Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

The blatant lying that law enforcement has to deal with on a daily basis is uderappreciated.

The US has a legal system that permits a defendant to say many things, like "My buddies and I were participating in a fantasy scenario where we plotted in detail and collected supplies to kidnap the governor of our state... but it was just a game. Like those other people who play games!"

Good for the authors in making an effort to clearly distinguish between protected speech and non-protected conspiracy to commit a crime.

View on HN

> The US has a legal system that permits a defendant to say many things, like "My buddies and I were participating in a fantasy scenario where we plotted in detail and collected supplies to kidnap the governor of our state... but it was just a game. Like those other people who play games!"

You can even get acquitted for it because it turned out that the FBI was the dungeon master all along: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2022/4/13/23023950/m...

5 guilty convictions, 4 guilty pleas, and 5 not guilty verdicts seems like a balanced justice system? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_...

Conspiracy plots are hard to prosecute, because who-did-what-when-with-what-intent is complex.

Which is why our founders had the good sense to bake jury trials right into the constitution. The focus on law enforcement, who in this particular case, were themselves involved in the "LARPing" to large extent, is bizarre.

The purpose of the criminal justice system isn't to punish every single unruly act. It's to match punishments with the actual crimes committed. It's bizarre to see Hacker News blindly cheering on this document, although, understandably it's because most people probably don't personally like those defendants.

So.. of course it becomes the focus of the top comment.

I'm cheering it on because I remember the Secret Service's ignorant CFAA fumbling in the 90s.

To be clear, law enforcement can also lie during the course of investigations, etc. Pretty much all the way up to the stand.

I'm not opining whether that's a good rule or not, just wanted to be clear that this is also a rule within the US legal system.

The blatant lying from law enforcement that the citizenry has to deal with on a daily basis is underappreciated.

The US has a legal system that permits a police office to say anything, but a citizen must not lie to a police officer.

The Miranda warning is not a good sign - it reminds the citizen that the government can and will use anything a citizen says for its own purposes.

That's a weird way of looking at the Fifth Amendment.

You have the right to say nothing.

Yes, but I would prefer not to exercise that in court, it would be better if the government behaved itself towards its citizens. You also have the constitutional right to a speedy trial, but in practice that doesn't look hot either.

> citizenry has to deal with on a daily basis

Sounds like a hyperbolic statement. Most citizens may be more likely to say that they do not have to deal with people who commit crime and lie to them on a daily basis unless you are in a very rough neighbourhood with very little law enforcement.

People who are policing do have to deal with this daily, however there is a change that the police could potentially form some kind of a sampling bias on new encounters with average looking citizens after dealing with so many lying criminals on a daily basis.

A colleague (non-white, of course) in a former workplace would not pull off the Interstate in certain areas of the nation because they didn't trust police. No, they were not paranoid, only regularly cautious, they were from South America.

I'm a white US native and I do the exact same. I made sure I had enough gas to get through Alabama (at exactly the speed limit) without stopping because of the stories I've heard, and those aren't even "that bad" when it comes to bad interactions with police.

Look up civil asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com