The point of the 3 years seemed to me to be mostly making an example of the author to discourage civil disobedience.
(Not defending the specific magnitude, just the principle.)
It's a stupid principle. It totally fucking distorts the most basic idea behind a system of equal "justice".
But the idea that we're going to "extra punish" a handful of people here and there to "make an example out of them" is totally incompatible with any reasonable notion of "justice" .
I don't want anything to do with it. Locking people in cells, forced labor, etc. are for the (few) people who are simply so dangerous that they can't roam the world without representing an imminent threat to others.
The words "making an example" are just a way of describing deterrence, which is a core function of the criminal justice system.
Deterrence is intrinsically neither good nor bad. It depends on what you're deterring. If it's arson, deterrence makes a lot of sense: it's fun and easy to set fires, and very easy to underestimate or disregard the harm those fires will do to others. If it's political tagging, deterrence makes much less sense. The justice system needs to extract a penalty for damaging people's property, but politically-motivated tags are a low-intensity problem.
Beyond deterrence, criminal penalties must account for the inefficiency of policing and the rewards to crime. A 1:1 damage/penalty system is intrinsically ineffective; it makes crime a rational decision.
It's easy to agree here that 3 years of probation for tagging in a deliberate attempt to get arrested to make a political point is abusive.
"fair" - treating people equally
In other words, I interpret the original question as: "how is making an example not considered unusual?".
Has anything changed since Aaron's death?
Have you ever met real people? Ever seen someone make decisions because they're pissed off? The guy basically took a shit all over the (immoral) way the justice system works, that's why he was singled out and made an example of.
You also don't know how this guy interacted with the police and the judge. He may have been a jerk himself. No one knows, but I do know that the legal system is not run by robots, and if your intention is to piss people off who have the power to screw with your life then, well... prepare to be screwed.
This is in no way a commentary on the substance of the article, nor am I defending the judge's decision. There's plenty of unfairness in the legal system (I've been on the receiving end a couple of times in my youth) and it's not right.
>wasted our tax dollars to prove a point
Silly me, I thought the whole point of a formal professional justice system was to fix that, not make it worse.
Let me put it this way; I'm your boss, and you go out of your way to screw with me and make me look bad. Would you not expect retaliation? Would you expect the same treatment as every other employee? If you do then you're naive. Judges and cops aren't robots, they're human. You piss them off and, as most people would, they are going to cause you as much pain as possible.
Like it or not, these people have a lot of power, for better or worse. If you want to make a stand and expose those who may be abusing their power then great, but don't expect that they will sit idly by while you do it.
Thats the core of what makes it shocking.
Lets say we had a business division of people focused intensely and solely on the job of applying computer science principles to practical net positive business applications. Shockingly there might exist a regional dysfunctional group where no one knows how to plug in a mouse or fizzbuzz. You can't rationalize away the incompetence of that particular IT department by making comparisons to the proverbial grandma can't be expected to run Ubuntu and pro football players shouldn't be expected to hack Clojure because that misses the point of why those specific societal positions exist in the first place.
Maybe even more on topic for HN, say someone wrote a garbage collector that actually stuffed the heap more full of garbage than when it started, and then when bugs are filed, rather than fixing the bugs, we get spin and rationalization that 99% of non-garbage collection code also put trash in the heap so its not really a bug that the garbage collector generates more garbage than it removes, etc.
Sure there was a minor expense in dealing with the misdemeanor but the vast majority was not his fault.
The cops being pricks is understandable, if a waste of everyones time, the judge being a prick is not. It is his only job to consider only the crime and the motives, and while his motives did warrant a stiffer penalty, they probably did not warrant that harsh of one.
I'd be careful about assuming bias here. If a judge thinks that you deserve a larger penalty as a deterrent then that's not bias, he's doing his job. If he hands you the maximum penalty because you're his noisy neighbor then that's bias. I can't tell you what his motivations were.
There is no un-biased method of determining that the OP is likely to tag a building. Every single factor pointed to this being a one time event.
The only factor that you can pin a maximum sentence on is being indignant towards the process. He believes the process needs to be improved, and put himself in there intentionally to observe.
Doing it intentionally points to a harsher sentence, but going beyond the initial arraignment already put him into harsher sentence. The prosecutor asked for several times the typical punishment as well.
Although it is always possible we are missing something, typically it is the case the most obvious truth is the correct one. The judge thought that purposefully tagging a building was an afront to the justice system and punishable to the full extent of his power.
Not exactly acting like a judge is it?
Only a racist or classist asshole would single out one client of the justice system and accuse them of "wasting its time" because they seem like a different sort of person from the one the system is targeted towards.
If I'm a "racist or classist asshole" then you're a naive moron. You seem to have read too far in between the lines; I never once said that I agreed with the decision, only that it doesn't surprise me one bit.
I too worded my comment carefully: if the first sentence of your earlier post was to empathise with the mindset of the judge, then it seems to me that it is the judge whom I am calling a racist or classist asshole. I await my summons for contempt of court.
Again, not saying that it was right or wrong, but the outcome should have been obvious.