Thursday, April 03, 2014

"I don't hate people..."





"Ashley Madison, the world's biggest online hookup site for married people, works only when monogamy is the rule on the surface but, deep inside, couples want to cheat. That's why it is scoring big in Japan. The nation that prides itself on conformity and proper appearances reached a million users in eight and a half months, the fastest pace among any of the 37 countries where the adultery site operates. The previous record was Brazil at 10 months. The U.S., which has the biggest number of users at 13 million, took a year to achieve the one million mark. Spain took nearly two years. Extramarital sex and affairs are not new to Japan, but a site such as Ashley Madison is a "a leveling out of the playing field" for women, said Noel Biderman, chief executive of Avid Life Media Inc., which operates AshleyMadison.com. There is a tradition of wealthy men taking mistresses in Japan and its male dominated society has provided plenty of outlets for married men to find casual sex."






Why they'll come for the lawyers first. - Sorry about your time on death row, pal. Nothing we can do.
"The decision explicitly acknowledged that “there is no question that the individual prosecutors involved in D’Ambrosio’s case violated rights secured to him by the Constitution.” But no one will be held accountable for it. And D’Ambrosio is just out of luck...

...that one “bad apple” was the county’s chief prosecutor. Again, the guy making the policy. And though the county may have known of only a few violations prior to D’Ambrosio’s conviction in 1989, as the county officials became aware of of many more incidents over the next 20 years, they still continued to fight to preserve D’Ambrosio’s conviction and to keep the man on death row...

 If Allen knew the evidence was exculpatory and withheld it from the prosecutor, D’Ambrosio would have to show that Allen did so out of bad faith. That’s very, very difficult to prove. If Allen did turn over the evidence to the prosecutor, that’s where his obligation as a cop ends. He is under no obligation to be sure that the defense attorneys are aware of the evidence. If he sees the prosecutor proceeding with the case in a way that contradicts exculpatory evidence that he knows he has already given the prosecutor, he is under no obligation to tell the court or the defense what’s going on. The responsibility for turning over such evidence lies entirely with the prosecutor. And the prosecutor is protected by absolute immunity...

The point here is not that the court got the law wrong. My impression is that, though there may be a few quibbles with the opinion, the court largely got it right. And that makes this all the worse. Police and prosecutors can break the rules to the point where they’ve committed grievous constitutional violations. They can do this in a death penalty case. They can do it over and over, in lots of cases, sending who knows how many people to prison for a decade or more — or possibly to their deaths. And even when the misconduct is abundantly clear, and the courts acknowledge as much, those same courts also say that under the law, no one is to be held accountable."




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