{"id":15188,"date":"2012-05-23T09:59:36","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T14:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15188"},"modified":"2012-05-23T09:59:36","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T14:59:36","slug":"chris-selley-on-the-disproportional-sentences-handed-out-by-the-court-of-public-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/05\/23\/chris-selley-on-the-disproportional-sentences-handed-out-by-the-court-of-public-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”"},"content":{"rendered":"

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed<\/a> the impact of the original idiotic action:<\/p>\n

It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people \u2014 well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate\u2019s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. \u201cGo suck a ni\u2013er d-ck you f\u2013king aids ridden c\u2013t,\u201d one read.<\/p>\n

Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society\u2019s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

The context of Mr. Stacey\u2019s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: \u201cLOL. F\u2013k Muamba he\u2019s dead!!! #Haha.\u201d That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society\u2019s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.<\/p>\n

Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year\u2019s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey\u2019s problem wasn\u2019t \u201cinciting racial hatred,\u201d the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.<\/p>\n

In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it\u2019s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action: It has been a tough week for notorious, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,28,15],"tags":[391,267,99,593,310],"class_list":["post-15188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-media","category-technology","tag-facebook","tag-justice","tag-racism","tag-socialmedia","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3WY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15189,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15188\/revisions\/15189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}