• proudblond@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I was a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against a huge company. It was so rigged. The judge had overseen the class action lawsuit that we opted out of and acted like we were ungrateful little shits. But never in front of the jury; in front of the jury, he was all perfect law and order. But when they weren’t there, he was so obviously biased. I lost basically all faith in our justice system (USA). And I only had money on the line; for someone in a criminal case, it would be sooo much worse.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      My country is currently doing a big anti-crime campaign and I was there for a family members trial as moral support. It became grossly clear that anti-crime just means prossecuting everyone and anyone regardless of guilt to pump up conviction numbers. The prosecution was given 6 months to prepare, the defense was given a single day; the prosecution was explicitly allowed to present evidence in any context including oppenly censored conversations, the defense wasn’t even allowed to present evidence unless it was deemed relevant by the prosecution.

      Totally shattered what little faith I had in my countries legal system, I always knew it was rigged in favour of the wealthy but to see just how blatantly tilted it is in favour of convictions was a big shock.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Yeah. Found myself in the system due to a misunderstanding. I was helpful and cooperative, they gave me the maximum sentence.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        This would probably be the gist of my answer as well, both as an observer as well as someone in a dispute.

        I’ve watched my best friends fight battles one could say are incredibly unnecessary, from the guy best friend having his family torn apart by the CPS based on false accusations before they went after his mom to harass her since they couldn’t successfully arrest her like they could with his dad on a false basis, to his GF (my other best friend) constantly having friends pulled away from her, to what me and my BF have gone through often (it should be noted what we consider the actual issue and what their active ingredients are has differed).

        Ironically I generally don’t have the negative relation with officials that these other experiences would imply I would have. I’m more accurately described as someone the people always seem to be after, not the officials in a society, albeit it might be said semantics don’t do that justice until it has been paraphrased a few times. Another way it’s been explained is that I incur “guerilla dissatisfaction” and that even seeming technicalities have some element of that, even when I’m being productive in its face, with their “three weapons” being denial, justification, and pretending to not understand.

        On the authoritarian side of things, it has only been recently (as in an epiphany that dropped out of nowhere some weeks ago) realized that an enormous amount of what could be called covert targeted bias against some of us, especially when the individuals who the bias is in favor of have the bias in favor of them as a form of some sort of social prestige, has been or is boiled down to secretly wanting to “humble” the person the bias is against.

        Example:

        A superior might say out loud “you acted in self defense against a killer, but it was still assault, so I’m going to give you a bigger sentence than the person who killed your dog.”

        In their minds: “maybe this is the perfect tool to humble them, they never seemed humble to me and an extraordinary large sentence might serve as a good character builder, not actually given to punish them.”

        And people wonder why sociopathy exists.