Internet Troll Sentenced to Jail

reply to post by samkent

Originally posted by samkent

You did not see all the evidence first hand.
You only read internet reports of what was released to the public.

The judge saw all the facts and reports of the person involved. Isn't that why we pay them?

I suspect he saw something deeper going on. Perhaps the home life.

I read nothing. I only watched the 2 minute video that was linked to in the OP of this thread, which was apparently more than you did.

In that video, it was clearly stated that Police determined that he actually posed no physical threat to any children, neither in the U.S. nor in the UK.

Originally posted by samkent

Someday you will get the chance to be on a jury. Then you can decide.

So you think that it's 'Guilty until proven Innocent'?
Sadly, you are not alone with that belief.

Originally posted by samkent

Isn't that why we pay them?

My U.S. tax dollars better not be paying the salaries of UK Judges.

I've not read every post in this thread, I've skimmed, so forgive me if I'm missing something.

1) This happened in the UK
- The UK does not have a "Right of Free Speech".
- Clarification: We have what is known as the Negative Right to the Freedom of Expression.
This means we can express ourselves in any manner we wish, except when said expression breaks a statute law.

For example, threatening to kill someone, is against the law. Thereby my making a written threat to kill someone, regardless of their capacity to execute said threat, is illegal.

It is covered by the "Offenses against the Person Act of 1861", and carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Like it or not, this guy broke a statue law by making said threats, and in doing so, he lost his right to the freedom of expression. Its not even a new law. 1861, over 100 years old.

Perhaps the real conspiracy should be, could or ancestors see the future, and foresaw the need for such a law, to deal with idiots like this.

Like it or not, we have some super-sensitive issues in our culture, issues that have an emotional impact well beyond a technical assessment of what has happened. Pedophilia, for example, "unites people in hatred" of anyone so accused, even though the term has a very wide net. For example, in the fifties when I was not yet in my teens we kids would go into the woods, pull down our pants, and stare at body parts, including, especially, Louie's sister. We were just curious kids and there was no real sexual issue there because we were simply physically immature, but today we'd go down as registered sex offenders.

The culture has developed areas of zero tolerance, such as kids making a pointy fingered "gun" with their hands being grounds for expulsion, or eating a sandwich into the shape of a gun. Compare that to the fifties when we would take our lunch break and go into the basement of the school and target practice with 22 rifles, properly supervised, of course. Every teenager I knew had a rifle and a shotgun in the trunk of his 57 Chevy and would as likely bring home a rabbit for dinner as a new girlfriend. Today we find this behavior abhorrent.

Now couple this with our new found "reach." It used to be well nigh impossible to reach multiple parties without multiple work. You wrote letters one at a time and mailed them separately. You could talk on the telephone, but long distance was expensive and strictly regulated--by our parents who did NOT want to pay a dollar a minute to call across country when all they made was $2.00 an hour. Long distance was for emergencies only, deaths in the family.

Today it is extremely easy to do something insanely stupid in front of millions of people in the blink of an eyelash. And thus we have the present situation. Life always has its "unfair" aspects. In the sixties you could go to jail if the cops found a single -er- "seed" on the carpet in your backseat. (You see? There's even a prohibition here.) People went to jail for 30 years for this stuff. Same thing if you were black and had a white girlfriend, or (frankly and I saw this with my own eyes, thank you,) were white with a black girlfriend. Society "didn't like it" and one way or another you would be stopped. If you didn't you'd go to jail, or be beat up in an alley, or otherwise told to toe the line.

So is this "fair"? Of course not. Neither was the fact that Zimmerman even went to trial. Or that the Kennedy boy (not his name, he was a doctor) was charged with rape, or that OJ got acquitted, or that the sleaze ball took secret campaign money from Edwards and used it to build a house, then testified against Edwards,

There's all kinds of inequities in the world, and if you don't want to win the Darwin Award, you need to be smart enough to be sensitive to those hot button topics that anger people beyond any logic or reason. In an ideal world, you shouldn't have to be. You should be allowed to be stupid without dire consequences. But we don't live there.