Drumstick wrote:So if there was evidence of a serious crime, that was absolutely concrete with no wiggle room whatsoever for the defendant, you'd deny the victim justice?
[...]His actual wording was "Man, I just don't think I could convict someone.". Even then it was with the disclaimer that he might be able to only if was the most serious of crimes.
I mean, I'm happy to answer questions, but the point of my post was that I don't have solid answers to them.
I think a justice system should exert the minimum force required to protect the rights of ordinary people. I think our present justice system fails in a few ways. 1. I don't believe a centralised state is good even in theory at solving the monopoly-of-violence problem. 2. In practice, given we have a centralised state and have to deal with it, our state to fails to exert the power that is has gathered responsibly: (a) It protects its own interests and the interests of the rich before it protects the basic rights of ordinary people, which is reflected in its laws, who it predominantly targets for punishment, etc. (b) It reflects an ethical underpinning that never truly escaped
lex talionis i.e. punishment-based morality; but a rational, utilitarian view on crime would lead us to focus more on rehabilitation, with segregation for the most dangerous people (but not in the squalid conditions of a prison as we know it as that does not put rehabilitation first). (c) The system encodes mostly deontological ethics in which even crimes of no real consequence are punished as a violation of a citizen's duty, whereas a better system would be more purely consequentialist. (d) The various appendages of the justice system reflect these values, which is why the legal professions are so petty-bourgeois, and why legal advice is so much harder to access for working class people, and why the police so often mistreat political enemies, the working class, the homeless, and so on.
(For what it's worth, as I feel it's a likely follow-up question, I do empathise with the feelings of the victim---I have been a victim of crime myself---but I don't think we should structure a justice system around that.)
For serious violent crimes, I suppose rape and murder and so forth, I feel like there is a strong (if nuanced) ethical argument to be made about how you might not agree with the state's justice system but should still compromise with it to achieve the goal of separating a clearly acutely dangerous person from society. Ultimately I expect I would go along with that.
For minor crimes, like drug offences, shoplifting, not paying a parking ticket... I guess I just disagree fundamentally with state apparatus being used to harass those people. I don't really think they should be crimes at all. I wouldn't ethically be able to convict some kid caught selling coke when I don't think drugs should be criminalised; I couldn't bring myself to judge someone for fiddling their benefits when I earnestly believe everyone should just be given what they need anyway. I don't buy any platitudes about "a citizen's responsibility" and "everyone knows the law" and so on because we can all think of times in history when the law has just been wrong and people disobeying it would seem perfectly reasonable by today's standards.
But bear in mind that I was thinking about whether I could attempt to remove myself from the process, not necessarily obstruct it. If you like state justice as it is, I am sure they could find another juror without conscientious concerns about the process.
OrangeRKN wrote:I wouldn't read too much into it, I'm pretty sure Karl_ is a character on the popular online roleplaying game "GRcade" being played by the human Karl
For what it's worth I have pretty much always been one of the left-est people on here. I am probably reaching caricatural levels of leftism in some people's eyes, but it's not intentionally a wind-up (apart from the gulag jokes obviously
).