Quotulatiousness

December 5, 2009

Speaking of disproportional punishment

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

BoingBoing reports on yet another vastly disproportional punishment for a victimless crime:

The movie industry has turned into an alcoholic dad who beats up his family at the slightest transgression while ignoring his own gross failures — blaming everything on external forces and refusing to confront its own problems.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach spent two nights in jail for recording her friends singing “Happy Birthday” at a movie theater, for capturing less than four minutes of a feature film. She is charged with a felony and if convicted, could lose the right to vote, to work with children, to hold office, and to partake in full civil life.

And the movie industry’s pitch to us remains, “Please stop pirating our discs, because if you don’t stop, we may be driven out of business and then society would suffer from our absence.”

Despite (legal) danger, teens still hot for sexting

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

In another example of the state’s threat of legal punishment being hugely disproportional to the perceived or actual damage of the ‘crime’, so-called sexting can carry a life-long legal penalty for an act with little or no actual danger to the parties involved. In a case of “well, duh”, kids are still eager to send one another pictures of themselves nude or partially clothed, in spite of (or in ignorance of) the legal threats:

The latest figures come from a poll organised by the Associated Press and MTV, which questioned around 1200 youths and semi-youths aged from 14 to 24. What they discovered, among other things, is that boys think naked pictures are “hot” while girls consider them “slutty”.

We’ll go out on a limb here and say that boys and girls feel much the same ways about thigh-high boots and micro-skirts — one boy’s hot is another girl’s slutty, but that’s another issue. Young people do seem peculiarly blind to the long-term risks of naked photographs, though perhaps they should be admired for having such confidence in their own bodies.

About half of those surveyed thought the risks were overplayed — the rest were suitably wary, but did it anyway. Greater education about the risks doesn’t seem to be the answer: it’s almost as though young people aren’t listening to the advice provided by their elders and betters.

The risks they run include both sender and receiver being charged with various sex crimes, resulting in potentially being added to the sex offender registry for their state(s) of residence, which pretty much ends any possibility of them being able to go to university, hold a job, or lead a normal life.

December 4, 2009

More good news on reining in the out-of-control HRC bureaucracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Colby Cosh summarizes the results of the Alberta Queen’s Bench decision on the Boisson case:

So how stands freedom of the press in Alberta after Thursday’s Queen’s Bench decision tossing out the Boissoin human-rights panel ruling? Justice E.C. Wilson’s reasons establish two big things, pending some higher-level judicial review of Alberta’s human-rights regime:

1. The Charter of Rights can’t be used willy-nilly by content creators in magazines and newspapers as a shield against tribunal oversight, but

2. The tribunals have to confine themselves strictly to the powers granted them by statute, defer to Charter values, respect the presumption of innocence, and in general act a lot less like a cross between a military junta and a three-ring circus.

In 2002 Red Deer preacher Stephen Boisson had written a sweaty, sulfurous letter about the Great Gay Conspiracy to the local daily paper (pause for ironic smirk: it’s called the Advocate). Among other things, Boisson denounced the spectacle of “men kissing men”, which suggests he may not know his way around the synoptic Gospels too well. In any event, a panel of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission found him guilty of discrimination-by-the-word, and he was subjected to a fine, prior restraint on his future speech, and a demand for a written apology.

Debunking the porn-violence link

Filed under: Randomness, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:

Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.

“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.

“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.

The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.

Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.

November 13, 2009

Veterans chase would-be robber out of Legion

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

A Royal Canadian Legion branch was the target of an armed robbery. The would-be robber must have thought these old gaffers would be easy pickings, as he walked in while they were counting the cash from this year’s poppy drive. He was lucky to escape:

A would-be thief brandishing a gun likely wasn’t counting on an 84-year-old veteran and a fellow member of his Toronto legion putting up a fight when he tried to make off with their poppy money.

But police say that’s what happened Thursday when a man walked into a Royal Canadian Legion in the city’s east end as members were counting the money from this year’s poppy drive.

They refused to give up the cash and instead chased the suspect and tackled him.

However, they were unable to stop him from getting away.

John Dietsch, the 84-year-old Second World War veteran, says he thought of the veterans who served in the military – and the time they spent selling poppies – when he stood up to the man.

September 10, 2009

Criminals get creative, use “reality TV” ruse

Filed under: Europe, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

Apparently, “reality TV” does have a use: it allows criminal gangs to kidnap women and sell their pictures on the net:

Turkish military police said today that they had stormed an Istanbul villa to rescue nine women held captive after being tricked into believing they were reality TV show contestants.

The women were rescued on Monday from the villa in Riva, a summer resort on the outskirts of Istanbul, according to a spokesman for the military police in the region who carried out the raid. He said the women were held captive for around two months, but refused to provide further details.

The women were led to believe they were being filmed for a Big Brother-type television programme, according to the Dogan news agency and other news reports. Instead, their naked images were sold on the internet by their captors.

Given what could have happened, these women seem to have gotten off quite lightly . . . and it raises the question of whether this has been done/is being done in other areas.

August 18, 2009

This is very much an unwelcome technical discovery

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

DNA evidence can be created to match a known profile:

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

H/T to Radley Balko.

August 3, 2009

Looking for your criminal ancestors?

Filed under: Britain, History, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:50

A wide selection of criminal case records from 19th century England and Wales have been made available online:

The records of more than 1.4m criminal trials held in England and Wales in the 19th century, including the most celebrated cases of the Victorian era, have been posted online for family historians to trace their more nefarious ancestors.

Among those whose names are listed are Roderick Maclean, one of several would-be assassins of Queen Victoria, who was declared “not guilty, but insane” after he threatened the monarch with a pistol outside Windsor Castle in 1882, and Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, the fence of stolen property and model for Charles Dickens’s Fagin, who was sentenced to transportation — not execution as in Oliver Twist — in 1830, six years before the novel was written.

Others include notorious murderers such as William Palmer, publicly hanged outside Stafford jail in 1856 after being found guilty of poisoning a horse-racing friend, and Dr Thomas Neill Cream, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, also hanged as a poisoner in 1892.

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