Years ago, I read about a guy who rode his bike past a house that was being robbed. The police acquired data from Google placing him in the area at that time. While he didn’t do anything wrong and had nothing to hide, I assume he had to hire a lawyer and go through a time-consuming and stressful process to prove his innocence. That was the turning point for me where I began focusing heavily on privacy.
He is far from the only one who went through a scenario like that.
Also one thing I fucking HATE with a vengeance is how some people say ‘the process will eventually work and his/her innocent will get asserted’. That isn’t a guarantee, but even if it did… after what? Spending days or weeks in a jail cell? Being treated like a non-human criminal by guards and the system? Spending large amounts of money you won’t get back and huge amounts of stress pommelled onto you and your family (and I have heard of some people’s family getting so stressed during the process that they had heart attacks and died). Your reputation in society being crushed even if you are acquitted beyond all doubt.
And what if something goes wrong? What if the ‘system’ fails anyway and you spend years in prison writing appeals to get a second chance. Some people have spent many years, even decades, behind bars doing this, and meanwhile their accusers got to go on with their lives and 100% forgot about everything while you had to take a shit in a cell in front of another cellmate and vice versa. In the TV show Law & Order they had the smug ass prosecutor say that ‘mistakes can still be corrected’ or something to that effect when talking about a man who was wrongly convicted of a rape he had nothing to do with and spent 30 years behind bars before being acquitted.
That shit made me want to puke. You know what 30 years looks like? 30 years ago was 1995 (or almost 1996, it is December after all). If a person was wrongly accused of rape in December 1995 and they were a 20 year old trade/college student, they would be 50 years old when they are released when the truth comes out. What will life be like for them? Being told that the system ‘worked’ but basically their lives are utterly destroyed anyway.
I remember reading comments on cracked.com whenever they had an article about how the legal system is so skewed and so fucked that a user would comment with their experience as a lawyer that his sheer disgust at not only the system, but how incredibly petty people can be and how often they get away with it. Like the story of a black guy who was constantly falsely accused of stealing by an elderly white woman who even went so far as to talk to police as to how to convincingly come up with ways to put that n-word in jail. This is even though that black guy was not a thief, drug dealer, drug user, or any other such thing. He was just a guy with a simple job and living a quiet life. But she didn’t like him for racist reasons and other crap.
The result? This guy was dragged through the legal system multiple times, but was acquitted each time. In the end the court and the judges realized just what a racist bullshitter the white woman was and put a restraining order against him and dismissed all charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be brought back up again under any circumstances.
Happy ending? Nope. The black guy lost his job, his home, his car, all his money, his wife divorced him, and when he was let go from the jail he was held him he literally only had the clothes on his back and no money and was on the other side of the state from where he lived. But hey, at least he didn’t have a criminal record… but in many places simply having an arrest record is just as bad. Exactly nothing happened to the elderly white woman who did this to him. She got to live on her life exactly as she did before.
The extent that pigs will go to in order to put literally anyone away should cause everyone to want to revolt/hunt all the fucking pigs. Too many people are completely fine with giving up all privacy if it “stops even one guilty person.” No one is ever innocent 100% of the time. They just haven’t been caught for things (especially super low level shit) and only think about big level crimes as being what pigs/prosecutors/feds are going after. By their own logic, they better know every single law at every second of the day. They truly can’t conceive of being forced to confess just so a case can be closed to keep arrest stats looking good.
The recent-ish story about that one guy that was broken down so badly that he confessed to murdering his own father after so many hours of interrogation and threats made by the pigs to kill his fucking dog. AND they kept going towards that confession even though his father was found to be completely alive by the same pigs. That shit scared the shit out of me, and that is just ONE example out of the ones you mention and so fucking many others.
I feel like there should be circumstances where if you’re accused of something and found innocent, you need to be made whole. Maybe that’s a huge payout. Maybe you get all your stuff back.
If the police bring you in for questioning because you were riding your bike, and you’re shown innocent, they should pay out like $500/hour to you.
In Canada in 2006 someone was arrested and accused of burglarizing a jewelry store. The police arrested him even though there was no conceivable way he could have committed the crime. He was interrogated by the police in the usual way you see in any interrogation video on YouTube, telling him that his guilt is beyond question, that they only wanted to know if he was regular evil or just super evil and it would be better if he confessed and saved everyone a lot of time.
So what was the biggest giveaway that he wasn’t the burglar? The 911 call that reported the crime said that the burglar was a below-average height white man with hair… and the guy they arrested was a very tall (6 foot 3 inch) BLACK man with NO hair (he shaved his head). The idea that this was a simple hiccup is so monumentally stupid it beggars belief. The interrogators did not even review the damn 911 and realize they had the wrong guy.
So what happened? The guy spent 3 days in jail before his bail hearing/conditional release and he spent the next year (not in jail thankfully) with his lawyer to sue the police over their incredibly stupid mistake. He won and was given around 45,000$ Canadian in compensation, but it should have been much higher.
The interrogation is on JCS’s youtube channel and he reveals one very harrowing fact: If an officer gets a confession out of a suspect through deceit (as in, they say ‘we got all the stuff! Fingerprints, DNA, video footage, cell tower metadata,etc, etc’ when they in fact have jackshit) it is actually very good for the officer’s career and could get them fast-tracked on promotions. This is even when many of those cases get overturned or proven false.
Government is bleeding money left and right on military and foreign policies. There’s no money left for the citizens. (At least in the US; here in Spain the big money sink is retirement pensions)
Couldn’t agree more with all of that. Then there are the scumbag bail bond companies where you’re out a substantial sum to borrow enough money to make bail if you’re unlucky enough not to have the full bail amount sitting in the bank.
Years ago, I read about a guy who rode his bike past a house that was being robbed. The police acquired data from Google placing him in the area at that time. While he didn’t do anything wrong and had nothing to hide, I assume he had to hire a lawyer and go through a time-consuming and stressful process to prove his innocence. That was the turning point for me where I began focusing heavily on privacy.
He is far from the only one who went through a scenario like that.
Also one thing I fucking HATE with a vengeance is how some people say ‘the process will eventually work and his/her innocent will get asserted’. That isn’t a guarantee, but even if it did… after what? Spending days or weeks in a jail cell? Being treated like a non-human criminal by guards and the system? Spending large amounts of money you won’t get back and huge amounts of stress pommelled onto you and your family (and I have heard of some people’s family getting so stressed during the process that they had heart attacks and died). Your reputation in society being crushed even if you are acquitted beyond all doubt.
And what if something goes wrong? What if the ‘system’ fails anyway and you spend years in prison writing appeals to get a second chance. Some people have spent many years, even decades, behind bars doing this, and meanwhile their accusers got to go on with their lives and 100% forgot about everything while you had to take a shit in a cell in front of another cellmate and vice versa. In the TV show Law & Order they had the smug ass prosecutor say that ‘mistakes can still be corrected’ or something to that effect when talking about a man who was wrongly convicted of a rape he had nothing to do with and spent 30 years behind bars before being acquitted.
That shit made me want to puke. You know what 30 years looks like? 30 years ago was 1995 (or almost 1996, it is December after all). If a person was wrongly accused of rape in December 1995 and they were a 20 year old trade/college student, they would be 50 years old when they are released when the truth comes out. What will life be like for them? Being told that the system ‘worked’ but basically their lives are utterly destroyed anyway.
I remember reading comments on cracked.com whenever they had an article about how the legal system is so skewed and so fucked that a user would comment with their experience as a lawyer that his sheer disgust at not only the system, but how incredibly petty people can be and how often they get away with it. Like the story of a black guy who was constantly falsely accused of stealing by an elderly white woman who even went so far as to talk to police as to how to convincingly come up with ways to put that n-word in jail. This is even though that black guy was not a thief, drug dealer, drug user, or any other such thing. He was just a guy with a simple job and living a quiet life. But she didn’t like him for racist reasons and other crap.
The result? This guy was dragged through the legal system multiple times, but was acquitted each time. In the end the court and the judges realized just what a racist bullshitter the white woman was and put a restraining order against him and dismissed all charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be brought back up again under any circumstances.
Happy ending? Nope. The black guy lost his job, his home, his car, all his money, his wife divorced him, and when he was let go from the jail he was held him he literally only had the clothes on his back and no money and was on the other side of the state from where he lived. But hey, at least he didn’t have a criminal record… but in many places simply having an arrest record is just as bad. Exactly nothing happened to the elderly white woman who did this to him. She got to live on her life exactly as she did before.
Stories like these never leave my mind.
The extent that pigs will go to in order to put literally anyone away should cause everyone to want to revolt/hunt all the fucking pigs. Too many people are completely fine with giving up all privacy if it “stops even one guilty person.” No one is ever innocent 100% of the time. They just haven’t been caught for things (especially super low level shit) and only think about big level crimes as being what pigs/prosecutors/feds are going after. By their own logic, they better know every single law at every second of the day. They truly can’t conceive of being forced to confess just so a case can be closed to keep arrest stats looking good.
The recent-ish story about that one guy that was broken down so badly that he confessed to murdering his own father after so many hours of interrogation and threats made by the pigs to kill his fucking dog. AND they kept going towards that confession even though his father was found to be completely alive by the same pigs. That shit scared the shit out of me, and that is just ONE example out of the ones you mention and so fucking many others.
I feel like there should be circumstances where if you’re accused of something and found innocent, you need to be made whole. Maybe that’s a huge payout. Maybe you get all your stuff back.
If the police bring you in for questioning because you were riding your bike, and you’re shown innocent, they should pay out like $500/hour to you.
In Canada in 2006 someone was arrested and accused of burglarizing a jewelry store. The police arrested him even though there was no conceivable way he could have committed the crime. He was interrogated by the police in the usual way you see in any interrogation video on YouTube, telling him that his guilt is beyond question, that they only wanted to know if he was regular evil or just super evil and it would be better if he confessed and saved everyone a lot of time.
So what was the biggest giveaway that he wasn’t the burglar? The 911 call that reported the crime said that the burglar was a below-average height white man with hair… and the guy they arrested was a very tall (6 foot 3 inch) BLACK man with NO hair (he shaved his head). The idea that this was a simple hiccup is so monumentally stupid it beggars belief. The interrogators did not even review the damn 911 and realize they had the wrong guy.
So what happened? The guy spent 3 days in jail before his bail hearing/conditional release and he spent the next year (not in jail thankfully) with his lawyer to sue the police over their incredibly stupid mistake. He won and was given around 45,000$ Canadian in compensation, but it should have been much higher.
The interrogation is on JCS’s youtube channel and he reveals one very harrowing fact: If an officer gets a confession out of a suspect through deceit (as in, they say ‘we got all the stuff! Fingerprints, DNA, video footage, cell tower metadata,etc, etc’ when they in fact have jackshit) it is actually very good for the officer’s career and could get them fast-tracked on promotions. This is even when many of those cases get overturned or proven false.
As usual: ‘Don’t Talk to the Police’.
Government is bleeding money left and right on military and foreign policies. There’s no money left for the citizens. (At least in the US; here in Spain the big money sink is retirement pensions)
The US prints money, that’s not how it works.
As you should know, printing money is bad for existing money. For a reserve currency, all around the world.
Couldn’t agree more with all of that. Then there are the scumbag bail bond companies where you’re out a substantial sum to borrow enough money to make bail if you’re unlucky enough not to have the full bail amount sitting in the bank.
It should be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be how it tends to shake out.