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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."
Who is Jack Thompson?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
We could keep him around for entertainment value alone, but best of all he's so freaking useful in totally discrediting the antigamers who don't froth at the mouth, chew carpets, and fling feces at the judge.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Up in ur base, killin all ur d00dz, JT!
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.
GTA4 has sold over 3.6 million copies. Even if lawyers didn't like to brutally advance their careers through any means necessary, I would expect at least some of these sales to be to lawyers.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I don't think putting pornography in court documents is normal strategy.
If the gay porn submitted for judicial review doesn't fit, you must acquit!
10 seconds of searching in google turned up multiple results for this item. I'd try either Ars Technica or Shacknews
I just get a "Temporarily Closed" page when loading GamePolitics...great timing to move your host.
Ars has a writeup that's a summary of GP's: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080520-judges-report-in-jack-thompson-case-guilty-on-27-charges.html
What is the law, if not semantics? While I don't agree with Thompson, I do agree that until a loyalty oath is signed, no judge can ever issue a binding ruling.
We as citizens must demand that our government dot it's 'i's and cross its 't's. Without these oaths, the judges are unaccountable. How hard is it to get a signature? How hard is it to take an oath? These oaths are required by the people and in them, the person taking the oath states they will follow whatever constitutions are relevant to the position.
See http://www.jail4judges.org/
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
On the bright side: no job means more time to play GTAIV!
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.
So I'd like to thank GamePolitics, Scuttlemonkey, and especially the Florida judge for brightening up this bad bad Wednesday!
Oh yea, and I want to thank Jack Thompson too, since if he wasn't such a stupid, obnoxious, self-serving buffoon this story would have never made it to slashdot!
My life is SO filled with coincidences. Last night at Felber's one of the ladies there called me a "fuckmonkey" (in regards to my bringing Amy there half an hour before taking Tami there), I just got back fro Top Cat's, where today's drink special is the "Drunk Monkey", and now the Jack Thompson story brought to us by Scuttlemonkey!
Weird. But not as weird as Jack Thompson.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If he gets locked up, someone might emerge who can actually argument and make the public belive that the cause might be worth fighting. Somebody who has only stayed in the shadows because Jack Thomson has made all video game opponents look like a big bag of crazy. Someone who is actually mentally stable and sees, that such lamenting has only made the public side up with the game makers.
Beware!
You can read a good summary at law.com:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202421556225
Well what'd you expect? There is no body of video game related laws that for someone to violate. Much of the nonsense that he's perpetrated has been as a result of the bizarre war he's trying to wage against games.
The issue isn't just that some guy doesn't like video games, it's that he's not only embarked on some sort of loony campaign against them, but he's also abused the legal system to harass video game developers and publishers. And he's also made sweeping, negative, and sometimes offensive generalizations about an entire branch of media and the millions of people who consume said media.
Whether this guy is unethical enough to purposely crap all over the legal system over something like video games, or whether he's just plain insane, either way he should not be practicing law. And he certainly shouldn't be wasting tax dollars on his bizarre personal crusade against a bunch of gamers. The legal system is better off without him, regardless of his views on video games or anything else. He's pretty much proven that he has no respect for the proper functioning of the courts/etc.
And third, this guy has managed to convince various media outlets that he is a credible expert on video games. Having an opinion on something does not make you a credible voice. We can only hope that whatever the end result of all this is, news programs will stop asking him to share his thoughts on video games or anything else.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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!
So what videogame was he playing that turned him into a criminal?
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
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.
Word is that he's planning to serve the local McDonalds with a cease-and-desist order and a job application.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you read his response, it's typical Jack Thompson. He doesn't argue the merits of the charges (probably because he was guilty of everything that he is being accused). He argues that the judge should be removed because she has a grudge against him.
One of the charges is improperly practicing law outside of Florida. This one was simple to prove. Every lawyer is licensed to practice law in the state where he passes his bar. To practice law in another state, you either have to (1) take the bar in that state or (2) apply for hac pro vice status if the lawyer needs to work a case. Every lawyer should know this. Jack Thompson (licensed in Florida) did not do either before representing families in the Devin Moore case in Alabama. Eventually he applied for status but had it revoked when he violated the gag order in the case.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.