Slashdot Mirror
Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality?
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
I didn't have to read very far to find out that no, the law is not a reality. Thanks, slashdot!
XML causes global warming.
Do stupid laws and frivolous lawsuits make you too afraid to help someone in trouble? No problem, we'll just pass another ill-thought law! What could possibly go wrong?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
I'm surprised that the USA does not already have a bill like this. In other countries (e.g. Germany) helping people in need is mandatory. You are also encouraged to give CPR and if you fail at it and make it worse you are not charged (otherwise people would be too scared of screwingn up and never administer CPR at all).
"Good Samaritan" laws in the sense of Seinfeld already exist in many jurisdictions. It is called a "duty to rescue" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue. Good Samaritan laws also exist, but in legal parlance that means something different, namely protection from liability of people trying to rescue or assist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law. The California law is a variant duty to rescue. This isn't anything new. Seinfeld didn't do their research and apparently neither did the submitter of this post or the editors.
This is the result of more than 20 people watching a minor (15) year old girl being gang raped during a school dance and not a single one calling 911 to report it. Unfortunately a law like this needs to be enacted so that such people can be punished. It's a shame that such basic morality is lacking in society these days but it's come to this point. We have to legislate that if someone is so devoid of such basic morality, that they can't call the police when witnessing a gang rape, that we need to start putting people in jail for not doing such basic acts of humanity, so that there is at least a threat of jail to inspire people to do the right thing if their conscious is devoid of inspiration to do so voluntarily.
Why should such people be punished? There's a lot of evidence that they are acting out of normal and fairly standard psychological patterns. Humans are less likely to help in large groups. This is known as the bystander effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect. People have tested this in many different contexts, these include having people pretending to have heart attacks, as well as more controlled lab settings. One good example test involved a lab setting where people were supposed to be answering a set of questions, then the experimenter would go out of the room and something loud and bad would happen to the experimenter who would cry out for help. The key issue is that all but one of the people in the room were actually actors. The actors all just kept taking the test. The one almost never helps. This works with as few as one actor and one real person. But if there is a single individual and no actors, more often than not, they will help. And if one of the actors gets up to help, then the person generally will also. You shouldn't punish people for following their basic herd instincts as righteous and moral as it might make you feel.
That famous Seinfeld ending was based on a very law recently passed at that time in Massachusetts. The episode was set in Latham,MA. The law referenced was not fictitious. Similar laws exist in many places.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/27/california.gang.rape.investigation/
You shouldn't punish people for following their basic herd instincts as righteous and moral as it might make you feel.
Then let's make gangrape legal too, shall we ? Talk about your basic herd instinct.
The whole point of morality, religion, and by extension laws and such is that we can do better than these stupid instincts. Modern society (or any city with more than 50 people) would be utterly impossible without actively punishing people for following their instincts.
Lets make the assumption that this law existed before this event happened. Would it have been prevented? Of course not. More ineffective unenforceable laws are what America needs! That is, if you are a up for reelection.
Just because it is the case that the bystander effect is normal doesn't mean it ought to be the case that it is normal. This is a very common logical fallacy in moral philosophy called the is-ought problem as it was well articulated by David Hume. The gist of it is that you cannot take descriptive statements as premises and come to a prescriptive conclusion.
The reason why there are such laws is because we feel that we should have a moral responsibility to help those who are in immediate life-threatening danger when we are in a position to help them without (too much) personal sacrifice.
The great thing about robbing a fat guy is it's an easy getaway. You know, they can't really chase you!
Being supposedly "progressive" has nothing to do with it.
Ever heard about long standing tradition of blaming rape victims, for example?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Unwilling to call the cops?
Yes.
How many cases have you heard of where some random person, on trying to do the right thing, finds himself tasered/sprayed, cuffed, tossed in a cell overnight, and charged with some absurd law simply for making himself available for the police to take their frustrations out on, having failed to actually do their jobs? Or worse, sued into penury by the very victim they risked their lives to help?
Yeah, I would almost certainly help someone getting raped in the street outside my house. And you can bet your ass I'd vanish before the police showed up. "You okay? Good... See ya!".
Then let's make gangrape legal too, shall we ? Talk about your basic herd instinct.
Sorry, but a HUGE difference exists between actively committing a violent crime, and choosing not to report the same.
Try applying this to situations you might disagree with. Failure to report your friend smoking weed? Failure to report your mother speeding? Failure to report your uncle cheating just a bit on his taxes? Failure to report your coworker for circumventing the DMCA to do what your mutual boss ordered?
This amounts to the worst of slippery slopes. Even in the best of applications, someone might simply not have noticed (I, for one, get very disoriented in large social gatherings, and yes, you probably could rape someone in front of me without my noticing). And in the worst, this amounts to criminalizing a refusal to obey potentially intolerable laws (Failure to report anyone who violates the "We love George Bush" law).
This can easily be seen as a violation of the 5th amendment. This would force anyone who doesn't report a crime they might or might not have been involved in to face charges for not reporting the crime unless they report the crime and, in turn, incriminate themselves. IANYAL
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I think not. I, and I alone, will decide when and if it's safe/appropriate/desirable for me to render assistance. I have helped at accident scenes, but would no longer do so because of the legal complications we've all heard of. A law like this would ensure one thing - that bystanders would immediately exit the scene, rather than watching to see if it was safe to help.
One armed fat guy and your spree is over.
Are they more dangerous than fat guys with two arms?
if you don't think you can call 911, grow a set of nuts and attack the perp. he can't fight very well with his pants down and his dick out. grab something heavy and bash him over the head or something sharp and run him through.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Where did Jesus ever say to kill someone. He said love your enemies and stopped jews from stoning a adulter. John 8:7
It's days like these when I lose hope in humanity.
The very fact that we need laws to tell us "yes, you can help someone in need and in fact you should" is bad enough, but then we have the typical lazy-bastard response "why should I be forced to help" and even uber-rationalizations like "groups are programmed to no intervene, it's normal" or even "it's a slippery slope..."
My karma is on Excellent so mod me down if you will, but if you think like so many posters, I have this to tell you: have a good look at yourself in the mirror. YOU are a self-centered lazy bastard; no matter how clever you think you are, you're human failure and I hope you won't find out the hard way how is to be ignored by your fellows.
Of course they're more dangerous, with less weight they can run faster.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
and unfortunate. the idea should be to compel people to stop acting like herd animals, not accept the vile reality of the behavior
people also tend to litter. vast parts of german society just shrugged and accepted the rise of the third reich. so we just accept evil? "oh well"
the idea is society is supposed to enforce codes of conduct to elevate us somewhat above that of herbivores, especially when the modification to the behavior is very quick easy and low cost: you can't make a phone call if someone is being beaten? you can't walk to a garbage can to dispose of your trash?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"punishing people who most likely didn't even know such a law exists does nothing but give us satisfaction with the thought that we wouldn't do that sort of thing, when of course, we likely would"
i've been in the kitty genovese situation in the new york subway. 10 of us made the call, and the alarm pull, and the alerting of the conductor and toll booth operator. as well as 5 of us guys and a gal holding the sleezebag perp down until cops came. as well as follow up with detectives from the nypd later. sure: some shrieked and ran away, but these were the MINORITY
the kitty genovese story as an outlier, not a definition of human behavior. herd behavior overcoming kindergarten sense of right and wrong is a RARITY, not a definition of humanity. we aren't herbivores. people point to the kitty genovese situation and say "see, that defines us". no, that's not an accurate description of human behavior. the kitty genovese situation was NOT the status quo or average situation. there's a thousand kitty genovese situations every day, and in the majority of them, someone makes the call
besides, it doesn't take knowledge of the law to counteract herd behavior. this supposition of yours is compete bullshit. we're not talking about not knowing vague arcana of the tax code, we're talking about face value obvious judgments from a kindergartener's sense of right and wrong: "someone is in trouble, call for help." if the herd behavior is enough to overcome this simple sense of morality, you SHOULD be punished, because you are truly deficient, and your deficiency resulted in harm, and will likely result in harm again: all you had to do was make a call. you are basically saying that complete bullshit excuses are acceptable
"what? murder is wrong? sorry, i didn't know that, i won't do it next time" or, since we're on the seinfeld kick: "was that wrong? should i not have done that?" its a joke, because its not a serious statement. no one with the slightest amount of functioning brain matter thinks that's a valid excuse for gross negligence. failure to act morally is a failure to act morally, whether by commission or omission, its equally indefensible and most definitely punishable
your position basically excuses evil
1. the bystander effect is a vague EFFECT, felt by everyone, but by no means the final word on your behavior. its not a law of nature like gravity.
2. but you go further than that and that says basically ignorance of the law excuses anything.
3. and even worse, you confuse horrible lack of understanding of simple right and wrong with ignorance of the law
frankly, you are completely full of shit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And this was without a "Good Samaritan Law".
People are inherently stupid. They see things that simply aren't there. They perceive things though their own past traumas and the like. If they get a silly notion in their heads, sometimes all logic is thrown out if the silly notion really bugs them. Such simple logic as "did I really see this guy do anything?
The "Good Samaritan Law" may have "good intentions", but we all know what the "road to Hell" is paved with!
I have to say, I am now glad I don't live in California, which up till now was looking good as a state I might want to live in. Now, "no way in hell" are the words that come to mind.
Gotta love our culture of hyper-paranoia. A child-abuser behind every door, a terrorist in ever-other plane seat, and now this.
I do have one solution to this mess: expatriation. Even China is beginning to look like a better option.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Suppose you witness a crime, but for various reasons (like wanting to continue breathing) you don't want to report it or testify about it. Suppose further the cops figure out you were a witness, and you're subpoena'd and ordered to testify. Since you didn't report the crime, and not doing so is a crime, you can now simply take the fifth and not testify!
How many cases have you heard of where some random person, on trying to do the right thing, finds himself tasered/sprayed, cuffed, tossed in a cell overnight, and charged with some absurd law simply for making himself available for the police to take their frustrations out on, having failed to actually do their jobs? Or worse, sued into penury by the very victim they risked their lives to help?
Zero. You may want to think that kind of stuff is happening all the time, but it isn't.
The right to remain silent (which comes from the fifth amendment) includes the right to not talk to police. About anything, really. And since nobody can really know ALL the laws, simply reporting an observed crime to the police could very well incriminate you in some crime, either the crime you're reporting or something else (watching a cock fight? illegal. Being out after curfew? Illegal. Who knows what laws you might have violated simply by being there, and when you report this crime, you're telling them that you were there.) For more on this -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
It has to make you think about what kind of society are we living in today that legislators would even have to consider putting forward a law like this.
Let's review: Twenty teenagers watched the gangrape of a 16-year-old girl outside a high school without doing ANYTHING and your primary concern is a fucking good samaritan law eroding your freedom?
I am a little more worried about the how those spectators will be the future of America.
And if you could, in any way, justify not reporting a violent crime in action (even anonymously), you have some serious issues. That's the problem nowdays, we've been reduced to sheep who don't want to get our hoofs dirty, so we just watch and wait for someone else to fix the problem.
We have a "good samaritian" law, with the force of police, courts and jail behind it.
We have a "stop snitching" movement, with the force of death behind it.
Which do you think will win? I'd say "stop snitching" has it all over anything else, because if you are caught you easily end up dead. Here in the West we love life more.
Don't forget their employers -- the privatized, for-profit prison industry.
But the real story here is Nava's run for Atty.General, and "my new law would have made people report this heinous crime!" will read well on this con artist's resume. That he's being egged on by the prison guard union should shock no one.
What is really scary is how much legislation is passed in CA that contains the words "This would create a new crime". I wonder if it's even *possible* to live here now without committing SOME crime??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?