Former Student Gets Year In Prison For College President Election Fraud 274
Gunkerty Jeb writes, quoting Threatpost: "A former Cal State San Marcos student was sentenced to a year in prison this week for election tampering by using keystroke loggers to grab student credentials and then vote for himself. Matthew Weaver, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif., stole almost 750 students' identities to try and become president of the San Diego County college's student government. His plan went awry when the school's computer technicians noticed an anomaly in activity and caught Weaver with keystroke loggers as he sat in front of the suspicious computer."
This guy has got a bright future ahead of him (Score:5, Funny)
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in national politics. But who will get him, the Dems or the Republicans?
Follow the money -- as in: who is the highest bidder?
Re:This guy has got a bright future ahead of him (Score:5, Insightful)
Diebold.
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Dems are neither intelligent nor ballsy enough for this sort of thing.
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The Dems. Duh
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that he rigged an election, it's that he stole and impersonated many students identities.
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and did it like a raving N00b. Even hackers want this idiot to go to jail
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter where he did this, he stole people's credentials (illegally), and used it to access system (illegally).
CFAA [wikipedia.org] is a federal statute, so he broke federal law -- and therefore gets federal prison.
I have no sympathy for him. None at all.
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I have no sympathy for him. None at all.
My sentiments exactly, I have no sympathy for any crooked politician. Corruption in politics should carry a 50 year sentence and the corrupting influence 100 years.
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I only have crappy teen dramas to go by but isn't being college president some kind of big career boosting deal as well? Something you can put on your CV. It sounds like there may have been financial gain too.
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However, keep in mind that depending on the school, significant amounts of money flow through the office. When I was in college we had a scandal where the president and vp embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from student government.
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This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....
I can see them being punished by the school, but WTF...Federal Prison?!?!?
Well you would have a point if all he did was rig a school election by distributing flyers telling people the election date has been changed or something of that nature.
However you seem to have missed the part of TFS that says he put keyloggers on other people's computers and stole their id/password. That's illegal and a jail-able offense. Or do you believe somebody putting a keylogger trojan on your computer should be legal?
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do you believe somebody putting a keylogger trojan on your computer should be legal?
Just because someone thinks the punishment is excessive, doesn't mean they think that the crime should be legal.
Likewise, just because someone thinks the punishment was excessive in one scenario, doesn't mean they'd think it excessive in other scenarios. You wouldn't punish someone for stealing a snickers bar as harshly as you would if they'd stolen an iPad, would you?
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I think anything you try to do to my computer via the internet should be legal. It is my responsibility to ensure that the software on my computer is secure.
I think breaking into my house and tampering with my computer should be illegal.
Then why would it be illegal to break into your house? Shouldn't it be your responsibility to make sure that your locks, doors, windows, and walls are all impervious to any kind of attack?
My bad. (Score:3)
Okay, it seems I really did misread the intent behind your words, and I apologize for that and for unfairly maligning your position.
Every single dollar or man hour of effort spent trying to catch a hacker, is infinitely better spent improving security to make hacking more difficult. ...
Legislators, law enforcement, lawyers and courts are expensive. Rather than putting a few hackers in jail, we could use that money to research security holes and fix them for billions of people.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, but I can't quite get up on my high horse about that one. :-)
I don't think the legal costs of sending hackers to jail is more expensive than the costs of subsidizing security, nor do I think the government should be in the business of subsidizing the costs of fixing sloppy programming. Writing solid, secure code is hard and expensive.
Read the full article. This is NOT harmless. (Score:5, Informative)
Wow...just wow.
I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!
[...]
This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....
Read the full article (especially the utsandiego.com link). He committed wire fraud -- the winner of the presidential election gets a $8000 stipend, and the vice-president gets $7000. He planned ahead (even putting together a PowerPoint presentation the year before for his frat brothers to run for the #2 slot) to "win" these prizes. Fraud over wire for financial gain is a serious federal crime with a maximum of 20 years in prison.
He also attempted to cover up his crime once caught *red-handed* at the machine he was entering the votes from in a computer lab by later creating Facebook profiles in other real people's names and generating a lot of fake comments intended to make it look like those people had conspired to frame him, and he sent it to local media outlets. It was stupid in way that shows how much smarter he thinks he is than the people around him.
This kid is a budding con artist. He was acting for financial motive to defraud the school, and he was willing to trash the lives of others to try to get out of paying the penalty for something he did. This kid has displayed blatant, selfish disregard for others and a willingness to hurt or exploit them for profit.
This isn't a harmless prank. These are the actions of a malicious liar with an inflated sense of his own capabilities who doesn't seem to grasp the idea that consequences should apply to him for his actions. They should have thrown the book at him. Imagine the harm he could have done if he'd waited a few more years to "ripen" as a criminal and landed himself in management somewhere.
Re:Read the full article. This is NOT harmless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Read the full article. This is NOT harmless. (Score:2)
+1. There are many cases where the penalties in the US are getting out of hand. This is not one of those cases.
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I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!
Typically student presidents are paid a salary from the student union (it's usually a role for people once they've graduated). This isn't just some 'student election', it's an attempt to defraud the university students of $20,000+. Jail is the right punishment for this crime.
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Election tempering is one of the vilest crime one can commit.
Stealing credentials and installing keyloggers is illegal, also.
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Wow...just wow.
I can understand him getting kicked out of school, but freaking federal prison for a year for just messing with a STUDENT school election?!?!
Geez, we're getting out of hand here...I've been hearing of small school children getting kicked out of school and having the cops called just for playing in the school play ground using their hands and fingers as 'guns' yelling bang bang at each other.
This is a freaking school election...not a federal / city/state election..it is college, it means NOTHING....
I can see them being punished by the school, but WTF...Federal Prison?!?!?
You are one gynormous ignoramus of the law. He stole people's credentials and broke into a system. These two are federal felonies. Do you live in some alternate universe version of the US where federal law doesn't include computer fraud and identity theft? Or are you simply being obtuse, seeking an opportunity to cry about the abuse of powah!!!!?
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He didn't go to jail because somebody gives a damn about the class president, he went to jail because he compromized hundreds of access credentials and used them to gain unauthorized access to systems(and, unless the school's IT office is fairly conservative, the odds are increasingly good that you can hardly touch their system without crossing state lines).
His pitiful attempts at hiding probably didn't endear him to anybody, either.
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Serious...? Uh, this is a student election. He got this sentence because he used "hacker" tactics. .
RTFA. He got sentenced for identity theft and computer fraud. Either you think this guy did not commit identity theft and computer fraud, or you think these two acts should not be punishable by federal law, or you simply do not know WTF is going on.
Job Offer (Score:5, Funny)
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Unlikely, they want the ones who don't get cought
Re:Job Offer (Score:5, Funny)
The ones that cough are diseased.
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I'm sure that the ones that get caught do feel dis-ease.
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They want the ones with no sense of ethics or morality.
Re:Job Offer (Score:5, Insightful)
They want the ones with no sense of ethics or morality.
Actually, they probably want ones with a strong sense of ethics that can be bent in a direction of their choosing. You don't get nearly as hard work out of someone ethically unmoored as you do out of someone who is acting for a "greater good," and you get even more work out of someone who doesn't even see the lesser evil. Worse for the former, you may get junk data since they don't care enough.
No, no greater evil is committed than by those who believe they are doing a great good. There are plenty of people in this country that passionately believe the principle that only those who do wrong have something to hide and that privacy is nothing but a shield for criminals. That's a form of strong ethics, though it's one I'd disagree with.
Hire those people, and you're golden.
Re:Job Offer (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know why, he was sloppy. Well, I guess they could train him in the details but his heart was in the right place.
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why would the NSA want the ones stupid enough to be caught?
Yeah, they can just hire them as contractors.
Re: Job Offer (Score:2)
Re:Job Offer (Score:4, Funny)
yeah he should of set up a virtual server and had the key logger report to it then ssh'ed into it from a out of country proxy to get the credentials then cheat. oh look three black suv's pulled up and i hear a helicopter got to go.
Wow! (Score:2)
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I'd love to see all the carefully organized evidence you have of professional political operatives engaging in vote fixing. Oh right, this is just a cynicism race-to-the-bottom, driven by paranoid conspiracy theories.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
How about the mayor in Florida that lost voting machines that were later shown to contain many more votes for the Ds than those for R. The mayor is a stanch R supporter, and when questioned how the fuck did these voting machines get lost, she replied "it happens, voting is a complex business". Yup, so complex, they were deliberately disconnected, moved to another room, and covered in a pile of boxes to disguise they were there.
That's just one example of the Bush / Fox / FL stolen election.
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or in washington two gubernatorial elections ago where the judge said yup there was evidence of cheating and dismissed the case anyway, did i mention the judge was former classmates with the "winner"
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, I remember Franken vs. Coleman. Probably better than you do.
On election night, the preliminary returns showed a very slight lead for Coleman, and the collated returns somewhat later showed an even slighter lead. As it happens, differences of a thousand votes or so are common from election-night return, and Coleman's lead was a lot smaller than that.
Minnesota law mandates a recount when the margin of victory is that small, and that is done by going to the actual paper ballots. The tabulation machines are good but not perfect. Once that count was done, Franken had a slight lead. This was perfectly normal variation. The fact is that the election was so close that the state hadn't actually established a preference in any statistically valid manner, so from a statistical point of view they were equal.
That being done, the Coleman campaign kept pushing for more iffy ballots to be counted, since they were behind. The Franken campaign never had reason to do so. Each batch of increasingly iffier ballots pushed Franken's lead a teeny bit higher. It would appear that, in that election, Democrats were more likely to come up with slightly unclear ballots than Republicans. The system for absentee ballots turned out to have a few issues (the instructions that went with them were incomplete), and this was remedied for the next election. (FWIW, I don't think Mom's ballot was counted.)
The details were overseen by a panel of three judges, who examined the questionable ballots. It isn't necessarily easy to discern voter intent unambiguously, and it's arguable whether an individual ballot is unambiguous or not (illogical though that seems). Finally, the counting was over, and the state Supreme Court spent about a month reviewing the process. At the end, they concluded it was as fair as it was going to get, and Franken won.
Of the eight judges and justices involved, four were nominated by Republicans, two by Democrats, and two by Jesse Ventura when he served a term as Governor as an independent. The final certification was signed by the Republican governor. If there was partisan influence, it wasn't from the Democrats.
There were some questions left about ballots. One precinct had apparently lost the ballots from one machine, and in one precinct there were doubts about whether spoiled ballots were properly disposed of (tearing them in half works). Franken's final lead was significantly larger than any questions about them.
Overall, it looked like a very careful nonpartisan recount. If somebody has actual evidence against that, I'd like to see it.
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Sadly, I have found that both of those tend to be surprisingly accurate in the long run.
Assuming the worst of politicians (and, really, everyone else) proves right more than by simple chance. Assuming you can trust them just leads to more problems than assuming you can't and keeping a close eye on them.
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The problem is that often, cynicism is not about having a close eye on them, but taking that sheep stance of "yeah, everybody does it, meh". And the, just because nobody cares, indeed, everybody starts doing it.
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http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]
simple fix (Score:2)
all he needed to do was use a keystroke logger to work his keystroke logger.
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all he needed to do was use a keystroke logger to work his keystroke logger.
I see you made a typo, then corrected it. Well done. (c:
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Yo dawg, I heard you like keystroke loggers ... ;-)
Settings examples (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Settings examples (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone steals my credentials, I'd expect that kind of punishment. I don't think he's being made an example, he's actually getting off light.
There's a lot of other things that he could potentially do, or has exposed those students to by capturing their passwords. It's not that he was caught trying to rig an election, it's that he was impersonating other individuals, stealing their identities.
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But he may have had political ambitions too. Nothing like a formal charge of election fraud to end a political career. Agreed that what a conviction does to a persons future is far too excessive - in fact, it should theoretically have zero effect since the jail term is allegedly the punishment.
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Honestly, do you want this person to "succeed" (as a politician)?
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Pretty much nothing in the publically available information on this guy suggests that he was anything close to a 'decent person'...
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He's small time, he cheated, he got caught and made an example of. If only we could have this sort of efficiency and insight into real politicians.
I hope you're joking. This is simply publicity that will jump start his public political career. There is no such thing as bad press anymore. Morals were thrown out the window a couple of decades ago.
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He's small time, he cheated, he got caught and made an example of. If only we could have this sort of efficiency and insight into real politicians.
A year in jail is not being made an example from. This person set out to cheat the school, then installed keyloggers to get access to people login info.
They want to set an example? Give him 5 years in jail.
What I see is a slap on the wrist for something that is serious.
True Story (Score:5, Interesting)
I did something similar at "Canada's Premiere Undergraduate Experience"
Long story short, one of the people running for Student Union President won my House election the year before. He did so by getting the competition kicked out on technicalities. No, I wasn't running, and No, I wasn't friends with anyone who did. Since every day a poster is up is a "violation" they racked up fast. This guy was going out with the person who's job it is to notify people of potential violations, and they were never warned.
Fast forward two years, and I logged in as every. single. student. from a MacDonalds down the road. Didn't actually vote, just logged in, logged right back out. Then repeated 8k times. Once a student logged in, they had an hour to finish. Since everyone's hour was up at 9AM, almost no one voted.
Somehow, there was still a landslide win. Not only did he have 90% of the votes, he had more votes than there were students in the entire university.
The whole election should have been thrown out. People complained on official forums, topics were deleted as fast as they went up.
It pays to play dirty apparently.
Re:True Story (Score:4, Interesting)
I did something similar at "Canada's Premiere Undergraduate Experience"
Long story short, one of the people running for Student Union President won my House election the year before. He did so by getting the competition kicked out on technicalities. No, I wasn't running, and No, I wasn't friends with anyone who did. Since every day a poster is up is a "violation" they racked up fast. This guy was going out with the person who's job it is to notify people of potential violations, and they were never warned.
Fast forward two years, and I logged in as every. single. student. from a MacDonalds down the road. Didn't actually vote, just logged in, logged right back out. Then repeated 8k times. Once a student logged in, they had an hour to finish. Since everyone's hour was up at 9AM, almost no one voted.
Somehow, there was still a landslide win. Not only did he have 90% of the votes, he had more votes than there were students in the entire university.
The whole election should have been thrown out. People complained on official forums, topics were deleted as fast as they went up.
It pays to play dirty apparently.
Have to be careful when playing dirty. In my elementary school was a fellow running for class president and he was well liked and popular. One of his competitors for the honor (as there really wasn't much to the office) found he had been born outside the US (he was an Aussie by birth) and this revelation -- why it was even considered by the faculty baffled me -- meant the popular student was ineligible. It really broke his heart and seemed incredibly unfair, particularly to classmates. Keep in mind most of us were 12 or younger, but we already had a pretty well developed sense of what is fair and how you deal with weasels who succeed in removing competition by devious means, the weasel was soundly defeated in the vote. So the lesson here isn't that you cannot have your competitor diminished by technicalities or smearing, but you should always have a surrogate do it on the side so you don't get caught for the 'Swiftboating'.
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No..it pays to not get caught.
Which, in American politics, usually translates to "pin it on some low-level minion and let them take the fall"
Mixed feelings (Score:3, Interesting)
On the one hand, fraud is bad. On the other, student government is usually a joke that deserves to be pranked. At the college level it is, AFAIK, not much better than HS. Our Class President gave a friggin' 15 minute speech at commencement. Holy Crap! That was the only real debacle at graduation. I'll never forget it. That's all I remember about the class president.
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)
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On the one hand, fraud is bad. On the other, student government is usually a joke that deserves to be pranked. At the college level it is, AFAIK, not much better than HS. Our Class President gave a friggin' 15 minute speech at commencement. Holy Crap! That was the only real debacle at graduation. I'll never forget it. That's all I remember about the class president.
Student government is seldom more than a popularity contest.
It can be good training (relatively speaking and tongue firmly in cheek) for figuring out social engineering skills - what are the hot buttons for people, what people are likely to remember of your (ha) promises after you've been elected and practice in keeping skeletons from accumulating in your closet.
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On the one hand, fraud is bad. On the other, student government is usually a joke that deserves to be pranked.
Yeah but "prank" and "stealing credentials from 750 people and then using their identities without consent" don't really go hand in hand. Bad judgement on an epic scale..
...you will absorb the culture (Score:2)
Choose wisely where you go to school
Not exactly the best and brightest... (Score:2)
Aside from his 15 minutes of fame, I don't really see how the reward justified the risks he took, although encore proved a significant lack of common sense.
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I just read some of these. I don't know about the rest, but the Roger Hedgecock article states that the bailiff gave the jury alcohol and pushed for a conviction. After much wrangling and seeming judicial misconduct (judge stating he thought Hedgecock was guilty, and therefore would not release interview transcripts to the defense) the State Supreme Court ruled in Hedgecock's favor. He then plead to a misdemeanor, with *no* retrial.
Thanks for the links, though. Interesting reading.
Lesson Learned (Score:2)
You only go to jail for election fraud when the election officials do not get paid by the elected office of which you have just stolen.
If only (Score:5, Insightful)
If only they would take the real elections half as seriously, maybe then we'd regain a (small) measure of confidence in the election process.
Prison (Score:5, Interesting)
He's probably going to prison for accessing the students accounts, not for the election fraud itself.
Re:Prison (Score:5, Funny)
He's probably going to prison for accessing the students accounts, not for the election fraud itself.
That's why you don't do this, kids. You start with logging other people's strokes and you end up stroking other people's logs.
Intellgence without wisdom. (Score:2)
What a waste.
Comment removed (Score:3)
The Mistake he made... (Score:2)
Was doing it himself. No Politician today woudl do that, they woulrd hire someone else to do it and pay them under the table with tax payer money.
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I think this kid's ready for the big time! Future statesman, you heard about him first on Slashdot!
I'm not sure mentioned on slashdot is any kind of endorsement. You don't see Wil Wheaton in the DC, do you?
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What's wrong with Hwil Hweaton?
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I think this kid's ready for the big time! Future statesman, you heard about him first on Slashdot!
I'm not sure mentioned on slashdot is any kind of endorsement. You don't see Wil Wheaton in the DC, do you?
Nope. Because Wil Wheaton :
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No he doesn't. He lied to Sheldon to win the Magic competition then manipulated Penny into leaving Leonard then used his stardom(?) to jump the line in front of everyone else who was waiting for the re-release of the movie.
Sorry, that's just soulless on many levels and borders on sociopathic.
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DC is not a freeway, therefore you cannot call it "the DC".
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Then the original should say "the D.C."
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If you took out the word "Republican" you probably would have gotten +5 Funny. But since you decided to make it partisan, it just looks sad because you think that only Republicans cheat.
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Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
He chose not to fight the charges. He was not deprived of his right to a trial. He could of plead not guilty. How about maybe he felt bad about what he did and actually plead guilty because he is in fact guilty. Maybe he decided to actually take personal responsibility for his actions and acknowledge in a court of law that what he did was wrong. Since your not his lawyer all you can do is speculate on his reasons for pleading guilty.
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Or, you're actually guilty and you know the prosecution has enough evidence to prove it. Nah, that never happens, people only lose in court because the defense messed up or the jury doesn't like your suit.
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Yes, a year in prison is fair given the nature of his crime given that he pleaded guilty.
Yet I wouldn't agree with that being a fair sentence if he decided to "exercise his rights". Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled, such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit, you are being charged under the wrong law, or when you're planning to challenge the constitutionality of a law. Exercising your rights because you hope to get off for a crime that
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Exercising your rights is appropriate when your rights are being trampled
Such as being denied a jury trial.
such as when you're being prosecuted for a crime that you didn't commit
You don't know, in a legal sense, whether someone is being prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit until they have been found guilty by a jury of their peers. If you can deny someone of a jury trial because you "know" they are guilty, what's the point of a jury trial at all?
Having a jury decide is not always a good thing (Score:2)
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Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts?
That's exactly why plea bargains must be abolished. Because no sane person can exercise their right to a trial anymore.
He deserved a longer sentence. (Score:3)
Yet another American deprived of his right to a trial. No doubt they would have tried to send him to prison for a decade or more if he decided to exercise his rights.
A year in prison is probably a fair outcome if the story is as described. But he deserves to have a jury decide that, and not face absurd amounts of time in prison if he wants a jury trial.
There was an $8000 stipend for the winner. This wasn't just a simple resume builder. He committed fraud to attempt to win a monetary prize due to the fair winner. Something he'd planned out the year before with four of his fraternity brothers running for the vice-president slot and it's $7000 stipend. This was planned for monetary benefit. Hell, his attorney's statement that wasn't even planning on staying at the school is even more damning in that light.
Worse, after he was caught, he set up Facebook p
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You might be right. In either case, it's wrong to deprive him of his right to a trial. If he actually deserves a decade in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. If he actually deserves a year in prison, charge him with that and let a jury decide. That's how an actual justice system works. Twisting his arm until you get a confession is just barbarism.
Re:Plea bargaining (Score:5, Interesting)
Pleading guilty avoids certain un-pleasantries.
That's extortion. If someone were bullied by the government out of their right to criticize the government, would you say "Not criticizing the government avoids certain un-pleasantries"?
The whole point of having rights is that the government cannot make your life more unpleasant for exercising them. Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government.
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By that token, everything the government does is "Extortion". Taxes included. In other words, you're opposed to this form or extortion, but probably happy about others. Or are you an Anarchist?
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By that token, everything the government does is "Extortion". Taxes included.
Yes, everything the government does is extortion. The whole purpose of government is to apply force to encourage certain behaviors. The difference is that we have a constitution that limits what the government is allowed to extort us into. The right to a trial by jury is one of those limits.
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Why yes, yes I am an anarchist. Unless you think that all people who rule will rule well (and by extension, there will never be a bad ruler), then you too should be an anarchist.
Let's start with monarchy. Monarchy is a great system, if the monarch is fair, just, not prone to being petty, etc. But actually, you still have to deal with the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy needs to be good, and the individuals within it need to either be good, or be prevented from being bad by rules that are enforced.
But, what if
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"Getting extra charges tacked on for exercising your right to a trial is no more just than getting extra attention from the IRS for exercising your right to criticize the government."
Except for one little detail. One was optional, the other was not. IRS Scandal was not at the option of those being scandalized by the IRS, while this one was. He had a chance to go to trial, he chose against it.
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One was optional, the other was not. IRS Scandal was not at the option of those being scandalized by the IRS, while this one was. He had a chance to go to trial, he chose against it.
The tea party groups had a chance to avoid extra attention from the IRS, by forfeiting their right to free speech.
This fellow had a chance to avoid extra charges from the DOJ, by forfeiting his right to a trial.
The situations are exactly analogous.
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How is this informative?
He pleaded guilty
There was no trial, he plead guilty, probably part of a plea bargain. He wasn't deprived of anything. Pleading guilty avoids certain un-pleasantries.
Unpleasantries such as having the book thrown at him for daring to exercise his right to a trial by his peers.
Personally I think the douche got what he had coming, but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that plea-bargaining is anything other than what we all know it to be.
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Civilization is expensive. If it's not worth paying for a trial, it's not worth imprisoning someone. The cost of a jury trial should be incentive for the state to imprison as few people as possible.
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You know, if he had been some independent student who fucked with the results as a means of protest, I might agree with that.
But no - he was a candidate, and he rigged the election in his own favor. Thus, dude was not an activist making a point, he was an ego-maniacal douche-bag that wanted to secure power for himself and cheat his fellow students out of a free and fair election.
Fucker deserves to be punished.
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