AllSeeingSkink wrote:I'd say a child rapist successfully avoiding going to jail is pretty much against the ethos of the law.
Due process was not followed sadly. Otherwise would not be having this conversation.
A fair and honest conviction would cause no objection from me.
Peregrine wrote:
Orlanth wrote:Following the standards of law and due process isn't nit picking, its is being legally right, rather than legally wrong. QED.
The standards of law and due process apply to the State of California imprisoning Polanski for an appropriate length of time after he is convicted of child rape. They do not apply to me, a private citizen, stating the indisputable fact that Polanski is a child rapist. He has confessed to raping a child, that is the end of it. The label fits even if the State of California botched the handling of his case and allowed him to escape punishment.
However your 'indisputable fact' is entirely wrong. You do not gave carte blanche to upgrade a legal case to a chatge of your choosing because you are triggered. That is not how it works.
You certainly don't use the type of case to attack someone who advocates for the due process to be applied impartially.
This is important. Underage sex causes societal triggers and these lead to all manner of miscarriage of justice. This case is a good example because of the potentially well meaning but legally unethical decision to hold sentencing decision making sessions between the trial judge and prosecutor without access to defence counsel. Triggered people
helped Polanski walk away by making him un-extraditable through a recorded miscarriage of justice.
However i could go beyond that. have kept my argument to Polanski's case and general legal ethics alone, however there is good cause to defend cases like this simply because society does not. It is all too easy to defend cases on prior merit, veteran with PTSD gets short justice, raise a popular petition to show them mercy etc. However people are naturally understandably averse to cases of underage sex, and while I can understand that, I can understand why one ought not to pre-judge or to extend a case to bounds it does not lawfully belong because the actual legal case doesn't have a ring to it like the upgraded label does.
You may not know of cases in the
UK recently where labels of underage sex have damaged people immorally and unfairly. The case of Sir Cliff Richard springs to mind. Sir Cliff is an easy example because it was a matter of press intrusion and prejudice of what came out to be an innocent man. However there is a link between an accusation of an innocent man and an upgraded accusation against a man who was charged with a lesser crime.
In the latter there is a far better and scarier example.
Have you heard of Operation Ore known in the US as Operation Avalanche? This involved a sting operation involving child porn. It had international ramifications and the consequences below occured in the US
Uk and elsewhere. The FBI set up a trap website with regular porn which also included some images of child porn. Because the US government is reluctant to handle child porn itself the number of images shown was limited, were vague and occupied a tiny subsection of the website. The sting operation then went on to track those who used the site especially though who subscribed.
There were a number of victims targeted, and I use the word victim because of the nature of the operation. There was so little child porn on the site and it was so ambiguous that most users claimed they didn't see it. Others downloaded it in error as part of a batch download of regular porn. Now these users were labelled as paedophiles even though the majority never saw any child porn and were not looking for it. They were caught on a technicality by the vaguaries of the website. It took a long time to clear their names, some committed suicide from the public shaming. I do not know where you would stand on this. Technically anyone who downloaded the one or two child porn images was guilty of downloading child porn, this meant they were paedophiles, had to sign the sex offenders register etc, culpability ballooned beyond what it actually was, and the public didn't care.
Worse yet were those whose credit card details had been stolen to use to pay for access to the site. Many were unable to clear their names even after they were able to prove identity theft, and again this led to a number of suicides. A police chief in the
UK was quoted as saying 'the ends justified the means' when looking at the recorded suicides, of both guilty and innocent downloaders and those who were victims of identity theft because some genuine paedophiles were identified during the process.
This highlights why one should not extra-legally upgrade an accusation beyond what the law does, one should not discount the possibility of mitigating circumstances, and one should also not label those who advocate for legal ethics for defendants of taboo crime cases. The latter is just a witch hunt. Witch hunts occur not so much from the accusation itself but because the taboo surrounding the accusation makes those who advocate for ethical and fair treatment secondary targets. i.e if you raise and defence against mistreatment or mislabelling of a witch/communist/heretic you must also be guilty. This is alarming, but it wont stop me.
I am NOT an apologist for child rape, I am an apologist for fair treatment under the law without requirement of merit.
