Mid Week Musings

Mid Week Musings

        Sooo,  Brock Turner, convicted (and admitted) rapist, leaves prison after serving a  mere three months, which is half of the ludicrous original sentence of six months. It is worthy of note that if anything positive can be attributed to this farce, and by farce I mean the sentencing, certainly not the crime, it is that the California legislature by  unanimous vote closed the loophole which allowed  Judge Aaron Persky to sentence  Turner to six months in jail rather than a longer term in jail for sexually assaulting an intoxicated, unconscious woman outside a fraternity party. Of course, Turner was "our kind of people,"  meaning either white, connected, wealthy, or all three.

       The misogyny demonstrated by Turner's depraved actions, his father for trivializing it in a pre-sentencing letter, and the judge for buying it, are staggering in implication. And while this case wasn't about race, specifically,  Judge Persky issued a prison sentence of three years in a 2014 case with similar circumstances, in which the convicted party, Raul Ramirez, an immigrant from El Salvador, plead guilty to felony sexual penetration by force. Naturally, Ramirez was brown, poor, and used a translator in court, while Brock Turner was a "Stanford man."

        Rape has long been the stepchild in what tend to be relatively uniform criminal codes for other crimes.  Until the mid 1970s, in most states a husband, estranged or not,  who brutally sexually assaulted his wife could not even be charged with rape. What is really pathetic about this is that the laws regarding this issue derive from  conservative  European Christian views regarding the marital relationship and wifely "duties."   These same Christianity based "morals" had a great deal to do with markedly different penalties for  White and Black crimes  in the south. These sentencing differences were at the core of Furman v Gregg and Mclaughlin v Florida. In the first, the death penalty was found to be awarded (that sounds weird, like it was a prize!) to Black defendants far more than Whites for the same crime, especially rape.  Mclaughlin (1962) overturned Florida's law which actually made it a crime for habitual cohabitation by two unmarried people of opposite sex, if one is black, and the other, white.

        In the Turner case, and a similarly nauseating recent one in Colorado (two years of work or school release), white upper class defendants were the recipients of what can only be viewed as preferential treatment based on race, economics and social standing. In both cases the law isn't at fault, but the judges certainly were. Sentencing guidelines vary from state to state, but are semi- consistent, with Florida's being among the strictest, especially for statutory rape ("Jessica's Law").  Allowing judges the kind of irrevocable leeway demonstrated in the Turner case, however, essentially annuls the will of lawmakers.

        While the law is, or is supposed to be, colorblind, Judges like Aaron Persky have no such constraints. It is a national scandal.  

        In another GMA item, researchers in Russia claim to have detected a radio signal which isn't merely random noise, but some sort of modulated  signal coming, supposedly, from a point in space 95 light years away.  This may well be true.  I personally believe we as humans are supremely egotistical  when we boldly aver that we are alone in the universe,  based on our (or some peoples')  creation myth,  which is essentially "God like us best."  It is conceptually quixotic  that we put all other cultures' creation explanations into the category of "myth",  but "we" (Christians, Jews and Muslims) actually have the Creation Story. You know the step by step eye witness account even before there were any witnesses?!

        What is lost in all the kerfuffle is that even assuming, and it's far from even "probable",  that 1)  there might have been an intelligence associated with such a signal and 2) it came from a source 95 light years away and 3) Einstein was correct,  the  signal would  had to have been sent almost a century ago, and the source is 551,241,120,000,000 ( 551.2 trillion miles!) away. A lot could happen in 100 years and that scale of miles, huh?

       

        This is just an opinion, but do we have stiff enough penalties for identity theft? I think not. Considering the aggregate potential for harm represented by some public servant stealing lists of personal data, and the struggle some have had to endure to restore personal credit and privacy, I feel this crime is far worse than, as an example, a non-violent burglary. If nothing more it is burglary writ larger in scope. The fact that these crimes tend to be seen, again based on the perpetrators, as more "white collar" than others involving less economic damage,  tends to minimalize the scale of the individual victim's possible damage.

        The Federal Trade Commission reported recently that as of 2010 more than 15  million Americans had their identities stolen. The amount of money lost to identity theft measures in the billions of dollars every year, and about one out of every 20 consumers will have their identities stolen this year. Identity theft even extends beyond the grave, as some thieves take the identities of deceased victims.

        Identity theft, though  common, is a relatively new crime. In the past, many state law codes  classified  this type of criminal behavior as false impersonation, forgery, theft by deception, or other similar terms. crimes. Today, some states still use these laws to punish identity theft crimes. It is a hopeful sign that more states have  enacted specific identity theft laws that target this type of behavior.

        We see a Bernie Maddoff  jailed and we rejoice, but in the end, it was just money, and those who lost it had plenty and can write off the amount which wasn't restored to them. No victim of  Maddoff  is on public assistance, rejected for credit, or has  had a car repossessed. Not only were most Maddoff victims middle or upper class persons, there is court mandated machinery in place to recoup much of what was lost (about 58% so far) due to his Ponzi scheme.  In some identity theft cases, the actual damage to the victim is far greater in the sense of ruined  credit rating, and difficulty clearing their name. State laws may require restitution, when loss can be directly shown, but no state actually assigns public employees to help with recovery. Complicating that,  many of those who commit the crime have long since disposed of the ill gotten gains.

         Maddoff is doing time, more  because he crapped where he ate, than for the nature of the crime. His true "crime" was a clear violation of the upper class rich white guy code - "Thou shalt not rip off thy peer group."  Lehman and Bear Stearns execs lost more and hurt investors worse (aggregate financial loss) in the 2009 housing bubble collapse - no jail time! ID theft is epidemic and hurts ordinary people. Perpetrators should be jailed similarly to Maddoff,(150 years) but most aren't.  Florida has enacted some of the more stringent State ID theft laws. Yet one would have to be at the top of an epic ring with large stolen assets to get even close to the FL maximum of 40 years. This in spite of the fact that many ordinary persons who are victimized will suffer relatively far more, and longer  than Maddoff's victims.