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In Florida, Secrecy Around Stingray Leads To Plea Bargain For a Robber
schwit1 writes The case against Tadrae McKenzie looked like an easy win for prosecutors. He and two buddies robbed a small-time pot dealer of $130 worth of weed using BB guns. Under Florida law, that was robbery with a deadly weapon, with a sentence of at least four years in prison. But before trial, his defense team detected investigators' use of a secret surveillance tool, one that raises significant privacy concerns. In an unprecedented move, a state judge ordered the police to show the device — a cell-tower simulator sometimes called a StingRay — to the attorneys. Rather than show the equipment, the state offered McKenzie a plea bargain. Today, 20-year-old McKenzie is serving six months' probation after pleading guilty to a second-degree misdemeanor. He got, as one civil liberties advocate said, the deal of the century.
Your congressman doesn't want to hear from you, unless you're a campaign contributor, Law doesn't matter. Elections matter.
There really has to be some sanity here: the weapon must be able to cause grievous bodily harm in order to justify heavy sentences. A BB gun doesn't qualify
Boy, 10, dies after his brother accidentally shoots him in the head with a BB gun at close range: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.gloucestershireecho...
BB gun accident takes life of a 20-year old boy: http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/...
You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.
Actually - you can.
Sticking a gun to somebody's head and demanding things from him is robbery. If the things happen to be illegal that's a seperate crime of which he is guilty, but it doesn't make YOUR crime okay.
That logic is a recipe for rampant vigilantism. Sure I shot twenty people down in the past year your honour, but they were all criminals, teenagers smoking doobies !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You'd think that privately run prisons are so pervasive in this country as to dominate the criminal justice (punishment) system.
Alas, fewer than 10% of the convicts in the USA are held in "private prisons"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Your numbers are out of date. Almost half of all Federal inmates are in private prisons, with the bulk being immigrant detainees. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... That was in 2012, and the percentage has only grown.
And if you happen to live in a state with a Republican governor and legislature, you will find it's also up to about half of inmates being in private prison systems. And those are mainly the ones most likely to be repeat customers, of course. Remember that maxim of free markets: If you want more of something, make it profitable.
Two companies control 75% of the private prison population: CCA and Wackenhut. They have recently begun a program of encouraging states to transfer the inmates with the longest sentences to their facilities, because they are much more profitable.