Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You have this real, principled concern about the way the criminal justice system is rigged to favor the government, "the most amoral and vicious adversary in the world," and at the same time, in the same post, you repeat utter bullshit that the head of the government, the President, is spreading to corrupt the criminal justice system to serve his ends. You say the criminal justice system is predatory and rotten -- does that moral concern just shut off when the President tries to arrange special treatment for this own supporters? I think your instinct is to just take the side of almost any defendant, even Roger Stone, but you don't seem to get that the moronic attacks on this judge are aimed at making the system more predatory and more rotten.
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Trump and the justice system are peas in a pod. They richly deserve to infuriate and damage one another.
I have a hard time taking Stone's side because he chose this. The usual individual ground up in the gears of the justice system doesn't choose to fuck with it. He's often trying to do something the people and entities with significant property interests and lobbyists who write our codes don't want him to do (drugs, "honest services" fraud [whatever that catch-all is], tax shenanigans, trading on info he should have known was insider stuff, etc.). Rarely is he deciding to voluntarily put himself in the cross hairs of an investigation and then lie to the investigators.
I offer no brief on behalf of violent or predatory criminals.
I full understand that Trump may have a corrupting effect on the system. And if he uses it to try to jail his opponents, you'll see me attack him (as opposed to critique, which I'm doing in regard to Berman). But we're not there yet, and so far he's actually been good on criminal justice reform.
I see a great bright side to the criticism of our justice and court systems. It's highlighting the insanity of our draconian sentences, and causing the public to examine a system it doesn't typically examine closely. If this results in policymakers saying, "Hey, ya know what? Putting away non-violent offenders for nearly a decade is nuts. We have to stop that cruel and silly shit, and wasting tax dollars on that sort of ludicrous incarceration," that's a great thing.
