Sentences in the Arbery case have been handed down…
…and they are very extreme.
Ordinarily, life sentences – and especially life without parole- are reserved for the most heinous of premeditated, purposeful,, callous murders.
No more. If you’re a white guy who looks like he might be a member of the cast of “Deliverance,” and you killed a black man under the fact circumstances of the Arbery case – which involved an ill-advised attempt at a citizens’ arrest gone horribly bad, possibly self-defense for the actual killing, and even without self-defense involved probably no more than some form of manslaughter – you will be treated as though you were one of those vicious murderers. And that’s true even if you were just along to document the intended citizen’s arrest and had nothing to do with the killing – although that defendant got a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Travis and Greg McMichael got life without parole plus 20 years for Aggravated Assault, to be served consecutively. William “Roddie” Bryan got life plus 5 years, with the possibility of parole, plus 10 years for False Imprisonment, which means he serves at least 30 years. They also all face federal hate crime charges.
This is a terrible result, just another indication of a double standard of justice in America. If the races had been reversed, such a harsh sentence would never have been rendered. In this case, the acutual sentence was at least partly motivated by the fear of mob violence if the sentence wasn’t draconian enough. One of the other motives of several recent cases has been to threaten to mete out extreme over-the-top punishment to citizens who arm themselves, even if the crime obviously did not conform to the usual facts that would justify the extreme severity of the sentence.
The anti-lynching laws that Democrats fought and Republicans supported did not anticipate this sort of lynching. I followed that case at Legal Insurrection and believe it is a gross miscarriage of justice. They made a mistake in trying to stop him but there is a reasonable probability that he was a burglar.
The judge and jury in this case were horrible. If they have a just man in the governor’s chair, the sentences may be commuted. Very few just men are elected to public office. The judge, Timothy Walmsley, is a specialist in commercial law appointed by a Republican governor in 2012, just in case you were wondering what the Chamber-of-Commerce wing of the Republican Party barfs up nowadays.
Mohammed Noor got, what, five years?
On the very same day, two sentences were handed down in Portland for the death of a young pregnant (black) woman shot in 2014 by two gang-bangers looking for her boyfriend. The men (also black) received 10 years and 7.5 years. Can anyone still argue that our system of criminal justice (starting at the top with the wretched Wray and the ghastly Garland) is not irreparably broken, and how is the next trial in the just-concluded state’s Arbery case ( to be resumed next month on federal “hate crime” charges) not an example of double jeopardy made possible by legal chicanery?
Make no mistake: as with Kim Potter’s conviction, this is applied ‘social justice’.
The facts of the incident matter little, if at all. What matters, first and foremost, is the race of the perpetrators and the victims. Conviction and sentencing are about societal equity.
The McMichaels must go to prison for life because of Emmett Till. And the Scotsboro Boys. And all of lynchings of blacks in American history. And Tulsa in 1921. And Omaha in 1919. And East Saint Louis in 1917. And all the white led race riots in American history.
It’s long past time for conservatives (and the few genuine liberals still around, like Dershowitz and Turley) to acknowledge this reality. The left never accepted liberal/individualist conceptions of ‘justice’; they merely went along with such until they could gain enough power and control. They have now, and they are imposing their vision of ‘justice’ with impunity.
Ackler:
I agree that this sentence is payback time plus intimidation through riot.
Most conservatives seem to understand that, as far as I can tell.
The three men are innocent except the color of their skin being White.
This is no difference between ancient human sacrifice and today’s political human sacrifice.
Society has advanced in science and technology, yet it stays still in the same cruel and cowardly level.
All Republican politicians remain silent and pretend they do not recognize the gravity of the injustice. Shame on all.
In this case, the acutual sentence was at least partly motivated by the fear of mob violence if the sentence wasn’t draconian enough.
Yet the sentence itself is a form of mob violence – the mob being the woke groupthink that whites were racially bad previously, and now have it coming to them, to be ‘fair’ in evening the score.
The laws be damned.
“The laws be damned.”
In 3, 2, 1….
Oh… Paul Scofield is dead. Never mind.
De Nihilism is another River in Africa. This is fun. Somebody find my straitjacket please.
I am afraid that they won’t live that long anyway.
I can’t get too upset about these folks being convicted of something. If you decide to use a weapon in self-defense, you take on the risk that you are wrong about whether self-defense applies. But this was a mistaken self-defense case. I understand that there was a pretty close call about whether the citizen’s arrest law at issue applied. So murder 1 and life without parole? For all three? Even the guy who was in the truck the whole time? I agree that it’s very difficult to call that justice.
The activsts pushing this believe that they are the most moral people who have ever lived. They’re not. And they’re destroying our legal system. What happens when a critical mass of people come to believe (correctly) that we no longer have equal justice regardless of race? These fools are sowing the wind.
Walmsley isn’t afraid of any mob violence. He’s just another professional class twit carrying around certain attitudes.
I can’t get too upset about these folks being convicted of something.
Being on the side of justice would contravene your script.
I think unless you have clear evidence that something wasn’t racially motived, or not in self defense (Rittenhouse), involving blacks as the victims or anything associated with blacks ,it’ll be tried as such and the current standard of prosecution is life sentence if not something more severe than what should be called for.
Trump broke The Left which in turn led to BLM 2020 that finally made the courts and school level admin bend the knee to the race hustlers. I mean, Potter and Arbery case weren’t Emmitt Till 2.0. Not even close, but the media and The Woke want it to be, so, simply, it is.
Here’s the official Glynn County police video of an earlier encounter with Arbery …
https://vimeo.com/647957977
Yet another drive-by from Art Deco. . .
Listen, I’m a lifelong conservative. I share a lot of your frustration with Republicans. My own frustration goes back to the Clinton administration and even before. I can agree with you that Trump broke a lot of things in the Republican party that deserved to be broken. I can agree with you that Trump did a lot of positive things in office, despite my well-known distaste for the guy.
Beyond that, there is no way on God’s green earth that I could vote for candidates from the modern Democratic party. In other words, I’m not even close to the marginal voter that the right needs to win elections. If you push people like me to vote third party or even drag us grudgingly along with Trump, the right loses, and this is what we’re going to end up with:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/crime/fl-ne-resiles-juror-speaks-20211210-xkayqv3zwzemfcr6mn2cfeetma-story.html
Let me state it another way outside of the context of elections and in the context of communications and messaging. The actions of the three jurors in the Halliburton Su case are a direct threat aimed at the very basis of our justice system, yet the dominant culture, media, and institutions would have us believe that those jurors did something virtuous.
Who is going to be able to break through the noise and speak to people of good will who might be persuaded to act like those three jurors? I don’t know who can, but I do know that Trump doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades.
I also know that you will never, ever reach those folks if you exude pontifical levels of certainty that the Arbery defendants should have been acquitted.
Bauxite:
Didn’t you learn from 2016 that the 3rd party alternatives to a Democrat (atrocity) only benefits the Democrat? I made that mistake in 2016, not in 2020. So yes the media propaganda can “fool me once,” It appears they can and will continue to fool you again, or maybe you’re really not being fooled, it’s something else.