| mc94301 | |||
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2004/12/14 ( 9:09 AM ) cxjo judicial branch v the media? ok, so a "jury of his peers" has decided that scott peterson should be put to death. and lots of people are really happy about this. am i among the few that believe that the state should not have the right to kill me or my friends or my family members, regardless of what they have done? do we even know that he did it? juries have convicted plenty of innocent people... what if this amber chick he was dating was jealous and knew she'd never get scott once the baby came out, and to top it off scott said something to her that pissed her off, so she figured she'd get rid of all of them by ordering a hit and making it look like scott did it. scott figures out what happened, but then he loves her too much to finger her as the true culprit so he acts like an ass and lets the circumstancial evidence convict him. is this justice? we kill a man, our tax dollars are used to kill a man, simply because he's a moron and he's in love. anyway, if you haven't figured it out yet, i'm highly opposed to state sponsored penalty. including any type of incarceration for any reason whatsoever. we should start by releasing all the non-violent drug and immigration offenders. at this point, with all the money we're not pouring into the prison industry we can then perform psychological evaluations for the remaining prisoners, and promote treatment and healing. but we shouldn't stop there. now that we've completely dismantled the prison industry we will have billions of dollars, and we will need to invest some of it in education. this is the obvious thing, books not bars, right? but on top of that, we need to figure out what in our society is causing violence and violent behaviour and put a stop to it. i'm not going to blame tv, movies, video games... people aren't incited to violence by watching violence or playing games. people are incited to violence when violence is acted upon them, thus spreading the violence like a disease through our society. and i'd wager that a lot (maybe most?) of this initial violence is instigated by the state itself, with it's threats to not only control your whereabouts through incarceration, but also to inflict direct torture on you including and up to killing you. ack, this is not what i intended to write about when i wrote the title. what really concerns me now, and is far more concrete than my anarchist dreams of a truly free state, is the media's coverage of the judicial system. first of all, nearly everyone had already made up their minds of peterson's guilt within the first few minutes of media coverage. no proof needed. this isn't particularly suprising.. the media didn't have to spin the data they had that hard to make for a profitable story. what irks me more is the change in the frame of the judicial terminology that the media seems to have spun up recently. whoever heard of a "penalty phase"? that one's not so bad.. i mean... "sentencing" is such a loooong 3 syllable word. but what about "guilt phase"? it makes it sound like the purpose of this part of the trial is to find the defendant guilty. "you found him guilty? good. you did a good job". anyway, if someone knows the origins of these phrases... are they reserved for capital cases? have they always been there, and i just never noticed before? or is it some media intervention in recent years that introduced these phrases into the legal vernacular...? arg. anyway, if someone could shed some light on this it would be appreciated. #
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