TheAgitator.com
Moron Is Here
Saturday, July 19th, 2008I’m not a lawyer, but I think I’m safe in giving this advice: If you’ve just seriously injured someone while driving drunk, don’t dress up like a prisoner and mock your arrest at a party while out on bond awaiting your sentencing. And if you do, don’t let anyone take your picture. And if you do, don’t let it be the kind of person who might post the photos on Facebook.
Clearly impossible. I regularly read on this blog that drunk driving isn’t a big deal. He was obviously framed.
Wow, what a worthless piece of detritus this Lipton guy is. Ooh, its so funny to get in a crash and fuck your friend up so bad she has to spend weeks in a hosptial. Huh huh, huh huh. I bet you’re the big man on campus now, shit bird. And who is the girl on his arm? Does she realize she might be the next victim of this tool? Kudos to the prosecutor for using available technology in a completely legal way to expose a drunk loser for what he is. This is a valuable lesson for law enforcers. There is no need to circumvent the constitution to catch criminals like Lipton. If you just let them talk and be what they are (self-absorbed, careless turds) you might just get them red-handed.
Critical thinking…..epic fail
If he’ll get a vasectomy, and therefore ensures that teh st00pid dies with him, I’d be OK with dropping the jail time.
Why bother warning these people. The bottom line is that if they really don’t care about the people they injured, then they SHOULD get the stiffest sentence. I think Facebook does a bang up job for the prosecution.
Or you could just not be a moron and use Facebook’s privacy settings to limit the audience of your pictures to your friends (or, if you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, to friends of friends). Given that Facebook photos aren’t publicly available, there are only three ways the prosecutor could have gotten ahold of the picture:
1. He hacked into the defendant’s account. Unlikely.
2. One of the defendant’s friends gave the prosecutor the picture. Again, unlikely.
3. The defendant was part of a publicly-accessible network (probably a regional one, seeing as how for a college network you need an e-mail from that institution to be a part of that network), and allowed his pictures to be seen by anyone from that network.
Newsflash: Facebook isn’t Geocities. It IS possible to post things online about yourself and not have anyone but certain people see them. And it’s not that fucking difficult, either.
I have been reading this blog for several years now. Never, ever have a seen a post that suggests that drunk driving “isn’t a big deal”. While Radley does post about the losses of freedoms at the hands of nannies like MADD, he has never even hinted that he’s ok with people driving while drunk. This is where I feel Libertarians do a poor job of explaining how law and order should work. Let me spell it out for you. According to basic Libertarian views, a person has every right to consume as much of anything he/she would like. But your freedom to do so ends where my freedoms begin. I have the right to drive and expect all other cars to obey the rules of the road. Draconian enforcement is another matter and does little to stop these kinds of tragedies.
Actually, there is a school of Libertarian thought that says drunk driving shouldn’t be illegal – that only if you injure anyone with a vehicle should you be prosecuted. The thinking goes thusly: a drunk who makes it home without hitting anyone or anything hasn’t actually injured anyone and, since there is no injured victim, there is no crime to answer for.
However, a road owner does have the right to set the rules that guests must follow while using his property. These rules can, of course, include rules about speed, which side of the road you drive on, and rules as to how intoxicated or sober you should be pprior to driving on the road.
A driver who violates these rules, though, is guilty of trespass. Generally, though, a trespassing incident does not warrant the destruction visited upon those who are found guilty of the “crime” of drunk driving. Again, this is a separate issue from the crime that is actually committed when one person, thorough their negligence, injures another in a car accident.
I see absolutely no libertarian objection to DUI laws in principle, provided they are reasonably related to a legitimate risk. Preemptively taking someone off the road who is tanked and swerving – though not yet causing any damage to person or property – doesn’t seem unreasonable or, much less importantly, unlibertarian.
That said, I’m a little less enthusiastic about using someone’s attitude about his arrest as a factor in sentencing. Imagine if a Reason employee got busted for, say, possessing marijuana. I can’t imagine any of Reason’s employees would feel ashamed of breaking that law, and that person would almost certainly have no friends who would judge them for breaking it. The arrest may even become an office joke, and the arrestee might even mock the arrest by pulling a stunt like this at a Halloween party.
Now imagine a law and order, touch on crime, anti-drug judge getting wind of that “stunt,” and “throwing the book” at the Reason writer. Surely that would be unreasonable and unjust. Same thing here, I think (I understand the cases can be distinguished, but not, I think, on the relevant issues).
#7 Tarran:
I’m familiar with the school of libertarian thought that says drunk driving should not be illegal. Adherents of this “school” apparently think just waiting for a lush to kill someone is permissible. This line of thought is a great example of why anarchists are only popular on college campuses and at hippie music festivals. It is often hard to prevent crime or other threats to public safety. But stopping a drunk (and most of those stopped are well above the state mandated BAC) is a way that law enforcement can truly save lives. If libertarians want to make excuses for selfish and reckless behavior (and I don’t think most of us buy into this idea), they have only themselves to blame for the relative scarcity of libertarians being voted into public office.
#8 Greg: I have to disagree to some extent w/ the “attitude” issue, but only because I think your theoretical case and the case being discusses are so disimilar from a moral perspective. Recall, Lipton’s error resulted in a lengthy hospital stay for a woman. In contrast, marijuana possession hurts no one (including the user). Taking the callous attitude of a criminal into consideration is not only commonplace, it is often quite appropriate.
.
#2
I haven’t seen anything in the stories I found that indicate Jade Combies was friends with or even knew Lipton.
Helmut,
You’ve of course identified the distinction I mentioned in my comment, but I don’t think that’s at all relevant for sentencing purposes. Sure, an actual victim warrants a higher sentence, but one’s attitude about the crime shouldn’t be a factor. If the criminal doesn’t think what he did is a big deal, so what? A crime should have a punishment, and the punishment should reflect the severity of the crime, and, sometimes, the attitude of the criminal during the commission of the crime (e.g., premeditation, malice aforethought, crime of passion).
It’s certainly possible that a judge could view drug possession as serious as he does injuring someone while drunk driving. In that case, the staff of Reason’s conception of the law and the judge’s would be wildly different. He wouldn’t be able to understand how Reason could be so flippant about breaking a necessary law, as grievous an offense as any other. Reason’s staff, however, simply wouldn’t take it seriously. That judge might – wrongly, of course – impose a stiffer penalty to “teach a lesson.” I don’t see how that hypothetical case differs from the real one, except that we libertarians view one as a legitimate crime, and the other as not really that big of a deal.
Anyway, just as I don’t think judges should reduce a sentence because a triple murderer is genuinely contrite, I don’t think he should impose stiffer sentences on people who think the law they broke is stupid or unjust, and as such don’t take the arrest very seriously (even if we think the person is monstrous for not agreeing with us about the law).
In short, yes, the instant case is distinguishable from my hypo, but -again – I don’t think any of the distinctions are relevant, because they are all based on a particular conception of the relative importance of laws, a conception that isn’t anywhere close to universally shared.
There’s an even larger issue here about the appropriateness of the crime-tort distinction and the legitimacy of retribution as an element of the “justice” system. I am firmly in the camp of those who reject both retribution as a method of punishment and the underlying premise of the criminal justice system that “bad thoughts” (mens rea) really matter. The only legitimately punishable “wrong” committed by the person in question was the resulting injury to the other party, and the only legitimate punishment was restitution. His “bad thoughts” and lack of remorse are irrelevant.
For more: http://www.randybarnett.com/restitution.html
I agree, Greg. Asking the defendant to be (or appear) contrite is a huge dog-and-pony show. They’re sorry they’ve been caught, but that’s about all.
Regardless of what sort of fool this guy is….
Should the severity of our sentencing be based on whether or not someone has a facebook or myspace page?
What if he had a page showing him remorseful… then he gets off?
Its a travesty… IMO
I think the TRUE libertarian position on this would be to privatize the roads and let individual owners make decisions about what sort of rules they want. If you allow people to drive while drunk on your highway, then you have to suffer the consequences of potential decreased patronage as people find alternative routes that offer more safety. Given the competition today among car manufacturers over safety, if roads were privatized, road operators would similarly compete over safety. And you’d probably find that drunk driving is a relatively minor problem compared to all the other ways that roads can be made safer that we have yet to discover because we have socialized transportation in the US (and just about everywhere else in the world).
Of course, when you start thinking about true liberalization of transportation and land use, you’ll soon see that the entire road/car/suburb thing kind of falls flat on its face. Go back to the last time in US history when transportation and land use was left to the private sector (that would be up until the beginning of the 20th century), and you’ll see that mass transit and relatively dense living was the norm (the sections of what we now consider “the city” that are made up of row homes are what were then called “the suburbs”).
not necessarily, but the facebook just proves he is not remorseful. It doesn’t matter so much that its on facebook, if he were seen laughing about it in a store, or on the street, and the judge got word of it I think the same thing would happen.
I think the point is that appearing contrite doesn’t prove anything, but appearing completely unremorseful definitively proves the negative. To whatever extent you believe jail sentences are for rehabilitation, that much additional time is warranted. If you believe that rehabilition through judicial punishment is either impractical or immoral, then make that arguement.
And i think,the “idiotcracy” is REAL. Don’t let the lawyers tell you otherwise.
I think generally the position of libertarians is the government should respect peoples rights until they have demonstrated they can’t exercise these rights without being a danger to others. DUI laws are necessary and stopping someone who is clearly a danger to others on the road is not necessarily a violation of libertarian tenets. What most libertarians object to is the lowering the maximum BAC and conducting DUI checkpoints to nab people who at best may be borderline threats. I believe in the right for you to keep and bear and arms until you walk out of your house and start twirling your loaded handgun like you see in the movies. At that point you have demonstrated you cannot exercise your second amendment rights without endangering others.
From what I’ve read on this site,most have a problem with DUI laws because the definition is so broad.The legal limit has change 3 times in 25 years in my state(.15 to .08} and many want it lower..Also,just because you are under the limit does not mean you won’t be arrested.Add in police road blocks,mandatory breath and blood tests, the lack of access to a attorney and the fact most could not be convicted without such actions and you see the problem.I believe anyone driving in a dangerous manner should be stopped and charged.Ask any DUI attorney or DA if most DUI’s they handle could be proven without a test.We have reached the point that people who do no harm or are a danger are guilty.
Greg N.:
This has been an interesting discussion. The more I think about your position, the more it makes sense. I have a profound distaste for the phony contrition I see exhibited by some criminals at trial. Psychopaths tend to be overrepresented in the criminal population, of course, and asking them to be contrite will only expose victims to unecessary theatrics in the court room.
Michael Pack:
That is a good synopsis. DUI enforcement is disproportionately effected by neo-prohibitionists and the promise of federal transportation funds. We need to focus on taking truly dangerous intoxicated motorists off the road. You aren’t necessarily dangerous because you register a .08.
Helmut,true and this guy was under 21 I believe and in Ohio ,02 is a DUI for the under age crowd though I don’t know what his was..This guy is still an idiot and drunk or not his age group has a high rate of bad and dangerous driving.They just don’t pay attention at that age.If you add alcohol,cellphones,CD’s,food ,drink or a passenger the risk goes up
Once again chance is a world class asshole who doesn’t even come back to defend his ridiculous assertions. Radley should just ban that him.
All in all, this situation is a result of most ‘generation y’ers’ having no concept of the importance of privacy.
These are the same people who think it’s just fine and dandy to have your phone records turned over to the government, show your ID when go to the store and have cameras installed on each and every road.
If we’re going to retrain this generation to appreciate the importance of liberty it’s going to take a ton of cases like this. So bring ‘em on.
Wait… What, when did Nick Bolea dot this?
^ dot = do ^