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"Accidental" Download Sending 22-Year-Old Man To Prison
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago, Matthew White searched Limewire for porn. He was looking for 'College Girls Gone Wild,' but ended up downloading some images of child pornography. This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images. A year later, the FBI showed up on his family's doorstep and asked to search the computer. After thorough sleuthing, the FBI found some images 'deep within the hard drive.' According to White, the investigators agreed that he himself could not have accessed the files anymore. Matthew now faces 20 years in jail for possession of child pornography. On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty so that he will 'hopefully' end up with 3.5 years in jail, 10 years probation and a registration as a sex offender. 'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.'"
Absolutely ridiculous
What's a district attorney to do when someone anonymously sends the D.A. an email with kiddie porn attached? Technically, the D.A. downloaded it.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
"Oh HAI, I just downloaded some kiddie pron... by mistake of course you understand"
yeah, I can see that one working out well...
Matt is pleading guilty on the advice of his public defender in hopes of getting a three and a half year sentence.
In other words, he doesn't have the money to actually fight this.
Sure. And go to prison like this guy. Personally, I'd take my chances and just throw the hard drive away.
DO NOT CALL THE AUTHORITIES
Worst idea ever. If you actually have undeleted CP on your computer you will get 20 years.
The only safe thing to do is destroy the hard drive.
Should always maintain your innocence in these type of cases because the guilty plea will haunt you the rest of your life. 3.5 years is still ridiculous.
Typically, neither do people who are innocent.
'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately.'
At which point you've just confessed to trafficking in child porn. No, the proper thing to do is have a secure file deletion utility to nuke all evidence on your system.
Child porn has just become way too much of a boogeyman these days. Even if he had downloaded the images to look at - what harm would it have caused? He didn't ruin some girls life by looking at pictures that already exist.
Personally, just to get around stupid cases like this, I'd say that simple POSSESSION of child pornography shouldn't even be illegal. The point is the harm done to the actual children. By that token PRODUCTION should be illegal as that's when the harm is done. BUYING it (through cash or barter) should also be illegal as it finances production of more material. Other than that? Having a picture or video on your hard drive hurts no one, and it isn't going to turn someone into a stark raving mad child molester anymore than playing GTA turns them into a murderer.
If simple possession were not against the law then every one of these borderline gray area cases like this would go away.
Please someone answer me as honestly as they can: even if that guy happened to willingly watch child porn images, what damage does that do to society? Obviously exploiting children to take those pictures is a bad thing. Yet, we are talking about a random person who never harmed or abused a child. He even downloaded them from a P2P network, which means that he didn't indirectly supported harming children by financing it. How will society improve itself if the justice system throws that man in jail for yeas to come? What is there to be gained? // Posted anonymously to avoid all that social stigma that is promptly associated with those that question society's knee jerk reaction regarding child pornography.
In my opinion, it's irrelevant whether or not he downloaded the images on purpose. The connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is so tenuous it's absurd. The only way people can justify it is to make up crazy hypotheticals and market demand theories which are used in no other context.
I was on wikipedia and I accidentally went to the page about the German rock band "Scorpions" and looked at their album "Virgin Killer"
Then, I turned on the TV and what did I see? "Romeo & Juliet" (with 15-yr old Olivia Hussey showing off her boobage)
do I turn myself in now?
Why? Because the prosecutor and judge will tell the jury that the law makes no distinction between accidental possession and intentional possession.
Although the jury has the legal right of nullification, the judge and prosecutor will tell them that "this is what the law says you have to do" and the jury will convict, thinking they HAVE to.
If you don't have a warrant, you don't get entry.
If you want to go fishing, go fish yourself somewhere else, not on the taxpayers dime.
Fire the lawyer. No jury will convict. "Deep int he hard drive" - it is to laugh. Must have been a really old hard drive - most of them are pretty shallow nowadays.
The summary states that if you accidentally download kiddie porn you need to call the cops asap. Typically, people who are guilty or trying to hide something don't call the cops on themselves.
Yes but the summary also states that accidentally downloading child porn will get you 22 years in prison.
No thank you, I will not be calling the cops to have myself sent to prison for 22 years for not doing anything wrong.
This is shocking and appalling and must stop. This sort of thing makes it impossible to be able to even look at webpages on the net. What if one accidentily clicks on a link without knowing what it goes to and ends up with these files in their web browser cache? Clicking on a link is not enough to show intent, we cannot go on a wild witch hunt where everyone is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Under the law, it is the act of taking pictures of children in a sexually suggestive way is what should be considered illegal. For some time it has been argued that those who were purchasing such material were helping to contribute to this. However, an accidental download of such a thing does not contribute in any material way to it whatsoever and in most cases, such as we see here, is completely accidental. There are serious problems with this. This is like arresting a person for seeing a blank sheet of paper on a sidewalk, picking it up and noticing that on the other side there was child porn, since they had simply picked it up and held it. The notion is so outrageous and this is exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do about protecting children and these prosecutions are not protecting children. That is NOT what this dragnet is about. They are NOT protecting children but they are attacking and destroying the lives of completely innocent people. In fact, many childrens lives have already been destroyed because they took a picture of themselves and simply had the picture on their cell phone. This is about thought control and precrime, because by accidentily downloading this, no one anywhere has been harmed, all it is a copy of bits. Really, this massive abuse of the law needs to stop.
The law makes no distinction if the child porn you possess was obtained accidentally or intentionally.
Its just like buying a used car from a drug dealer and going across a border checkpoint.. The sniffing dogs smell some dope that got stashed underneath the seat and YOU are the one who gets put in prison.
I'm not a libertarian but even I can see how utterly broke and immoral the system has become to get to such a point.
Calling the cops is a complete gamble. The cops will likely say "you have child porn, I am required to arrest you and charge you with possession, you can explain it to the judge".
Best thing to do is a low-level multi-pass format, or a new HD. But that is if you *know* that you downloaded CP. If you don't know, cops may bust down your door some months later, seize your computer, then charge you once they find a thumbnail in some cache folder that was deleted 4 months ago.
There is NO requirement to "call the authorities". Delete it, preferably with a file shredder that opens up the file, overwrites each block with random bytes, closes the file, flushes the cache, THEN deletes the file. "Nothing to see here." Their "l33t toolz" (which are really just some perl scripts) won't recover it.
The cops are not your friends. If you accidentally downloaded child pornography, then you downloaded child pornography and you are in possession of child pornography. Intention doesn't matter, as can clearly be seen in this story. If you then call the cops, then you're basically confessing. Do not do it.
Just another example of the prophecy of 1984. If anyone thinks that this sort of activity will diminish in the future then they are just kidding themselves. It will get worse, much worse. Big Brother wants to know what you are doing, where you are doing it, when you are doing, and even why you are doing it - at all times. As other posters have said - destroy the drive if you ever THINK you might have accidentally downloaded ANYTHING that your respective Government considers illegal. Preferably with acid, although a sledge hammer would do nicely.
This is were the Internet shows its evil side.
There was no internet in 1692.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
No, this is where HUMANITY shows its evil side.
Do you really forget accidental child porn on your hdd for a year ? If you do "forget it there", you belong where law says you should be at. Every normal person would delete the file after opening it.
Duh.
This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images.
Not a new low for slashdot, but still depressing that people can't even finish reading a sentence they have begun to read. Even worse, you actually read the FA to get that "forget" part of your post. Maybe you just skip randomly around.
It's bad enough that viewing child porn can throw you in prison for 20 years when most who view aren't interested in making it, which is the real crime. But even the FBI says he couldn't have accssed these pictures easily. For that we trade his tax paying job for a tax paid term in prison which will also make it hard for him to pay as much in taxes afterwards. Then there's the ridiculous cost of this investigation.
Whheeee ... the modern police state, where you can be arrested for anything at any time, regardless of how stupid it is.
Infuriate left and right
Hmmm. How about using a virtual machine to watch porn then? One that resets every time you use it?
I'm being serious.
As much as I think child porn is bad (including possession), I think US law, for better or for worse, is built upon giving individual rights to protect themselves from self-incrimination, otherwise the legal system can run amok - as evidenced by this case (if we choose to believe the guy).
So I kinda like the Neal Stephenson approach of having a strong magnetic field in the door frame wipe any drive passing through it. Surely in this day and age of portable electronics it may cause some issues, but not unresolvable ones ;-)
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Indeed - there's a few studies that show that excessive prison sentences don't act as a deterrent. Only increasing the likelihood you get caught does.
Also, for the worst crime - murder - neither is much of a deterrent. The murder rate is low here in Norway., but almost all of the ones which do happen are done by mentally unstable people - e.g. during or after a breakup, or when just plain mentally ill. For these, there is rarely any calculation at all where either the length of the sentence or the chance of getting caught (almost 100%) are considered.
Who runs (most of) the high schools?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well of course, we latin americans are basically evil. We will do anything for money, as opposed to the pure and pious white people who do each other no harm.
And they dare to say racism is over in the US. Thank god I don't live there.
Yes, but the US government is a "do as I say, not as I do" government and is either immune to or ignores their own laws. I remember reading somewhere that the largest distributor of child porn is the US government - they use it as bait.
Since warrants are easy to get, the correct response is to press a button mounted near your doorknob that initiates the thermite destruction of all your drives, which are of course encrypted.
So let ordinary citizens defend people who can't afford lawyers and who are getting screwed over by public defenders.
If you have the legal right to represent yourself even though you're not a lawyer, why don't you have the legal right to have another non-lawyer who you have more confidence in represent you?
I've gone up against experienced lawyers (including the government 3 times) at least half a dozen times - I've won every time. From my experience, most lawyers don't even know all that much law. They just know how to draft and file motions with the right words, and how to navigate the court system. It's not that hard, there are already too many lawyers, and we need to get these blood-sucking ticks out of the legal system if we want justice instead of "the law."
Absolutely.
If you're innocent and your lawyer says "cop a plea" your next words should always be "you're fired". Same with any plea bargain. Don't even consider it. You don't know what society is going to be like in 20 years - maybe that innocent plea bargain will make you eligible for compulsory military service or organ donation. Stranger things have happened.
Innocent people are more likely to be flustered, etc., when confronted with allegations of a crime.
They'll act guilty, whereas the true crook will look you right in the eye and lie. He or she has nothing to lose by lying.
The old story of "liars can't look you straight in the eye" is a lie. Crooks do it all the time. An honest person would be ashamed tha people would even *think* that they did something wrong, which is why they act in ways that pop psychology says "they're acting guilty."
"No warrant, no entry. I have nothing to hide, but I do value my privacy, and you should be spending your time catching crooks, not trying to weasel around the law like a crook. Have a nice day."
Really? How is that "War on Drugs" working out for you? I hear USA has the highest percentage per capita of jailed individuals in the world, many in for-profit private prisons and most for drug-related offences. I assume drugs are therefore next to impossible to obtain there, no?
This is precisely such moronic "logic" as you have presented, main purpose of which is diversion of money and power to the "holy crusaders", elimination of civil liberties to enable the witch-hunters to operate "efficiently" ... and creation of ever-more-profitable and violent black market, which is used to justify this spiral of insanity.
This "theory" has pretty similar validity to that of the "phlogiston theory".
If it were true, images of all kinds would promote all sorts of other behaviours. Vanilla porn would cause wide-spread rape. Images of murder, warfare, terrorism etc (all which appear hourly on TV and are watched by hundreds of millions of people) would lead to daily rampages of thousands of axe wielding murderers running through the streets of any country with large cable TV reach like, say, Canada. Murderers competing with thousands of bomb-totting terrorists, followed shortly by whole armies of home-grown para-military-militias fighting each other ... and on and on.
The truth is much simpler: as someone pointed out on this thread, "fighting" child molestation is a sure-fire short-cut to political power as mentioning it has the apparent effect of completely disabling higher brain functions in majority of the populace, and its no different than any other drummed-up bogeyman of the days past used for this purpose by truly evil charlatans, like fifth-column Communists, witches, demonic possession etc and so on.
Total bullshit. Children age and become adults and the simple fact is that human brain's facilities for facial recognition are insufficient to maintain recognition without any other circumstantial links (research shows that we recognize our old acquaintances based on other cues such as a series of contextual memories across time). This is why police has to use computers to "age" photos of children gone missing for more than a few years - people simply cannot recognize them. And if you cannot be recognized, any claims of "compounded harm" are simply a result of suggestions of the "holy warriors" and "therapists" whose business is to ensure that any and all claims are suitably exaggerated, logic and empirical evidence be damned.
And frankly, and I say this as Democrat, Huckabee's decision wasn't wrong. 100+ years for the crimes was crazy. Even letting him out via parole wasn't unreasonable.
He then apparently went crazy. Actual mental illness, which he didn't have any sign of when they were letting him out.
The point he should been locked up is when he ended up in police custody again a while back. It would have been nice if someone had noticed he was batshit insane at that time, held a competency hearing, and locked him up on that while he was helped.
But we stopped caring about the mentally ill in this society a while back.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yup... The SPs/MPs will happily do a free sniff of your recently purchased used car. Can't beat a good training opportunity.
And if their free sniff finds some hidden drugs, what then? Will the congratulate you on your honest, or arrest you for possession of illegal drugs? Hopefully the former, but do you want to bet the next N years of your life on that?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Absolutely. If asked, say no. If they have a warrant, they won't ask.
In general, ALWAYS politely but firmly refuse to be searched. If they have a warrant, they won't ask.
NEVER talk to the police. It's just giving them evidence. Even if you are innocent, or believe you are innocent. They are, by definition, looking for a way to charge someone, including you.
If you are arrested, keep your mouth shut. Tell the police you are exercising your right to remain silent, and that you want a lawyer. NEVER resist. Follow instructions and go quietly and contact a lawyer ASAP.
One does not need to be any sort of anarchist to question whether or not it is a good thing that we have this particular "justice" system.
A coherent, non-corrupt, and temperate systems of laws and their enforcement is, to my thinking, an obvious public good. Today's American legal system does not meet these basic criteria.
Our laws retain considerable internal coherence; but so many and various legal fictions have a accreted in the system that it has lost touch with external reality. The question of corruption is less clear, tho there is strong evidence that financial interest of the prison-industrial complex fuels the demand for more "crimes" and more "criminals" to fill prisons. Most disturbingly, the US law enforcement system seems to have thrown overboard any vestige of temperance, moderation, or concern for justice.
Thus the social utility of our legal system is rapidly declining. In some areas of the law it may already have reached a negative level of utility. It no longer serves the public interest.
We must beware of misleading questions like "isn't our legal system better than nothing?" The obvious alternative to injustice is not anarchy, but justice. Civil society must use its budgetary control over the law enforcement apparatus to reign in abusive prosecution. The police and prosecutors must be reminded that they are paid by the taxpayers to serve the interest of the community, not the interests of their caste and industry.
I wonder how many women would survive?
Depends. If the women were armed, most or all of them would probably survive. Their abusive husbands/boyfriends might not though. If both are armed, at least the woman has a fighting chance. If he's drunk and she's sober, my money is on the woman.
Gun control leaves women more vulnerable than ever. My wife is 5 feet tall and just over 100 lbs. (152cm, 47 kilos for the metric-oriented here). I am a foot taller, and close to twice her weight. I am much faster and stronger. If she were unarmed and I (or someone my size) were to attack her, there is damn little she could do about it.
A firearm is a great equalizer. A small 9mm pistol takes down an attacker the same way whether it is fired by a little old lady or a weight lifter. No offense, but Portugal's drunk wifebeaters might be less of a problem if your country didn't prevent the women from fighting back effectively.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The fact that they already have the truth, and are in denial.
Comment of the year
Just get a new HD. Why risk _everything_ when you can be in the free and clear for a very well spent $100 and a few hours re-install. You think that guy wouldn't pay $10,000 now to make all his troubles disappear??
It's the unforgivable crime. If that stuff winds up on your drive, smash it, then toss it, and get a new one. Tell whoever that the HD died and you need a new one. Even if you have to put it on a charge card or borrow the money. Don't even mess around with shredders or wipe programs. Why take any chance at all??
-- Or Bernie Madoff, who stole BILLIONS of dollars - wiping out whole families, I suppose he should just get a slap on the wrist eh?
No, he should be forced to work until he dies, paying as much as can possibly be paid back to the people he swindled. This works better than us paying 40+K a year to keep him in prison.
-- The point of prison has never been to punish the prisoner.
It may not have that effect, but the ultimate *stated* point of non-life prison sentences is punishment and deterrent.
-- The only real purpose of prison is to remove the people who harm society from the society they harm.
If this were the case there would only be life-sentences. Removing an individual from society for a few years (at a cost ~40K a year) does *provably* far more harm than good, if you're only consideration is 'getting the off the streets'. Remember, that 40k does not include the benefit of having a productive member of society in jail. And most people who end up in jail for a year or so are generally not jobless, and almost certainly aren't jobless *and* stealing/doing 40K or so worth of damage/theft per year while out of prison.
-- So repeat after me
What a disturbing phrase.
The reason our sentencing laws are so draconian is because too many people ignore them, and have never stopped to consider what would happen to their life if they spent even one week in jail on charge to which they'd been found guilty. A significant percentage of Americans would find that they'd been fired, can't get hired at a similar job, their credit has been affected, and that it's all legal. So they can't make their mortgage, can't pay their debt etc etc. Extrapolate the curve.
Prisons exist in America as they are today because we've allowed the prison industry to become profitable. The regulations now exist to serve the private prison industry, because the only industry that pays any attention to the prison system is the private prison industry. It is *NOT* that we don't have regulations in place. It is that normal Americans just aren't paying attention - as we are wont to do - and a capitalist response has filled the vacuum. I'm not against capitalism in any way, I'm just stating a fact. Also, I'm blaming 'us', the citizens who are not paying attention, not the corporations - despite the fact that I think every company I've every looked into which makes money off of prisons is disgusting.
I will admit that the advertising seen whenever a major prison bill comes up always appeals to exactly your viewpoint. The advertising paid for by the prison industry, that is.
To summarize:
Prisons and draconian sentencing laws exist because of a desire for profits.
The conditions which have allowed industry to add even more stupidly long sentencing has been, in order.
- Citizen apathy.
- A general lack of empathy in our society - we rarely attempt to 'put ourselves in their place' before making snap judgments, which we then stick to.
- Voter ignorance, combined with.
-- appeals to fear (get them off my streets!)
-- appeals to vengeance (Punish those bastards! See second point also).
-- 'not my problem', or worse
-- 'MAKE THIS not my problem'.
I specify vengeance, not punishment or 'justice'. Nobody screams 'Punish them!' unless that which they truly desire is vengeance.
It is really easy to tell if you are punishing someone or are extracting vengeance: if you feel good about it, it's vengeance. Try punishing a three year old for trying to start across a street without looking if you don't believe me.
Dude, you are my hero.
Most people with a life or a job, don't want jury duty. I was a full-time employee once, and I *wanted* to do my jury duty to see what it was like, but my employer said they wouldn't pay me for that time. Which means outside of the rare exceptions like yourself, the jury is mostly filled with people with nothing better to do, or who couldn't get out of it. Not exactly a jury of your peers.
But this raises an interesting question in our justice system. If a judge instructs the jury to *only* decide yes or no, whether or not the defendant broke this statute, therefore he is guilty, or whether the jury has any room to consider the validity of that statue to begin with, or extenuating circumstances that alleviate his responsibility, even if the statue was broken. I assumed the jury had that latitude in determining a verdict.
I was watching a policy discussion from the Cato Institute concerning three strikes. A two-time felon was replacing his carpet, and found an old bullet underneath, and set it on his dresser. The police asked to enter for suspicion of an unrelated charge, found the bullet, and he got like 20 years for mandatory minimums on his 3rd strike for possession of the bullet. No guns or boxes of ammo, just a single bullet he found under his carpet.
WTH.
and when you get out you are not on the kiddie fiddler list so you at least have a chance of having a life off public assistance.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
What a victory for the tax payer. First we have the thrill of supporting some lard assed FBI personnel. Then we have the joy of paying for a trial as well as the prosecutor's time. And then for the next wonderful thrill we get to pay a huge sum to put this poor guy in prison! And then we get the absolute joy have having him on a sex offenders' list so that he will not be employable or able to get housing for the rest of his life which will trigger welfare and public support until the poor schmuck is dead.
So the guy gets his entire life trashed and the public gets a whopping expense. With a logic stream such as this one the people behind this kind of law should have been in charge of the war in Vietnam. Entire new definitions of victory abound!
[citation needed] No seriously, I googled it, and I couldn't find anything remotely resembling a credible study staying that Britain had the highest crime-rate. I found a super-popular map that put Iceland at the top, but that sounds very odd to me.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
First of all, he was talking about Western Europe and at least according to this statistic http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita there is not a single one of them ahead of the US, certainly not Great Britain.
They wouldn't have asked. Asking first is stupid because it could tip off the suspect that they were under investigation and they'd then have time to destroy evidence and such.
So that they asked means they either realized they had insufficient evidence to get a warrant, or they'd already tried to get one and the judge said "No, you are fishing and I'm not signing off on it."
The police do things like this, try to go search when they lack the evidence to get a warrant. Many people are cooperative so it works well. Happened to a friend of mine. His roommate at the time was a problem many ways, and ended up getting himself arrested. However the police thought my friend might be involved as well. So they came back and said they wanted to search the house. My friend told them to get lost, which annoyed them, but there was nothing they could do. They didn't have any probable cause that he was doing anything illegal, they'd never get a warrant, but they could ask and if he said yes they were free to go.
It is amazing how often tricks like that work. A county attorney I know says he loves lineups. Reason? Because he asks the question "Would the guy who did it please raise his hand?" and people do! He's gotten the same person with that on more than one occasion. If crooks are willing to make it easy for the police to get them, well expect the police to take advantage.
So if you've done nothing wrong and the police come and ask to search your house, your answer should be "No, come back with a warrant." That'll most likely be the last you see of them, they wouldn't have asked if they had probable cause for a warrant. Remember: The 4th amendment is made for protecting innocent people. If we could rely on the police to be a perfectly noble and just group who would only ever search criminals, well then we'd not need a 4th amendment. It isn't there to protect criminals. However we can't thus we have one to protect innocent people from being harassed and inconvenienced.
Oh really? Tell that to the face of the child in the image he downloaded.
This is exactly the type of reactionary nonsense I was talking about. That emotionally-charged statement does nothing to explain why the connection between downloading an image off of limewire and the sexual abuse of a child is not tenuous.
I think the only people who claim racism is over in America are the racists.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
As for your wife, she could easily defeat an attacker. A screaming woman will actually stop most attackers,
That is just plain stupid. By claiming that screaming will easily defeat an attacker, you are claiming that all the 90 thousands some odd rapes a year were not violent crimes, but in fact totally legal consensual sex. You are one sick puppy.
I did read his comment, which was full of outright lies. Lies like claiming that crack cocaine was eliminated due to introduction of ever more draconian laws, which is utterly laughable to anyone with even passing knowledge of the US drug scene. "Recreational drug" consumption has been steadily growing all throughout the "War on Drugs" and shows no signs of slowing down, although some morons have mis-interpreted decline in use of older types of drugs which were being replaced by newer, more potent or more fashionable ones as a "victory" resulting from their brain-dead "demand reduction" campaigns.
We're talking about drunken husbands beating on their wives, and now you want to argue about whether it would be better if they had FIREARMS? Is this really what our society has come to?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The advice to call the FBI and turn yourself in is the MOST RIDICULOUS I've seen in all that ridiculous case. They're either going to laugh at you or sue you like that poor guy. And the real advice is: never admit having done anything. Even doing something by mistake. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Remember the magic words: "I don't recall." Those words sufficed to get a few war criminals off the hook.
McKinnon is getting the same kind of bullshit -- and it would never have happened had he not admitted doing anything wrong.
The best thing to do would be to have the FBI agents and Judge killed. And their families and their friends. In public. By rabid, starving dogs.
She would never get a gun, carry it around or learn to use it. Remember, many don't even try to escape, they would be too afraid that he would find out, or still "think" they're in love with them (ever listened to Better Man?), etc.
Besides, in a small house (most of them are), she wouldn't have the space to fire a clean shot before he grabbed her.
And there's one victim even more problematic: the kids. They get beat up too, but guns would never help them.
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Those women could also choose to just walk away from those abusive husbands/boyfriends, and report them to police. Saves a lot of violence both ways. But for some reason most of them tend to say. Why that is I truly don't know nor understand.
A peaceful little woman is unlikely to want to carry a gun around, much less use one. Would she even be capable of using it, against say, her own violent husband, when even trained soldiers in war often can't bring themsalves to shoot the enemy while under direct fire?
A violent perpetrator is much more likely to carry a gun with him, as part of his toolset for doing nasty things.
So much for an equaliser.
I agree that the guy is probably innocent, and would hate to be in that position too, but what precedent does it set to allow it? Now pedo's everywhere will get the green light to download and purge, because it gets them off the hook. I'm not saying that it's right, but that's probably where they're coming from. I'm really surprised no one has brought this side of the argument up.
Britan is widely held to be the highest crime rate in the western world, and the rest of Europe isnt that much better?
Where in the world are you pulling that from?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I know, let's criminalise breathing oxygen. I'm sure that we can trust the police to only use the law against the "bad guys", and we can conveniently do away with the need for pesky things like evidence. And I'm sure than no innocents will be caught by having to meet their targets for catching "people who breath oxygen". If the worst comes to the worst, they can always bring in some guy who taped something off the radio, and sentence him to decades in prison!