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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The laws were on the books, and the public's opposition to what the movie-maker was doing seems to fit in with the intent and scope of the laws. Maybe you can blame him for selective enforcement, but I don't think that qualifies as a miscarriage of justice. (That is, of course, assuming we take at face value that his denial that he didn't steal and ship a copy of the movie to Oklahoma.)

The prosecutor took measures to avoid normalizing what he and the community saw as deviant behaviors. That's one of the key purposes of law: it allows society to express its condemnation of certain conduct.

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Selective enforcement is absolutely a miscarriage of justice. Justice is the character of law that makes it fair. If you disagree with this, I would like to hear your defense.

The world is an inherently unfair place so it's dubious that laws that attempt to regulate it should be fair.

What you have there is an argument that is true but also unacceptable. It is true that the world is unfair and that pushing it into a fair state is impossible.

However we can't formally accept that as a society without kicking out one of the main pillars supporting the justice system. If we expect and accept that the justice system to produce unfair outcomes it becomes challenging to justify having court appearances. We could get unfair outcomes much more efficiently by just letting the police and DA arrest whoever with regular internal purges against corruption.

Selective enforcement may or may not be a miscarriage of justice. Here, you have a law where changing standards of morality may have rendered the full scope of the law obsolete. But there is conduct within the scope of the law that the community still considers egregious. I don’t think it is “unfair” to enforce the law against that conduct, but not enforce it against other conduct the community no longer considers wrongful.

I disagree. If the community wants to make that illegal, they should make it explicitly illegal, and go through the formal processes of review and enactment that allow for checks on the power of the government. Incredibly broad, rarely enforced laws only allow for corruption by the powerful. If communities should be allowed to use the full force of law (which, of course, can legitimately steal from you, lock you up, or kill you) to maintain social norms without them being explicitly defined, then what is the point of law in the first place? (Which is arguably a system of explicitly defining norms and the consequences of breaking them, with the implication that these norms are universal.)

Those laws should never have been used, and if the community wanted to dissuade future productions, they should have passed laws at the city, county, or state level that allows for the proper checks and balances.

one of the things that the founders of the American Republic attempted to do was to avoid the tyranny of the majority, that the public is opposed to what someone does and thus, for political purposes, laws are selectively enforced to punish the person the public dislikes seems to be a clear incident of such a tyranny.

The framers did not intend to preclude communities from enforcing laws regulating standards of decency and morality. This person was not prosecuted because people didn’t like him, he was prosecuted because he did something that was illegal and went far beyond the other, perhaps technically illegal, conduct prosecutors otherwise let slide.

Many people broke the law but weren't prosecuted because they didn't go far enough to justify it. This person broke the law and was prosecuted because he went further. Sounds to me like he was, in fact, prosecuted because people didn't like him.

Sure, in a sense they prosecuted him because they didn’t like him, but it’s because he went too far. It’s like prosecuting someone doing 30 over the speed limit but looking the other way when someone does 5 over. Yeah, we don’t like reckless drivers so we prosecute the first guy. But it’s not arbitrary, and it’s not improper.

Not that this is particularly important to your point, but 30 over vs 5 over is usually a different law.

I'd argue that there's a qualitative difference between selective enforcement that involves informal standards that evolve over time (e.g. police ignoring anyone who breaks the speed limit by less than 10MPH) and selective enforcement that involves a law that hasn't been enforced for centuries being pulled out of retirement and aimed at a single individual.

All of that seems to equally apply to a prosecutor going after runaway slaves and their accomplices at the time when slavery was legal and accepted in community, does it not?

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