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Sex Offender Gets New Hearing After Hearing Officer Rants Against Arial Font
ericgoldman writes "People often feel passionately about fonts, but government decisions shouldn't depend on what font people choose for their written submissions. In Massachusetts, a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer after it was determined that (among other possible biases) the hearing officer posted to Facebook that he 'can't trust someone who drafts a letter in arial font!' and 'I might be biased. I think arial is inappropriate for most things.' This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with."
.... most American legal jurisdictions have Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure, that specify the format legal pleadings are supposed to take. They're usually quite specific on the allowable fonts, font sizes, line spacing, the format they expect for the numbering of paragraphs, and so on. Lawyers and pro-say litigants ignore these rules at their own peril, as doing so is liable to get your case dismissed outright and at the very least will seriously annoy the Judge. Of course, most Judges don't take this annoyance, combine it with a bunch of other rants, then post it on Facebook....
It does amuse me that so-called higher educated professionals just as liable to open mouth and insert foot on Facebook as the immature uneducated brats (I was, like, at work, and like, you know that patient, like, from the other day? He's, like, a total asshole.) I have the misfortune of calling co-workers.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If you spend your time dealing with sex offenders, and your rants are about Arial, is it possible that you might have your priorities in poor order?
"a sex offender overturned the decision of a hearing officer"
I'm not sure it's a good idea to let the defendant be in charge of the judicial process.
...now if it were Comic Sans, I would TOTALLY agree.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Back in the 90s, I had a job teaching MS Office to people. One class I was hired for was to teach a bunch of local judges how to use Word.
While discussing how to change fonts, one of the judges says, "Huh! Anal font, what the hell is an ANAL font!"
Maybe it is the same judge!
I recall when I was first confronted with the reason Word Perfect was still (at the time) preferred for legal documents and especially court documents. That formatting absolutely needed to look a certain way even if it was ugly and primitive looking. Word Perfect could do it, MS Word not so much. I thought it was ridiculous, but perhaps not as ridiculous as this story.
| | All [...] documents should be in a fixed-width font. Anything else is just crazy.
|
| Fixed that for you.
FTFY
social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers
Seems to me more like "social media helps to uncover insane asshats among government workers".
Seriously, this guy apparently prejudiced against someone in a sexual assault case based on a font - he just gave everyone with whose cases he was involved a cause to ask for a retrial.
What are the chances an innocent person went to jail cause he didn't like their font or their hair style?
Once again this just proves that if you give asshats enough rope, they will eventually hang themselves with it.
I say "thumbs up" for the social media.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I just this past week had the opportunity to read some legal filings in the case between a friend of mine and his former wife over custody. Since he can't afford a lawyer, he fills out forms the court gives him and does it.... BY HAND.
Give me some arial any day of the week.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
There were several comments which seemed not to really be supporting claims of bias (Arial font, hating the word lascivious), together with some things that are as likely to be just being inconvenienced (e.g. a police report in spanish I suspect is included to imply racism, but is just as likely to be complaining much in the same way I might complain if someone gave me something in German).
But the vast majority of comments were more cut and dry 'I hate the people who I'm called upon to conduct hearings for', which would be the more relevant serious half of this.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You can at least be more likely to know what you are getting when a public official rants stupidly in public. The people who never ever rant publicly likely harbor as bad if not worse sentiments privately, and the populace is none the wiser.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The rant doesn't bother me... its the decision based on factors that have no legal bearing that bothers me
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
That should be a shooting offence. I recall working for a company who had a new director of marketing. She did everything -- everything -- in PPT, even memos. Her preferred font was Comic Sans and the concept of a colour space for documents was basically science fiction to her.
Yeah, the company went under. How did you guess?
I guessed it went under because if the company went on to be wildly successful, then this anecdote wouldn't confirm your belief that the marketing director's memo style was a sign that the company was doomed to fail so you wouldn't have told it.
i'm going to write a strong letter using Helvetica Narrow
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sure there will be such cases, but mostly the conflict is between old style prejudices that date from a time when things weren't as public and there weren't as many opportunities for moral outrage , with a modern time that offers a flood of information that makes your private thoughts suddenly a lot more public.
A more realist reaction would be to be a lot more tolerant towards inappropriate thoughts.
"This is just the latest example of how social media rants by government workers are causing problems for the workers — and the people they deal with.""
No, this is just the latest example of how people posting stupid shit online come back to bite them in the ass.
I'm still amazed that 20 years in, most people still have no idea how to act like rational, civil human beings online.
I don't respond to AC's.
FIXED THAT FOR YOU FULLSTOP
The problem WAS earlier, before people were stupid enough to post such things online, that such bias STILL existed, STILL influenced decisions, but could not be identified and rectified.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where are all the slashdot typesetting snobs proclaiming "if it doesn't have proper ligatures, it's an abhorrence!" ?!
That might not be important for you. But other aspects of the system could be. E.g. take an A3, you can put two A4 pages exactly on it. Also, you can blow up an A4 page, to A3 and keep the exact dimensions. Or, blow down an A4 page to A5, and keep the exact dimensions. There are so many benefits from the system, even if you don't use them all.
I like printing two pages to a sheet, it saves paper. Because I use A4 size sheets, I can fit exactly two pages of a document. Nice.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
It's not a compelling property for a single paper size, but it's pretty nifty when constructing a series of paper sizes.
Both the "normal" US paper sizes (A, B, C, etc., where A=letter) and the ISO A-series (A4 etc.) follow the same rule for relationship between adjacent sizes: Each size is the same as two of the next smaller size, joined along their long edge. (Or put another way: splitting a sheet in half with a cut parallel to the short edge yields two sheets of the next size down.) This has some fairly obvious reasons to make sense.
That rule means that a series will alternate between two aspect ratios, so e.g. A=8.5x11 has the same aspect ratio as C=17x22, while B=11x17 has the same aspect ratio as D=22x34. However, there's no guarantee that those two aspect ratios are the same, and in fact in the US system they're not. This means that enlarging or reducing by 2 steps always works nicely, but going up or down a single step doesn't -- you end up enlarging margins in one direction, or cropping in the other, to make up for the difference in aspect ratio. The ISO system, on the other hand, does make that guarantee (by making the aspect ratio sqrt(2) ), so that you can scale between any two sizes in the same series.
Another application, which is basically the inverse of scaling to a smaller sheet, is scaling to fit multiple pages on one sheet, particularly for the case of printing two logical pages on each sheet -- the US system requires large margins to make this work, while the ISO system uses paper much more optimally.
No. It isn't. It's an insanely trivial matter of absolutely no merit.
Justice is about facts and the most fact-related evaluation of guilt possible. Making judgements based on a font is sheer incompetence unless the font is so unreadable as to make reading impossible. And in which case the reaction needs to be "prepare this again, this time using a font I can read" and nothing else.
Firing the hearing officer would also be eminently reasonable, as would formally re-evaluating every judgement they've made in pursuit of their job. Due to the profoundly obvious fact that said hearing officer is an incompetent boob who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near decisions that affect other people's lives.
And frankly, if slashdot would allow me to, I'd have written this entire post in comic sans.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.