Plea bargains are coercive and only benefit the guilty while screwing over the innocent. Though trial judges aren’t in theory supposed to be aware of a defendant rejecting a plea bargain, prosecutors often tell judges that the defendant rejected a plea bargain and it makes the defendant look ungrateful/unremorseful during trial.
So the next time you hear of a dubious case where folks are saying "but they PLED GUILTY" as irrefutable evidence of guilt, keep in mind this person may very well have accepted a plea bargain to avoid a heavy handed judge feeling scorned by a rejection of a plea bargain by a lowly defendant who in the judge’s mind is almost certainly guilty.
And the next time you see someone found guilty by a judge, bear in mind there a good chance that person rejected a plea bargain and part of the judge’s finding of guilt has more to do with feeling outraged that a plea bargain was rejected than anything rooted in truth.
Plea bargains are a way for the state to save itself the expense of a trial but the way it works out is to compel people to accept a lighter punishment via plea deal than they might get at trial even if they are innocent because there is little that pisses of the incarceration industrial complex more than being innocent.
Judges (generally) can’t just summarily pronounce you guilty, but they can let the prosecution get away with anything it wants, prohibit you from presenting evidence on your own behalf, and editorialize on the facts of the case to the jury.
The whole system is engineered to lock up as many people as possible and it makes a mind boggling amount of money doing it while also using various methods to discourage targeted civilians from participating in society.
Hard to take you seriously when you seemingly aren’t aware of judge-alone trials. I don’t think you have a clue what you’re taking about. Also, judges in jury trials still play a huge influence on the jury’s decisionmaking. It’s common for POC in redneck areas to opt for judge alone trials instead of dealing with a jury of folks who are far from their peers.
Pleas bargains in theory work as you described. In reality, they’re pushed by prosecutors with the "we know you can’t afford a trial and/or are too scared to face a harsh sentence" addendum.
Odds are they’re just going to deny them or the wait for a hearing to see if they meet asylum status will be so long they’ll eventually give up.
If the US really wants to hault illegal immigration (it doesn’t) it would be a better idea to help fix the issues that makes them want to come in the first place. Many of which are/were directly caused by the US. Or making receiving a temp work visa easier for migrants
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I’m morbidly curious about how they were hurt from the fall. The article implies they fell out of the house, which I guess makes sense, because if they were still inside, it would have provided a soft landing.
The article doesn’t imply anything, it directly tells you that the bounce house was blown 15-20 feet in the air by a gust of wind, and children fell out at approximately that height before it landed on the playing field. Maybe finish reading the article, or at least click the link they provided to the press release if it wasn’t clear enough for you: www.charlescountymd.gov/Home/Components/…/400
On August 2 at 9:21 p.m., Charles County 9-1-1 Public Safety Communications received a call from the Regency Furniture Stadium reporting that a moon bounce house became airborne due to a wind gust, while children were inside it. At the time, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs baseball team was playing a game, and the moon bounce was carried approximately 15 to 20 feet up in the air, causing children to fall before it landed on the playing field.
Sorry if this is a little terse, but every single thread on this site has someone saying “I read the article and I still don’t know what happened”, only for me to read the same article and conclude that the person commenting only read the headline. Which is exactly what I would expect from some dumb person reading the headline “1 child killed after wind gust sends bounce house airborne at baseball game” and not understanding if the child fell out or not because it wasn’t in the headline.
They would have to drive the anchors deep into the ground to have any effect. The types of anchors I’ve seen on these things are little more than tent stakes to keep it stationary.
I think these need to be strapped to concrete barrels to be safe. Or banned if there is any wind over some limit.
We used to have our trampoline secured with the corkscrew type anchors. I wonder if those are strong enough. I know our trampoline never budged with those.
Good luck with the liability lawsuit when a child drowns in your pool and you don’t have a locked fence between the public road and the pool. They will take everything you own in that lawsuit, because you didn’t take necessary safety measures to protect children.
The same should apply to a bounce house, not anchored properly, launching a child to a violent death.
Set up the law so that the responsible parties that failed can be sued into bankruptcy, or perhaps even jailed for public endangerment or manslaughter due to their negligence.
None of this “nothing we could do” BS. Bounce Houses shouldn’t blow away except in the most extreme conditions, and it should be obvious under those conditions not to use a bounce house.
One child almost every year is a staggeringly low incidence rate. If that’s enough to get banned then children should also not be allowed near pet dogs, the beach, family members, heavy furniture, inside cars, or outside.
Funny, because we recall products that can kill children all the time, even when there are low death counts, because any lethal scenario that is possible with a child’s toy or child-focused product must be accounted for.
At a minimum, the law must require that these be anchored securely enough not to be blow away. Put it on the companies that rent these out and set them up to do so safely, instead of making any amount of dead children an acceptable cost.
If this happens with any regularity at all, regardless of how rare, there’s no excuse for letting it happen again.
I’m fine with requiring them to be anchored, and you’re right that safety laws are pretty strict for toys, but we can’t mandate literally-zero-risk-of-harm. “Rare” and “regular” are terms I generally think of as opposed and there’s always going to be some cold calculation of “acceptable risk” on a personal and a societal scale.
Yes, we must not sacrifice precious bounce houses just because one kid every so often dies /s
Just like when Kansas had that boy get decapitated by a water slide net due to their lack of regulations - why change safety regulations because 1 kid died?
And compare how ubiquitous bounce houses are versus dogs or others things. Because there aren’t a ton of these, it’s easier to regulate.
If the design is inherently unsafe and regular use can result in injury, like the Verrückt water slide, then yes regulation and inspection is necessary. If the product is intended for children too young to understand basic safety precautions then strict design rules are important because we can’t trust companies to be ethical on their own. But if the object in question poses an obvious minor-to-moderate risk, things like trampolines or skateboards or tire swings, it can be reasonably expected that the object not break from normal use but supervision and safety precautions are the responsibility of the consumer.
There’s lots of room for argument about where the lines of acceptable risk are drawn. Personally I’m in favor of helmet and floatation-vest laws for children (and people accompanying children). I think bicycles are an acceptably risky thing for children to ride, but obviously tragic accidents do occur.
It’s hard to find data pertaining to bounce houses specifically as there is no official governing body tracking them. It gets lumped into sports or recreation and without usage stats it’s impossible to determine injury rate. They might not even be as dangerous as traditional playground structures.
I do actually think the design of bounce houses themselves is indeed what makes them dangerous. They are lightweight and filled with air by design, to be portable. They then can catch wind underneath them, again due to their design and how they are used with kids jumping on them, which makes them airborne. It is THIS specific situation that I take issue with and think they should be banned. Normal injuries from kids jumping into each other are acceptable imo, not a big deal. Even kids falling from a set height with most traditional playground equipment is acceptable risk as long as the structure itself is firmly in the ground as it is designed to be.
However, the design itself of bounce houses is the problem. They very thing that makes them bounce houses, is what makes them unacceptably dangerous imo.
Airborn events are dramatic and awful but rare and preventable, and I think gut reaction legislation is bad practice. I would like to see widespread adoption of laws for securing and operating these things but I don’t think they meet “ban outright” danger. Backyard pools are way deadlier and I don’t even think those should go away.
They aren’t rare according to the article you linked:
Although cases of lofted bounce houses get the most media attention, Knox said that just as many injuries are associated with simply jumping inside inflatables.
So for every injury jumping inside, there is one related to a lofted bounce house. A 1:1 ratio. That’s not that rare.
Knox spoke on WDUN’s Newsroom and said even a slight breeze in favorable weather conditions could be strong enough to topple a bounce house.
Honestly what you posted confirms what I have been writing.
I recently saw one which had foot-long stakes driven at an angle. I wonder if that would be secure enough. I didn’t consider wind as a major threat at the time.
It also had a big pocket on the front that said in big letters that it just always contain the manual — empty, obviously.
They often have mesh (not bouncy) sides, and even landing from 20’ on your neck on the inflated surface seems like it could be deadly. How awful.
The only way to be wrong about everything is to know what the right thing is and deliberately choose the wrong thing. So even Trump will be right occasionally.
They literally have built their entire careers on baseless claims that even their followers know are BS, they just chose to believe because they just want to echo their hatred. All of their shit is baseless and they scream it from the rooftops until it sticks. It’s just a shit post in a different form. Their entire campaign is a baseless shitpost.
So fuck it, JD Vance fucks couches and it’s fucking WIERD. Let it destroy him. Finally we are fighting fire with fire.
I hope the Democrats win, but I have to point out that someone being discredited by rumors or misinformation is not suddenly ok just because it’s your side that benefits from it
They lie all the time. They lie all day. I’m tired of taking the high road. I will lie about them and laugh about it. The couch thing is hilarious and untrue. The dolphin porn search is hilarious and real.
someone being discredited by rumors or misinformation is not suddenly ok just because it’s your side that benefits from it
I agree, but this rumor is so absurd that anyone who actually believes it is a fucking moron. It’s a meme joke that should be no more effective than “let’s go Brandon”. If it’s actually costing him support then he’s relying on absolute idiots to support him.
Why is it on Harris to attend a debate she didn’t agree to, and not on Trump to attend the debate he did agree to?
He RSVP’d to the ABC debate, and now he’s chickening out and trying to hide behind his propagandist friends to avoid engaging in an actual debate.
It only looks bad for Harris if you consider Trump someone with integrity, Fox News an honest platform, or ignore how many debates Trump has backed out of in the past purely out of cowardice.
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