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Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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