I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and was curious about other people's thoughts on the issue. I call it the Criminal Justice Industrial Complex because that's what it's become. The entire thing from the passage of laws and who lobbies for what in exchange for what, the court systems, court appointed attorneys vs expensive private attorneys and plea bargaining, the nickel and diming costs of being on probation or having a vehicular alcohol tester or your phone monitored or ankle monitors, court mandated counseling, all of which the suspect or perpetrator has to pay for. Combine that with some people being entirely let off the hook for serious violent crimes while others get 18 months in prison for something that hurt no one and deprived no one of property. The whole thing is a monstrous house of cards built on graft, shady contracts, money making schemes, votes for bribes, keeping hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and low tier government employees in a paying job and having to justify budgets, and on and on. We don't have a 'justice' system. We have a leviathan with several million moving parts that all need to get paid, designed to suck people in, grind them up, drain them for everything they're worth, and spit them out......but only if they're not "special" in some way. Be the right race, gender, religion, know the right people, have enough favors or clout and you can side step all of that. Clearly it doesn't work. We have people rotting in gulags for years for standing outside a building while others set buildings with people in them on fire and had their cases dropped entirely. What we have isn't working, and it sure as shit isn't justice.
For me, I would consider three things. And I'm more than willing to be convinced otherwise, I was just musing on it.
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All crimes must have an injured party. That is not to say a victim per se, just an actual injured party. Shoplifting might not have a victim, but someone is losing because of the theft. They are the injured party. A crime that has no injured party should not be a crime. And that does not include orders of deviation from the victim. No more of this "well if you commit A, that means it becomes more likely that other people might do B, which means that it could also become more likely that C could happen, therefore A is illegal". If you commit an act, and no person was harmed, no property was stolen or damaged, there is no injured party.
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You must have actually committed the crime, not just thought about it, intended to, wanted to, etc. Buying oregano from someone thinking it's weed shouldn't be a crime because the fact is, you bought oregano, not weed.
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You must have mens rea. The criminal must be aware, or should reasonably have been aware that what they were doing is a crime. No more having 300,000 statutes on the books and then saying "ignorance of the law is no excuse". If a guy meets a girl who tells him she's 21, they meet at a bar, the doorman checks her ID, the bartender checks her ID and asks if she's really 21, and the guy also unobtrusively checks her ID and all see that it looks real and says she's 21, if it turns out she's 17 the guy should not be guilty of anything. There are a ton of other examples of shit that could fall into this like catching the wrong kind of fish that happens to be 1.5cm shorter than the law 2 days out of season being a federal felony.
I understand that this means a ton of people who are probably bad people would not get locked up for small shit. But the flip side is that I would also increase the penalty for committing the few remaining crimes drastically. I would have life in prison or the death penalty for a lot more things. Much longer prison time for things like assault and battery or robbery. I'm a big proponent of letting people do more or less what they want, but come down like an ocean-going cargo ship full of bricks on the people who really do evil shit on purpose.
This board has, or at least had, a pretty wild mix of viewpoints from hard libertarians to natsocs and in between, so I'm curious what people's thoughts are on a total revamp of law, crime, and punishment in the US.
I just deleted a huge rant about how private property owners should have absolute sovereignty on their land, including booby traps and lethal force. The word "trespassing" should instill instinctual, reactive fear in everyone and avoiding it at all costs should be a cultural and legal assumption.
Because of you, I'm now hearing that word as spoken by Keith David when he voiced Goliath the gargoyle.
"You are trespassing."
This needs to become the new 'Beware of Dog' sign.
I would read such a post, if you had the patience to write it out. I'm a big proponent of Castle Doctrine (the name is half of it) because defending your "nest" is so inherent to every living creature that demanding a human being not do the same strikes me as purposefully malicious. Is a man not entitled to the safety and security of his own domain?
In the mind of the communist, a man isn’t even entitled to his own domain. The removal of castle doctrine is just another step on the road to abolition of private property.
It was more ramble than anything.
Part of the justification for traps being illegal is that an innocent person, like a mail carrier, or an "innocent" person, like a trespassing neighbor who doesn't intend to break other laws, can trigger the trap inadvertently. These are clearly flimsy justifications to prevent you from defending your home against feds.
In the first case, fair enough, but A) why is the potential of harm illegal rather than the act of having trapped an innocent person and B) if you turn your lawn into a Vietnamese rice field, are you just going to be cool with a rando setting it all off? You're not going to cancel your mail for a while or put up a sign or something?
In the second case, it essentially decriminalizes trespassing. As long as they don't touch anything, anybody can just wander around your property, apparently. That's the kind of argument that an entity with a vested interest in uninterrupted snooping would make.
This case still blows my mind: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/montana-man-charged-with-shooting-teen-in-his-garage/
I don't see how the home owner did anything wrong. Sure, he maybe didn't identify his target before firing, but if the eurotrash hadn't trespassed, the homeowner would be peppering the walls of his own garage. Is that illegal? I'm against any law or system that prevents finding out after fucking around.
For the 'innocent person' you have a DMZ. Like the postbox, or a foyer, or the threshold of your door.
Anywhere else and FAFO.