[SGVLUG] Scary stuff for us Geeks.

[Dustin]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Terry Hancock wrote:

> But how many people will get hurt in between, and how many will *really*
> get their lives back afterwards?

None.  As I said, it doesn't function unless it is made to function.  
It's only advantage is that the mechanism is there whenever society
chooses to use it.  It is, however, nice to put the Kentucky rifles up
over the mantle in case the Redcoats come back, rather than beating them
into ploughshares because "obviously we'll never need to fight like that
again."

The common mistake is to confuse it for something it isn't and conclude it
doesn't work.  It doesn't usher in the Second Coming and a Millenium of
Peace On Earth, which a lot of other things do.  On the other hand, none 
of those other things actually work, so maybe something that works in a 
limited way is better than a metric ton of things that don't function.

The tree of liberty still gets watered with the blood--or lost lives, or
productivity--of patriots.  But sometimes they buy more with some legal 
tools embedded in the legal system than having to deal with a legal 
system designed by and for the few.

The things I find most scary about certain recent events is not the little
miscarriages of justice (it's easy to have perspective from the comfort of
home, I freely admit) but the attempts to weaken the legal tools so there
isn't a mechanism to eventually deal with the problem.

I've always hated the repeated, often successful attempts to do away with
unanimous jury decisions for the same reason.  If people don't believe in
erring on the side of freeing the guilty rather than convicting the
innocent, they probably deserve all the injustice and oppression they get,
but I hate to be punished for their stupidity (or, more often, fear)  and
I hate for them to make it harder for later generations to be sane.

> It's easy to apologize later after you've already gotten away with the
> crime, but is that really a deserved absolution?

Again, you mistake it for some much better tool that, well, doesn't exist.
And absolution is certainly outside of any legal scope.  The law is really
incapable of dealing with such weighty ethical issues.

Dustin