights everywhere. I’d never seen a police car with so many lights.

Also in between cruising at 70mph in a 75 and being told that I was going 91mph in a 65, a Sheriff’s Deputy pulled out of the median. Clancy immediately saw him and saw that the speed limit just dropped to 65 and slowed down. The officer, who half-an-hour later told me that he was initially pulling out to give her a ticket for following me too closely, decided that I was the one to go after since I wasn’t slowing down and in a few seconds I was about to start going downhill.

I cannot say with any certainty how fast I was going when he pulled me over. It’s entirely possible that I was, in fact, going 91 miles an hour. I can say, however, that the entire 1,180 miles I had driven to that point I had a tremendous amout of difficulty getting my car to stay about 75mph. Even going downhill I could rarely go about 82 or 83. This is me with my foot pounding the accelerator to the floor.

So the odds that I was going above 80 (and therefore speeding) were relatively high. If my car could, under any circumstances, go 91mph, it did not let me in on this little secret. Of course, I didn’t specifically ask it to go 91mph, but I did ask it to go 80-85 on various occasions and was almost always denied and was even denied the opportunity to go 75 more than a few times.

That is almost all I will say about how fast I was actually going. I will state unequivocably, however, that Clancy was not following me too closely at any point in our drive. She’s very cautious about such things.

Back to the number 91. Actually, 91 isn’t so important as is 26. I was allegedly going 26mph over the speed limit. In many states, Real-life Wyoming included, this creates what can be termed (if we choose to censor the term) a Spitstorm Ticket, which means that you were not only speeding, but you were actively a danger to other drivers. I should point out that there were not many on a rural Real-life Wyoming freeway at two in the morning. The officer did dutily inform me that there could be some deer around for me to potentially hit in lieu of cars.

So apparently the law in Real-life Wyoming as it pertains to drivers allegedly going in excess of 25mph of the speed limit is that you have to appear in court. This would mean that I would need to fly back to Real-life Wyoming and go before a judge who could fine me in excess of $500 and even throw me in jail for 20 days for this alleged, atrocious danger I posed to deer at three in the morning on a rural freeway in Real-life Wyoming.

But wait! Says the officer. Here’s what I am going to do for you! I will put you down as being able to forfeit a bond rather than have to appear. He should not do this, he explains, but he wants to do me a favor seeing as how I am moving cross country and am such a nice person. Bond would be a mere $230 and would not require my return to Real-life Wyoming.

It’s an interesting turn of events wherein I am pulled over for going a speed that I was hereforto unaware my car was even capable of going that turns out to be one mile-per-hour over the spitstorm threshold that creates such potential for a world of trouble that paying a $230 seems like a great deal and raising a fuss could more than double my fine and, if the judge were feeling particularly cantankorous, land me in jail for a spell.

Fortunately, no deer were hurt in the fodder provided for this post.

One of the surprises when I relocated to Deseret was that state trooper highway patrolmen would often hide behind large structures waiting for speeders. This surprised me because in Delosa from what I understand they’re not allowed to do that. As I understand the law to be, the police shield, word “Police”, or overhead lights must be visible to oncoming traffic unless (a) The police officer is mobile in the middle of routine business when he catches the violator or (b) they are supervising a construction or school zone and are not visible because they’re behind another vehicle.

The city of Phillippi actually replaced a bunch of police cars and police lighting systems that didn’t have overhead police lights because lawyers were getting tickets dismissed. When the car was parked on the side of the road, the shield wasn’t visible and there weren’t overhead lights. It was a small investment to bring in a lot of future revenue.

Cops in Delosa work around this rule in a number of ways. There was one popular place in Phillippi for cops to hide wherein most of the car is obstructed by brush but there is just enough to see the shield in the right slant of light. Since judges have signed off on it, the local constable’s office used it right up until something was built there. It’s also not uncommon for some police departments to schedule routine operations to involve going back and forth in areas where people frequently speed or red lights are run.

I was informed upon moving to Estacado that the laws here are the same as they are in Delosa where cops can’t out-and-out hide. Santomas cops are very, very innovative when it comes to skirting this requirement. Their highway fleet has no overhead lights and are atypical police car colors (Silver, gray, green). The cars are marked with the word “Police” but you can only see the marking if your headlights on are on and hitting the car. The cars are always parked at a 45 degree angle or so. In other words, despite meeting the letter of the law, it’s difficult to tell that they’re police cars until people know what to look for.

That’s just it, though. People learn what to look for. I’ve already figured it out. The cars are parked at a 45 degree angle, are Chevy Cavaliers or Cavalier-looking cars (adding them to the Camaros, Caprices, Impalas, and Crown Vics as cars to be suspicious of), have a slightly unusual hew of whatever color the car is so that the reflective paint blends in, and are parked at a 45 degree angle or so.

But to me, though, the really odd part is that they don’t actually have to cheat. The average flow of traffic on I-31 is above the speed limit in all but the right lane. The city of Santomas has lower speed limits than the freeways in surrounding counties. It is nearly impossible for me to believe that they couldn’t find speeders without resorting to such tricks.

Of course, the law that protects us from cops is a bit silly in and of itself. It’s not illegal to knowingly speed in front of a police officer. It’s unlawful to speed at all whether a cop is present or not. Theoretically, then, the police officers should be able to deploy any means they wish short of entrapment or Constitutional abridgments in their pursuit of “dangerous” drivers. In a sense, laws like this as well as caps on ticket revenue and special outs to avoid your insurance company finding out about your misdeeds underline what a game this all is.

If we were serious about speed limits, there’d be speed cameras placed everywhere. Any time you speed you get a ticket. Even if the ticket is $5, it’ll start adding up and drivers will modify their behavior accordingly. Cars will start coming equipped with a new kind of cruise control where you set a maximum speed so that you inadvertently don’t go over the speed limit. Revenue from tickets would go towards something other than the general funds of the municipality to avoid incentives to set speed limits to low.

None of the above changes are coming down the pipe any time soon, so we’re back to the games of wackily-painted police cars hiding behind not-completely-opaque bushes.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been discussing the CPS raids on the FLDS and the subsequent court battles with various people over the last week and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. There is a near even split. The dividing line is not between liberals and conservatives or big government folks versus libertarians. Rather, it’s men against women. Probably about two thirds of the men I’ve talked to believe that the CPS was way out of line and that this is an egregious example of government over-reach. About the same portion of women take the opposite view. Republican voter or Democrat, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Men seem to look at the situation abstractly as a legal or philosophical issue. Women seem to look at the situation more personally as young women are stripped of their autonomy to become tools of procreation and the playthings of much (and sometimes much, much) older men.

For my part, from what I know about the case and the laws surrounding it, I think that the judges came to the correct legal conclusion. The CPS did a very poor job of getting its evidenciary ducks in a row. Even setting aside the faulty tip that triggered the raid, it seems likely that they could have done a better job of seeking out the women that escaped and the men that were kicked out of the compound. Or maybe even with all those ducks in a row the situation is cloudy enough that they can’t realistically legally intervene. Not sure. It’s frustrating when the prosecution (or in this case a government agency) botches a case that really could have been worthwhile, but when that happens the system needs to do what the system needs to do in order to prevent those botches from happening in the future.

And so I would agree with the men, for the most part. Except that a lot of them take it a few steps further. In their view, the CPS folks are the bad guys and the FLDS – or at least the majority contingent of the FLDS that is not actively sleeping with minors – their victims. More than one person has suggested that the FLDS is being picked on because it’s different, that the belief that all of these bad things are going on is largely the product of prejudice, and that we’re punishing an entire group for the actions of comparatively few.

That’s where they lose me.

From my perspective, the CPS folks are the inept and overzealous good guys in this case. The FLDS members are the victims only insofar as criminals are sometimes the victim of illegal searches. Well that’s the extent to which they are victims of the state, anyway. A majority of them are victims of the system they grew up in, but then they’re also the perpetrators. The moral perpetrators here are not simply the men that are having sex with people that they shouldn’t be having sex with. The perpetrators are the families giving up their young women to this system and raising their sons to be future perpetrators or else allowing them to be kicked out of the compound. While some people wonder why they don’t just take the men out of the picture and let everyone else be are in my mind insufficiently weighing that by participating in the system, their hands are bloody to. The women are victims, but they’re not just victims.

Don’t get me wrong. They have my sympathy. I don’t pretend that if I were raised in that environment that I wouldn’t believe exactly as they believe and support the system exactly as they support it. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But while I have sympathy, that doesn’t entitle them to the moral right to perpetuate the system that warped them. Though I don’t have as much of it since they were profiting from the system in a sense, I even have sympathy for the men that are collecting the young brides. As the saying goes, they know not what they do. They believe that they are doing God’s work. That doesn’t mean that letting them do what they were doing is right, either.

I’ve no doubt that the FLDS parents love their children. The problem is that either they love their church more or are stuck so far under the thumb of their church that they are powerless. So in a sense, Warren Jeffs is their parent. Their argument that nothing should be allowed to come between their family loses its resonance when they quite frequently allow their church to do just that:

To reduce competition for wives, the church systematically expels adolescent boys, thus trimming the eligible male population. It’s estimated that the FLDS has thrown out between 400 and 1,400 male members in the last decade.

Church elders excommunicate boys as young as 14 ostensibly for bad behavior—like flirting with girls, watching a movie, listening to rock music, drinking, playing basketball, or wearing short-sleeve shirts. Sometimes called the “Lost Boys,” they’re considered apostates and cut off entirely from their relatives. Parents or siblings who protest are sometimes asked to pack their bags as well. Girls have also been cast out of the church, but this happens much less often. Usually this punishment is reserved for women who don’t wish to be part of a polygamous marriage.

Excommunication doesn’t just mean that they lose Temple privileges or can’t take Holy Communion anymore. The church is the community. They’re not only kicked out of Mass (or whatever the FLDS equivalent is) but kicked out of their homes and their physical communities. Complaints from FLDS members about how wrong it is for them to send these kids into the world at large ring hollow. The church does it and the parents allow it to happen. Either they agree with what’s happening or they’re powerless to do anything about it. The end result is the same either way.

So how well do these young men fare in the world of iniquity that they are thrust into? It’s not a pretty sight:

They aren’t used to remembering when job interviews are or how to pay bills. They don’t know how to mingle with people, and some struggle to talk to girls.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

A therapist meets with some boys; some attend self-improvement classes. They are learning to manage money and signing up to take the GED. Fischer evaluates them, asking about future plans and if they want to go to college. He is working to match each boy with a mentor and find them places to live. For now, they live in hotels and in houses that the Fischer brothers own.

Many are highly skilled in construction, a main job in the creek. But all this support from outsiders is confusing. The boys say FLDS members and even their own families often turned on them, so it was easier to distrust everyone.

“In a way, it scares us,” said Raymond Hardy, 19. “I’m not used to it.” Ream wants to know what the catch is. “There’s always a catch. Why are they doing this?”

Of course, one could read this and say that the CPS is just condemning more kids to this fate. This is true, but I am unpersuaded that this is the worst fate. As difficult-going as this was for the Lost Boys, their situation is not unsalvageable. Many of them will grow up and have children and those children will be born free. Their sisters, on the other hand, will have children that will be born into the same machine that they were, believing that free thought and action are stops on the road to Hell. Regarding the kids in Eldorado, as substandard as our Foster Care system is, I’m not convinced that it’s worse than the alternative. I’m further not convinced of the notion that because the FLDS screwed them up so royally that the only responsible thing to do is to return them to that oppressive environment.

The tricky part, though, is the question of “What next?” This is a question where the CPS has fallen woefully short and the question to which I am not sure there is a good answer. Even if they do take the kids and more of them eventually adjust, the women in the compound will simply have more kids. The machine will likely live on. Perhaps the result will be an insurrection among the rank-and-file towards normalizing the church’s relationship with its surroundings. It seems unlikely that such an insurrection can be cultivated where free thought is grounds for explusion and besides, they’ve lost their children before in service of The Cause and no such movement has occurred.

From the CPS’s perspective, this will quite likely result in a retreat from Texas and that may be all the CPS and the State of Texas want. The Creek compounds in Utah and Arizona will continue on, though. Willard has expressed great concern that any attempts to pierce the armor surrounding that will result in rivers of blood. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. After Waco, it seems unlikely that the federal government is going to take that chance and the governments in Utah and Arizona seem to have moved on from their investigations.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all of this. It’s also why I have become so frustrated with those that are celebrating the reunion of parents and child. Even though I believe the courts likely ruled correctly given what they had to work with, I am more inclined to feel sad and angry that moral justice was not done even if legal justice was. This represents not the greatness of our system, but the inherent weakness of it. It is apparent that either our governments are too inept to handle the investigation or otherwise that cults can escape justice so long as their circle their wagons tightly enough. No thorough investigation can occur without ripping the community apart from one end to the other… and we can’t rip the community apart without being able to thoroughly investigate it first.

Further, they’ve managed to win people over people by virtue of the very insularity that keeps them beyond the government’s reach. The fact that they’re so different becomes a reason in itself that they should not be released into the general system. The kids are so brainwashed that they can’t handle the outside world without the guidance of their brainwashed parents. Except that arguments of coercion are shrugged off because you can’t call it coercion when the conditioning begins at birth. The fact that members of the church are so stripped of their autonomy that coercion becomes redundant simply doesn’t make me feel better.

In an earlier thread, Gannon took exception to how many people the US has in jail. I’ve already begun discussing this in the context of Jamal Damon Barack, and the types of repeat theives that public universities see.

On the competing side, two stories recently: First, a CNN video on a man who served his time, came back into society, but couldn’t make it so he handed a cop some crack and begged to be re-incarcerated. Secondly, a story on some teenagers who ran a violent prostitution ring, but managed to get off with a year and a half in juvie due to a plea bargain.

If you’re going to make a case study for where the US prison system is messed up, these are a pretty good place to start. People fall into a life of crime for a lot of reasons – some are actually in need, some simply have no respect for the law/life/property of others, some are medically sociopathic, some see an opportunity for profit that bypasses or outweighs the risk calculation of being caught, and some (though this is generally relegated to more obscure/arcane areas like tax law or financial reporting) honestly try to follow the law but simply have no clue what it actually means.

In the case of JDB, I mentioned that the (a) courts are too lax in sentencing and the comforts of prisons and (b) prisons themselves are not really set up to do a good job rehabilitating people. The homeless gentleman doesn’t appear to have gotten a lax sentence – but at the same time, when he got out of prison, he literally had no support structure to turn him back into a productive and law-abiding member of society. He sounds like the type who would have done better for it. On the other side, we have people like JDB and the pimp boys, who probably would leave jail and go right back into crime no matter what prison tried to do to rehabilitate them.

Prisons, obviously, have dual purposes. There is a large amount of debate as to which of these purposes is primary. Speaking neutrally, they can be enumerated as corrective and protective. In the corrective element, prison is supposed to serve as a place where individuals who’ve committed crime can be rehabilitated, shown the error of their ways, and then return to society and become productive and law-abiding. In the protective, prison is supposed to both serve as a deterrent to criminals (the sane ones who will weigh risk/reward and decide crime isn’t worth the risk) and also keep those who are not yet rehabilitated away from those they otherwise would harm.

Where this falls down:
#1 – Prisons and the Justice system currently do a lousy job working out who’s actually rehabilitated or not. Part of this is due to the lax sentencing problem, part of it is due to well-meant but ill-thought-out plans to try to keep prison populations (and thus maintenance costs) down, and part of it is due to the construction of the system in the first place. The end result is that a lot of people who have no business being released back into society are let out anyways.

#2 – Prisons do a lousy job of showing prisoners the reward for being productive and law-abiding. Let’s face it, most prisons have corruption problems, they have a high criminal-to-guard ratio, and the underlying society between prisoners isn’t run like normal society. People learn plenty of the wrong lessons in prison.

#3 – Prisons, especially short-term/”low security” ones, are cushy. I wouldn’t say that I’d want to live there, but I can certainly see where a guy who’s homeless and desperate might indeed see prison as “no worse” than where he currently is – in prison, he gets his meals covered, he gets a roof over his head and warm bed to sleep in at night, and he has things like cable TV and a weight/recreation room available at least part of the day. In the case of the story above, we’re lucky he didn’t go violent. If your calculation is that prison’s no worse (or even better) than you are now, the deterrent effect and protective goal of prison kind of vanishes.

Oddly enough, though it would take some and money, at least a partial solution to these problems has already been discussed in the area of sex offenders. A number of states have been considering laws that change the sentencing of sex offenders from a strict “X years unless shortened for other reasons” or “X years with first parole chance at Y years” to, instead, “jail until you can prove rehabilitation and minimal likelihood to re-offend.”

The American Criminal Liberties Union and associated well-meaning (but almost never well-doing) groups opposed these laws, but I submit that if expanded, it would improve the prison structure on both goals.

Consider the following hypothesis: all sentences from this point on (and all existing sentences commuted to the new structure) remove the “cap” of a sentence. Instead of a judge pronouncing “stealing a car at knifepoint, 10 years with possibility of parole in 5” on someone, the simple pronouncement: “Guilty. Remanded to state custody, first possibility of parole in 5 years.”

This changes the game in a number of ways.

First, it removes the idea of shortened sentences from the equation. Gone is the idea that someone will simply “get off with a slap on the wrist”, gone is the idea of someone waiting out their sentence. It also adds a sanity check on judges who are unnecessarily light to start with – a second panel would be responsible for releasing the individual, and hopefully catching the unrepentant criminals who got a light sentence to start with.

Second, it alters the game for those who actually want to get out of prison. If you really want out – if you really are repentant, really DO want to be outside the walls – then your best bet is not going to be to participate in the underlying prison dynamic, but to really learn a skill, really become marketable, really show that you can be a productive member of society. Those who don’t, simply won’t be released – and the goal of protecting society would be served. Moreover, the example to other prisoners would be there: thugs who wait around don’t get out, those who learn to play by the rules actually do get released.

Lastly, this very filter would help with the final problem – the current difficulty of ex-cons in finding work and re-entering society after prison. Those who go through construction apprenticeships, or college courses, or any other form of learning a useful skill will necessarily be the type to market that skill when they get out. The idea of someone who made a mistake, but learned their lesson and served their time and are coming out fresh, might actually have some meaning.

Looking at the three cases above – in the case of our homeless guy, he likely wouldn’t have had zero support structure when he got out of prison. In the case of Jamal Damon Barack, hopefully a parole/release board would have realized after the first few convictions that perhaps he wasn’t learning his lesson and kept him back. And in the last case, I hope to god no parole/release board would be as stupid as the judge who gave violent multiple-time rapists a year and a half each.

Some comments in this post reminded me of an incident at Southern Tech University a while back, and an underlying statement about the justice system.

Southern Tech, like most universities worldwide, has a theft problem. It has this problem partly because it’s in the nature of universities to be insecure, easy targets. Universities combine large amounts of people, relatively open buildings, unknown or shifting class schedules that leave rooms full of steal-able items exposed, and a generally open atmosphere that can lead people to let their guard down; they then mix in personal belongings that are more and more expensive (laptops, PDA’s, cell phones) and a decent amount of fairly high-ticket items (projectors, computers, equipment of varying sorts) owned by the university itself. The end result is, universities are a reasonably easy place for would-be thieves to snag something that will later be sold to a pawn shop. SoTech’s location right next to what is generally a drug- and gang-ridden slum area of town makes the problem worse, but they’re certainly not unique – nearby colleges in both rural and very rich neighborhoods have similar theft issues.

Recently, the SoTech police department sent out a memo to the entire system. Jamal Damon Barack* had been let out of prison again, and as a condition of his parole he was warned that he was no longer welcome on our campus or any others he has stolen from. We were to post fliers with JDB’s face, and keep an eye out – calling the cops if he did show up.

Gannon claims:

On the other hand, the US tries 10, 11, 12, 13 year old children as Adults and sends them to jail. In general, there a way too much people in jail.

Actually, the US has the opposite problem – we’re far too lenient on many crimes, and for many criminals, the system of rehabilitation is a joke to start with.

In discussions with the police investigator, I’ve found out a number of things. It turns out JDB is one of 5 or 6 serial thieves in the area (in addition to garden-variety opportunists, who also hit campus) who make a living out of (a) targeting educational institutions and (b) living in jail. They all have a rap sheet a mile long – JDB, for instance, has over 50 arrests in 20 years, and over 300 convictions on various counts of theft (and those are just the ones they could prove: the estimate is that he’s responsible for at least twice that number). He’s known by virtually every campus cop who’s ever worked in Colosse or its neighboring areas.

Each of them have learned to game the system and have the following things in common:
#1 – They are nonviolent. The most any have on their record is a “resisting arrest (running away)” notation, rather than citation for attempting to injure an officer.
#2 – They know how to fool judges into thinking they’re contrite.
#3 – They know precisely how to behave in jail and quickly get into the good-behavior and “trustee” positions even before their sentencings.
#4 – They exploit any “other” circumstances (one has a “terminal disease”, others have other sob stories or elderly mothers/other relatives who constantly speak on their behalf in court) for reduced sentencing.
#5 – For them, the minimum security prisons are a joke. They get a comfortable bed, 3 square meals a day, cable TV, the equivalent of a health club in the prison gym, and aren’t required to do anything at all unless they take jobs in the trustee program. The trustee program not only gets them preferential treatment but money as well, all for just a couple hours of work a day. While they’re on the streets? They have to provide their own basic necessities like food and shelter, while worrying about anyone else who might try to attack them or steal from them.

The result? A virtual revolving door for these guys, with the educational institutions pretty much supplying their income (along with the shadier pawn shops where they hock their stuff after presenting ridiculously-fake “receipts”) while they’re out. And it’s not as if they are stupid, either; they are incredibly inventive in managing to break off theft-prevention devices or get into areas they’re not supposed to be in, including traveling over false-drop ceilings or blending in with student crowds.

SoTech’s police, along with the other police departments, have repeatedly tried to get these guys longer sentencing and serious sanctions on parole to try to clean up their behavior, but the system’s not having it. Colosse already has enough trouble with a relatively constant stream of violent/drug/gang crime due to turf wars between rival gangs of Blood/Crip/MS13 backgrounds; the judges don’t want to catch grief from misguided racial advocacy groups for contributing to the numbers of incarcerated minorities and one way that they can keep their numbers down is to let “nonviolent offenders” off as quickly as they can.

Gannon thought we are “too tough” on crime, for trying murderers as adults in some specific cases; I think we’re too easy on crime. There are way too many ways for a criminal to game the system and get out early, and not enough rehabilitative ways for the system to actually work on them once a criminal’s decided that crime pays. The added problem is that, societally, many of these kids in the black/latino subcultures are being taught precisely that by parents or “role models” who themselves are gang members or glorify “thug life” behavior.

It gets worse as the gangs have begun recruiting younger and younger members, as well, which relates somewhat to Gannon’s cry about “tried as adult” children. I’d argue that a kid who joins a gang and then shoots 4 people in cold blood has made a pretty adult decision to commit murder or his other crimes, and that seems to be the general consensus as well – but even then, such prosecutions are relatively rare compared to the number of kids committing gang crimes overall.

I’m willing to take a bet that, if these kids didn’t start out learning that (A) crime pays and (B) as a child criminal, the system would give them just a slap on the wrist (especially “first time offender”), they might grow up making a different calculation on crime. Fix the culture and treat crime seriously with greater punishment and stronger rehabilitative efforts, and you might just manage to reduce the number of people willing to take the risk and ending up in prison in the first place.

*name changed for purpose of the story, naturally.