If you arrived at this page by following a link I posted in a comment discusson with the claim it was child pornography (which I neither approve of nor posses) you’ve done the same thing that allowed the FBI to get extensive search warrants to look for child porn on the computers or in the mail of those who followed the link. While this behavior may not break new legal ground the fact that otherwise law abiding people are willing to follow this link out of mere curiosity, skepticism or the desire to see if I was telling the truth suggests that merely following a link claiming to offer child porn is not a good reason to believe that the person who did so is a bad person.

Additionally I have a significant problem with the idea that merely checking to see if something is child porn could itself be a crime. In particular this seems to have troubling free speech implications. The first ammendment has long been held to protect the consumption of media as well as it’s production. Now there is a good argument that child porn as the product of a criminal act ought to be exempt but the supreme court has ruled that computer generated child porn is protected by the first amendment. If it is illegal to follow the link because it might be real rather than CG child porn this seems to raise troubling issues about your first amendment rights. Moreover, surely you have a first amendment right to read media that is titled to be child porn but isn’t and since you can’t know what the content is until you actually view it how can clicking on the link itself constitutionally qualify as a crime?

Now one might argue that clicking on the link isn’t a crime, it only gives probably cause to believe a crime has been committed. True, I agree that members of a forum populated by pedophiles and perhaps advocates for legalization of child sex/porn are very likely to also possess child porn but clicking on the link is not evidence of a specifc crime and relies on impermissible considerations. It’s also true that people who belong to NORML are likely to have pot at home but surely we don’t want the government to be able to justify searches based on our protected first ammendment activity.

Anyway I haven’t had time to really think this through or research it so I might be missing something but these are my initial thoughts.

It appears that Spitzer was seeing prostitutes while publicly denouncing people and trying to send people to jail for operating a high end prostitution ring.

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”

Now prostitution should clearly be legal. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with explicitly paying money for sex, and let’s not kid ourselves what differentiates prostitution from dating the guy with the nice car is only the explicitness of the transaction. In fact criminalizing prostitution, and thus requiring those women who want to monetize their sexual allure to give up their autonomy and hitch themselves to a rich guy, seems decidedly sexist to me. True, as a practical matter it is right to worry that some women may get treated badly or abused in prostitution but once as a practical matter the question is will less women be hurt if prostitution is legal (or tacitly tolerated) or if it is illegal?. I think the answer is clear. If prostitutes don’t fear arrest they can seek police protection from extortionists and pimps, can receive health care, have worker’s rights and otherwise be protected by the same systems that protect the rest of us but so long as it is illegal we create a shadowy underworld that will trap the most desperate and abused women and use the illegality of their business as a means to subjugate them.

But while some argue that the moral acceptability of prostitution is a defense of Spitzer I couldn’t disagree more. At worst patronizing prostitutes is a relatively minor moral failing. Knowingly placing people in prison who don’t deserve to be there is on the order of kidnapping, rape or murder.¹. Sure, we can’t expect any one politician to undo all that is wrong with our justice system. If Eliot Spitzer had stood up and said, “I think we should legalize prostitution,” his political career probably would have died right there and done no one any good. But it’s one thing to pick your battles carefully, it’s another thing entirely to exercise your discretion to send people to prison for being involved in the same activities you do so you can further your political career. Unless evidence comes to light that Spitzer fought to minimize the penalties or change the law on prostitution he deserves to hang for hypocritically sending people to prison for offenses he must not have thought warranted that treatment. At the very least he doesn’t deserve a free pass from the people when he wouldn’t give that pass to others.

Now some complain about the use of seemingly absurd application of laws like the Mann act or arcane financial crimes to ‘get’ Spitzer. I couldn’t agree more with the queasy unease many people have about stretching these laws to cover Spitzer’s activity to satisfy the people’s moral outrage or serve political ends. But this sort of tactic was Spitzer’s calling card. Two wrongs don’t make a right and I believe we ought to take the high road and refuse to do to Spitzer what he did to others but having made his career on this sort of ‘dirty’ legal trick it’s appropriate that he lose it for the same reason.

Ultimately if this had been Bill Clinton chared with say smoking pot I’d go to the mat for him. Certainly he has never openly spoke in favor of legalization but he didn’t choose to advance his political career by throwing others into prison for the same things he himself did and I got the impression that his administration at least slightly favored liberalization (his pardons, DOJ attitude toward MMJ). However, if we don’t hold people like Spitzer accountable to their own standards we further encourage politicians to victimize the less powerful with faux moral outrage. More on this later.

Now, I’ll leave you with some links for purient interest about the girl he was with and other details. I would feel sorry for her if I didn’t think she was sure to get a generous offer from playboy, likely to get a book deal (or payoffs from other clients) and maybe even have her CD produced.

• people about Kristen
• Hufington Post, lots of links
• Kristen’s MySpace Page, note the creepy guys leaving messages.
• Details About Trysts
• Post Identifies Prostitute

So California assemblyman John Benoit announced legislation today that would set up numerical limits for the amount of illegal drugs (I believe schedule 1 substances excluding marijuana¹) one could have in your blood stream and legally drive similar to the .08 BAC limit for alcohol. Apparently the lack of such specific limits is making it difficult to prosecute inebriated drivers (presumably because they must convince the jury of they reached some subjective level of impairment). This is a good reasonable idea that would likely save lives

But of course a proposal as sane and reasonable as this was too good to be true. Benoit has now said (same article) that he is seriously considering making this a zero tolerance law. Yup, that’s right apparently demonstrating our moral outrage that people are taking illicit substances is more important than saving lives on our highways.

As we all know from drug testing in athletes drugs can be detected in your bloodstream long after the individual in question has sobered up. Thus if you are a drug user the net effect of such a zero tolerance law would be to decrease the relative penalty for driving while inebriated. If you know that even if you wait till the next morning to drive the police could still throw you in jail because of the residual drugs in your bloodstream then why bother waiting? We’ve already (unreasonably in my opinion) expressed our moral disapproval of drugs by making them illegal but it’s criminally stupid to put our moral outrage over people’s lives. Not to mention the perfectly sober people who partied the night before who will end up in jail under such a program.

Of course if groups like Mother’s Against Drunk Driving are really about saving lives and improving highway safety I expect them to come out strongly against bills like this one. I On the other hand if they are about revenge and getting even with that type of person they will probably support this kind of zero-tolerance legislation. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.

I think there is a good case for making the sale of child porn illegal and certainly the creation of child porn (by molesting actual children) should be heavily criminalized¹. However, the argument for criminalizing mere possession of child porn seems less strong. In particular I can think of a bunch of reasons off the top of my head why criminalizing child porn would increase the number of molested children. Let me summarize a few here.

1. There are documented problems with the harshness of child abuse penalties (lifelong sex offender status etc..) discouraging family members from turning in their relatives. No doubt people are going to be an order of magnitude more reluctant to send their uncle or brother to jail for merely possessing child porn (whatever the truth is they will tell themselves he doesn’t hurt anyone). If child porn was decriminalized it might encourage more people to report pedophiles they know to social services who can then provide treatment.
2. Making possession and sharing of child porn illegal radically restricts the reuse of child porn. Suppose there is X amount of child porn that has ever been made and X is more than enough to satisfy most people. If they could all access that X amount there wouldn’t be as much motivation to molest kids to make child porn. On the other hand by making it illegal we likely take a great deal of that child porn off of the internet and balkanize the rest of it encouraging more people to pay for child porn and thereby encourage others to make it.
3. Prohibiting possession of something always creates a criminal element who tries to deliver that thing. Organized crime creating child porn may harm children more than the alternative. It’s hard to rate relative badness of this sort of thing but being repeatedly molested by a criminal enterprise may be much worse than being occasionally molested by your uncle.
4. Whenever you criminalize an activity that a fair number of the perpetrators see as victimless (”I just downloaded the pics I didn’t hurt anyone”) you reduce the barrier to further crime. This is the same way that government prohibition of weed has made it a gateway drug. In the legal scheme where mere possession of child porn is a felony many people may not see it as a big leap to go from mere possession to purchasing child porn from sketchy eastern European websites. On the other hand if you make it a felony to purchase child porn but not merely to possess it you might very well do more to suppress the profit motive in abusing children.
5. I suspect that some people who like to look at child porn (or at least who would were it not a felony) are actually decent people who do believe that children shouldn’t be molested, they just happen to be turned on by it. For instance some girls both feel very strongly about protecting college girls from being taken advantage of yet also find porn that depicts it really hot. I have no reason to believe that there aren’t some people who are turned on by child porn who feel similarly. By decriminalizing mere possession you can enlist the aid of these people in tracking down the abusers who make the material.
6. Making possession of child porn a felony encourages people to be very careful about who they share it with reducing the distribution of any single image. This makes it much less likely that the child pornographer will be caught since it is less likely to make it to the police in a timely fashion.
7. Sending otherwise productive members of society to prison and especially inflicting punitive sex predator laws on them is not only a huge societal cost but makes them more likely to offend. The guy who is turned on by molesting kids but has a nice career, friends and family may very well keep his desires under control. Send him to prison for a few years because you find some child porn on his hard drive and he may very well become bitter and having little left to lose descend to actually molesting children.
8. Maybe people who would otherwise get treatment are scared of asking for help lest their child porn collections be suspected and they get sent to jail. Since therapy seems to be helpful in preventing more abuse this could be another potential avenue of harm.
9. Perhaps the release provided to pedophiles by looking at child porn makes them less likely to go out and molest. While I think this is the least likely of all these points it needs serious study not another mass media sensationalization about a correlation between the two (duh people who want to look at child porn more likely to molest kids).

Now maybe these factors all end up getting balanced out by other ones but I seriously doubt that these questions have been seriously studied. They certainly weren’t why we passed the laws against child porn. Frankly I don’t really know whether child porn laws help or hurt and given that I’m unsure I think the default state should be not to regulate speech/content. However, one can reasonably disagree with this point.

What one can’t reasonably disagree with is that we have a morally responsibility to seriously examine whether laws criminalizing child porn reduce or increase the number of children who are molested. If you are in a position to seriously influence the law (politician etc..) and you allow more children to be molested because you want to make something as disgusting as child porn illegal or just because you are too lazy to consider the arguments then your not much better (maybe worse) than a child molester yourself. At least child molesters have the small excuse of extreme psychological pressure but if you let it happen out of mere laziness you have no such excuse.

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1. By child porn I mean photographic evidence of what would be otherwise termed molestation of a child. Teens taking pics of each other or people taking candid shots of their kids getting out of their bath even if later used for sexual purpose are not what I am talking about here. Maybe other laws should cover these situations but that isn’t the subject here, nor will I address here the question of where to draw various age lines. ↩

So despite pretty vehement opposition to the Bush administration I’m actually quite glad to see Bush commute Libby’s sentence. It’s not that I don’t think the administration didn’t act repugnantly in the whole Valerie Plame affair but Libby seems to be nothing more than a loyal staffer who got stuck in the hot seat. It’s Bush and Cheney who bear the responsibility for this whole business not Libby and by commuting Libby’s sentence Bush leaves little doubt where the blame lies. I don’t see much deterrence value in convicting him of this sort of crime. The only thing a prison sentence would really teach white house staffers is to say they ‘don’t recall.’ A lesson Gonzales seems to have already learned.

Besides I still have some misgivings about the whole business of obstruction charges. By no means could this investigation be called a witch hunt but where should one draw the line for crimes like lying to an investigator? What if the prosecutor asks you if you were cheating on your wife? Or asks a political figure if they lied in their campaign promises? Sure the questions likely have to be material to a genuine investigation but when is a crime significant enough to prosecute someone for not revealing compromising information? I’m troubled by the possibility that future parties could use investigations of minor crimes to put administrations between a rock and a hard place as even a direct refusal to answer can be an answer. Frankly I just don’t know the answers to these questions.

I guess I’m just not sure Libby needs to go to jail so I’m happy that he doesn’t have to and that Bush is effectively going to take the blame not his unfortunate subordinate. I mean all other things being equal it’s sad to see someone go to jail.  I don’t think that white house staffers should get special treatment but then again I feel that prosecutors have too much power and discretion generally and that we many of our sentences are far too high.

So over on digg they link to s a story about a man who exposed himself to a ten year old being sentenced to wear a T-shirt saying “I am a registered sex offender.” A sentence like this not only seems disproportionate to the crime (primarily this is just going to scare and disturb children…just like seeing a guy wearing a sex offender shirt will) but also to increase the danger to children. Not only do such humiliating and harsh sentences discourage people form turning family members in by ostracizing the offender from any social support network they make it more likely that he will molest. While this man seems like nothing more than a harmless flasher if he was going to molest someone this makes sure he has the least to lose.

But what really blows my mind are the comments on the article. These are comments by a relatively tech savy, liberal, anti-Bush crowd and they literally include a fair number of people demanding that people like this get the death penalty and many more who are outrage that the judge didn’t lock this guy up and throw away the key because he had previously exposed himself to children. Yes apparently people are eager to sentence someone who pulls down his pants to far worse punishments than people who beat their wives, steal senior citizens retirement funds, or even some kinds of rape.

Moreover, some brief thought reveals that this has little to nothing to do with the crime itself and everything to do with the man’s desires. People are responding to a sexual desire towards children not any act. If you doubt this look at how people react to a pedophile who is so morally upright as to refuse to ever indulge his raging desire. Instead of regarding such a person as a moral paragon as they would someone who resisted other sorts of temptation they view them as a sicko who ought to be punished. Indeed the public has been fairly vocal about prosecuting people for any pornography involving the idea of sex with young children even if it is only written or computer generated irrelevant of any issue of encouraging molestation.

Obviously people just have a deep psychological need to push away their disgust at the notion of children as sexual objects and feel righteous condemnation. I’ve known this for some time but it really does make me sick to observe how pervasive and extreme the reaction is and disappointed to observe the lack of any influence of reason on the process. I mean I can think of little that is more selfish than counterproductively punishing people and thereby increasing the danger to children just so you can expiate your disgust.

As you can guess this also indicates my opinion on the sex offender proposition on our ballot. I just haven’t remarked on it because it is so obviously bad. The experience of other states, experts in criminal recidivism and good sense cry out that this measure will increase sex offenses by making families less likely to report offenders and, as John Stewart said, creating roving bands of homeless child molesters. Not to mention the severe drain on law enforcement resources by the totally useless monitoring system that will tell us where everyone who was arrested for streaking in college is at every moment.

So there is this interesting segment on This American Life on KQED about seniors who shoplift. Apparently this is a pretty widespread phenomena. I was a bit disturbed by the alternative course they made seniors attend instead of going to jail which told seniors how they should feel bad about shoplifting. This seems perilously close to government endorsed morality.

In an ideal world the criminal justice system in its official capacity would be about imposing published penalties for illegal acts not about making moral judgments. I find it particularly disturbing the way the application of the death penalty seems to depend almost exclusively on moral judgments. For instance, you are probably more likely to be executed if you kill someone for sexual gratification or as part of a satanic ritual than if you kill a business rival who is interfering with your profits even though deterrence would cut the other way. Worse, current religious and moral beliefs of the defendant make a huge difference. The fact that if Moussaoui had converted to Christianity and expressed regret he would almost certainly would avoid the death penalty seems a blatant violation of the first amendment but I don’t see any practical way to avoid this. I mean in effect we are executing someone for not agreeing with us that his actions were wrong, not to mention the problem that his underlying crime is merely a failure to inform the government of a plot and raises troubling 5th amendment issues. This doesn’t mean I necessarily oppose the death penalty, I’m still not sure if the extra scrutiny it brings to the justice system outweighs the harms but it is disturbing.

Anyway back to the point of this post which is: Why don’t more seniors/terminally ill people commit crimes? I don’t mean just shoplifting but also big crimes like bank robbery. It would seem that there has be a significant number of people who realize they have only a few months to live, less time then their lawyer could stall out their trial and people who are really old or about to die are given a pass on prison anyway. Even if they feel a bit scared of violating the law it seems in many cases they might even have a moral obligation to engage in theft and donate the money to useful charities. Sure if everyone went and robbed banks when they were about to die it would cost banks more money in insurance but this would effectively amount to an increased tax and many people (myself included) believe that we should raise taxes and use the money for good.

I mean if I ever discover I have a terminal illness and am still well enough to pull off a bank robbery a few months before my death I sure as hell would do it. I’d probably be pretty scared but it would be one hell of an experience and I might even be morally obligated to do so. I guess I’m just surprised that such a huge majority of people seem to really buy into the cultural norms society presents to them.

So I’ve always been a bit suspicious of plea bargains. Both as a way to induce a guilty plea as they can induce a rational innocent man to confess and as a way to ‘pay’ for testimony. I’m particularly bothered by the clear implication that only certain sorts of testimony gets you the benefits of the plea bargain. If you are a mobster you won’t get the lower sentence for a plea bargain unless you testify that you saw your boss doing the dirty. If you testify you never saw your boss say anything incriminating you will likely not see the light of day (I don’t know if the plea bargains can technically depend on the nature of your testimony but the surely do in practice).

However I was just listening to the NPR report on Andrew Fastow’s testimony against Enron and they were discussing why he was so motivated to help the government. They said that if the government doesn’t think Fastow was helpful enough they could him do more time or make his wife do more time. In other words the government is threatening to keep a man’s wife in prison to get him to say what they want. How can this not be illegal. How can it possibly be fair to convict a man based on this sort of testimony?

Maybe(if one smoked a lot of crack) one could believe that no one would plead guilty if they knew themselves to be innocent. If one had lived under a rock maybe you could believe the jury isn’t unduly influenced by the testimony of an ‘accomplice’ who has taken a plea bargain (they are told). However, it is just absurd to believe that threatening someone’s wife isn’t an unfair advantage for the prosecution at trial. Even the most moral man in the world, who naturally believes his wife should not suffer from his misjudgment (not necessarily legal guilt), might lie to spare his wife and blame someone he thinks is a bad person. Not to mention the general question of whether it is ever fair to hold a person’s sentence hostage to someone else’s actions.

Hopefully this was just an error by some reporter but I fear it happens, at least in effect if not in name.

So today the execution of Morales in California was indefinitely postponed today when two doctors balked at actively participating in the execution. This situation was created after a judge ruled based on a study in the lancet, that the standard method of lethal injection may not render an inmate fully unconscious allowing them to suffer and thus may be cruel and unusual.

I have to say I approve of the decisions by the doctors involved. I tend to think the entire debate over doctor assisted suicide is just stupid if doctors have anything to do with executions. However, this issue is at least debatable.

What I don’t understand is why we are executing people with methods that have the slightest risk of causing pain. What is death not enough? Why must we be additionally cruel and make sure they die in an unpleasant fashion? It isn’t like their aren’t plenty of perfectly painless, even enjoyable ways to die. Why not end a killers life with an overdose of opiates? Or as the judge suggested an overdose of barbiturate (there is no good reason it needs to be given by a doctor or nurse but I suspect the judge’s ruling in this case was simply mandated by state law, i.e. it would be illegal for someone else to administer a controlled substance). Hell, given a choice between the current procedure and a large caliber precisely aimed gun to the head I would take the gun out of fear the barbiturate wouldn’t be enough.

I’ve never understood the societal need to inflict pointless pain but surely this case is just ridiculous. We are already killing them for their crime, is it to much to ask to do it in the most painless way we know how?