Gunmen Open Fire On Mother's Day Parade

[draco664]

And this flaw of giving criminals more rights than their victims stretches to both ends of the criminal spectrum.

For fuck's sake, what rights a criminal has and what rights their victim had are two fundamentally different concepts. The violation of the victim's rights are why the criminal is on trial. If you willfully violate the rights of the criminal, then you are a criminal too. See?

I find it baffling that people don't seem to grasp that concept. But if it's beyond you, then look at it this way - We are better than them. You don't need to lower yourself down to their level just to punish them.

It's not a flaw. It's a feature. It's there for a reason, and that reason is that a government has more power than individuals. Anyone living in a dictatorship can be imprisoned because of the power imbalance between the government and the individual. Nearly every Western democracy broke it's monarchist/dictatorship shackles and replaced the legal system with one where if the state wishes to imprison you, then they need to prove you deserve it beyond reasonable doubt, not to a judge, or a bureaucrat, but to normal citizens. Your peers. That's quite telling in and of itself.

I've personally witnessed a case where a man who was proven guilty of raping and torturing a 16 year old girl was appealing his sentence of solitary confinement because it was such a cruel punishment... bullshit, a cruel, yet just, punishment would be cutting off his dick to make sure he never does it again, compared to his actions solitary confinement is a mercy... the courts agreed with him and moved him to general population.

And there are dozens of cases where people proven guilty of capital crimes were exonerated later. So perhaps on the off chance that the people we have imprisoned are there wrongly, maybe we shouldn't treat them like dirt?

At the other end of the spectrum, even petty criminals are given more rights than their victims. One of my grandma's friends owned property, squatters moved into it, when my grandma's friend tried to have them arrested for trespassing, they were informed that the squatters were in fact not trespassing, they did have rights, they would have to go through an eviction process, and by the way, her friend was fined for not maintaining the property to state standards for rental housing. That's right, the courts punished her friend, the VICTIM of the crime and rewarded the criminals. Ask me again how much respect I have for our legal system.

That sounds to me more like a human-rights commission decision, or a tribunal staffed with career bureaucrats than a court. However well-intentioned those things start, they almost always descend into hotbeds of rabid advocacy. Your grandmother's friend has my utmost sympathy.

[Andara Bledin]

I'm not sanguine they'll find the guys who did this. The city is gang infested, and if it weren't for the Mississippi River traffic it would have died like Detroit is dying now a long, long time ago.

And yet, with video footage and the promise of a reward, several people have called in to identify the shooter, who is now being sought.

Article at Officer.com, source AP

The article includes a witness statement that he was firing in a specific direction, and not wildly. The suspect's prior arrests include for weapon possession and drug possession (heroin is mentioned).