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Judge Recommends Guilty Verdict for Jack Thompson
GamePolitics is reporting that a Florida Judge has recommended that Jack Thompson be found guilty on 27 of 31 counts of misconduct and is awaiting a Florida Supreme Court verdict to back him up. Thompson is striking back with allegations against the Judge and others, complaining that loyalty oaths were never signed. "Tunis made 21 recommendations of guilt in relation to Thompson's participation in Strickland vs. Sony, an Alabama case in which the anti-game attorney represented the families of two police officers and a police dispatcher slain by 18-year-old Grand Theft Auto player Devin Moore. Tunis also recommended that Thompson be found guilty on four out of five counts relating to his 2006 attempt to have Rockstar's Bully declared a public nuisance in a case before Miami Judge Ronald Friedman. An additional two guilty counts stemmed from a non-video game matter."
Please stop submitting Jack Thompson stories. His only point to his shenanigans is to gain press via controversy. Please don't give it to him by crossposting stories about him to Slashdot, Fark, etc. etc.
Except he wastes court time, i.e. our tax money, on his self-promotion crap. Give him a blog and let him rant, fine. But it's time the legal profession was reigned in over their bogus lawsuits.
A man who stood up on Fox news the day of the Virginia Tech shootings (when the bodies of slain students were still warm) and told the nation that he was certain we would find video games in the shooter's bedroom. He then later turned one of the funerals into a media circus and photo op.
A man who has overstepped laws designed to give Americans freedom and the right to enjoy entertainment in their homes. He has taken the The Bill of Rights into the restroom and wiped his ass with it.
A man who, after overstepping his bounds an pushing extreme values of the political Right, asked for members of the Bush family (which he erroneously thought would be allies) to remove his disbarment from the Florida courts. Name Jeb & George
You have a man who has tried to undo the separation of church and state. This same man has been operating in a court of law and using false correlations while pushing his own moral and religious beliefs. He is completely divorced from the sense of Justice and the American People. This same man will soon suffer under The Justice of The United States of America or my faith in it will soon falter
My work here is dung.
You could have also phrased that as, "..police dispatcher slain by 18-year-old fluoridated-water drinker Devin Moore."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The way I heard it was:
If facts aren't on your side, pound on the law. If the law isn't on your side, pound on the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound on the table.
That describes JT more accurately. Procedurally, he's a moron -- he's actually gotten himself barred from filing directly to the Florida Supreme Court. Then again he's not exactly that sharp when it comes to facts or law either.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
That's sort of like saying "Al-Quaeda hates freedom" -- I don't think Thompson hates the first amendment, it is just (in his mind) trumped by other values. He has further picked a particularly poor method for promoting his values.
To be more technically correct (and as this is slashdot, that's the best kind of correct), I'd say he believes that video games (and other media) containing sexual or violent content are the root of all evil, and that he'd rather have no video games (or other media) than the possibility that the games could contain sexual or violent content.
This particular story relates to disbarment proceedings against the man for repeated poor (and illegal) conduct.
The man is a Fundamentalist Christian who believes he received guidance from God to eliminate video games.
No, seriously.
My blog
If the public wants to have a reasonable and adult discussion about violence in video games, I don't think that's something to be afraid of. Just as our culture went through similar grumblings about movies and television, and almost repeatedly about music, it's a valid conversation to have. There's a useful discussion to be had about the appropriateness of certain types of games for particular age groups, and the most effective ways to introduce children to various things they might experience through games. At the end of the day, we've still got the first amendment, and not a particularly realistic chance that video game violence will somehow end up banned.
What's most likely going to happen is that a smattering of state laws will get passed and quickly be overturned because they're unconstitutional. Ten more years or so down the line, there will be enough people in positions of authority who grew up as gamers that the issue will mostly go away. There will still be the occasional whining and controversy, just like we've got with movies/tv/music today when a game really decides to push the envelope, but most people won't give it a second thought anymore.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The reason Jack Thompson has been allowed to get away with so much asshattery is because the justice system defaults to not disenfranchising people.
This is a good thing.
Keep it that way.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Frankly, I think it's appalling that McCarthy era loyalty oaths are still on the books. I hope the refusal to sign was intentional, and that this issue is persued to the point of being fired, which would then create an outcry in the judiciary leading to the legislature overturning this fascist act.
What's wrong with a loyalty oath you ask? Take a look at what's happened to our government over the past few years, could you honestly swear loyalty to *this* government? What if it got worse?
If you think about it, anyone who really meant their oath to "defend the Constitution of the United States... against all enemies, foreign and domestic" would have taken up arms against this government a long time ago. Ever since Wickard v. Filburn it's been clear that even the SCOTUS is a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
Dissent is an essential part of a democratic society. People who disagree with current policy should not be discriminated against, even if they are communists.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Huge difference between labelling content (which is what Tipper was going for - dunno about Hillary) and censoring content (which is what Thompson wants).
I'm all for labelling so that people can make informed choices. I'm way against censorship so that I'm allowed to make those informed choice.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Having painfully(1) read GamePolitics' coverage of the trial, I find myself concluding that the real victims of Thompson are not gamers but the lawyers and judges of Alabama and Florida. As gamers, we can ignore him and go back to playing our games while occasionally enjoying schadenfreude at his expense.
The lawyers and judges that had to deal with him endured harassment, patently false accusations, completely incoherent arguments, abuse of law and process, and threats at every turn. It made me glad to be on the receiving end of only the news stories about him.
(1) Both because Thompson's rants are difficult to parse and because GamePolitics.com's servers were awful.
I don't think the bar association had any major issues with the lawsuits themselves. There are all sorts of lawyers out there, but as a lawyer he has to follow the professional code of conduct. The things he accused of doing:
Each of these is a serious charge and the judge has determined that enough evidence exists. I don't know Jack Thompson but his actions suggest a man who doesn't think that any rules apply to him.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"I win" means God supports me and wants me to win.
"I lose" means God supports me but is testing me, and I must work harder, and He will eventually help me to win.
Their reasoning is that the 1A is intended to protect expressive conduct (which is why you can burn the US flag even though it's not technically speech -- it's expressive conduct). Pornography, to them, is not speech for the purpose of expressing ideas but rather "titillation of prurient interest". As much as I don't agree with them, I have to respect that their interpretation is not unreasonable or ridiculous and that they are, in fact, intelligent people that love freedom as much as I do despite our serious philosophical difference about the meaning of that freedom. We are more permissive of government regulation in these circumstances because it is clear from the context in which exchanges between such businesses and their customers occur that neither the merchant nor the buyer is interested in the work's literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. "The deliberate representation of petitioner's publications as erotically arousing . . . stimulate[s] the reader to accept them as prurient; he looks for titillation, not for saving intellectual content." Thus, a business that "(1) offer[s]