> The attorneys for the county argued that the six should get no more than three hundred thousand dollars each in damages, and suggested that it was Winslow’s fault that he had been repeatedly raped while he was serving his sentence. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should be abused like that in prison,” one of the attorneys said. “But you saw him testify here. You saw his video. Mr. Winslow is effeminate in nature.”
I can understand that it's his job to downplay the damages but this is despicable.
That is beyond downplaying damages. That is literally "he deserved it because he is not man enough". This being used as a serious argument is just wow-level of highly wrong.
Attorneys who represent states often make perverse and reprehensible arguments to mitigate the state's liability.
I don't way to go too far afield but I would recommend the Paradise Lost documentaries. In the third one, the lawyer for the state of Arkansas argued that maintaining a conviction was more important than determining actual guilt.
For good or ill, that's actually a pretty widely accepted legal principle in the American justice system.
Jury trials are used to determine guilt or innocence, and judges are extremely hesitant to second guess a jury decision under any circumstances. Appeals aren't for relitigating guilt, they are for ensuring that the original trial was conducted fairly and properly. Furthermore, there's a strong bias in all circumstances against reopening closed legal matters. In general, the US court system prioritizes consistency and finality above correctness.
On paper at least, the proper legal remedy for someone who was convicted, who does not argue that their trial was conducted properly, and who nevertheless maintains their innocence is a pardon or commutation from the governor.
This undeniably sucks, but the alternative is to have the court system essentially DDoSed by felons demanding frivolous retrials.
There was witness tampering by the police and jury misconduct. Either of those should have been enough to generate a new trial on procedural grounds.
I do not know if you're familiar with the case in those documentaries but more than a decade after their conviction, new material was discovered and a DNA test linked a new and different suspect to the crime and under the Arkansas DNA statute, the convicted men should have received a hearing on the matter.
The state's attorney argued that the legislative intent of the statute was only to use DNA evidence to prove the guilt of people who had already been found guilty at trial and that no new evidence should be admitted to the hearing.
The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants.
To a much, much lesser extent than this story (thankfully), I have a very distinct memory from my childhood of going to a live spaceship launch that to this day feels so vivid and real, but I have never been anywhere near such an event.
I remember even getting in "trouble" in school for telling my class that I had gone to see a spaceship's launch at show 'n tell. My teacher tried to correct me by saying I had seen it on TV or something, but I was convinced I had been there in person.
It's funny how over time, though, it blends in well with other childhood memories, it probably has compounded on itself enough times that my brain just stores it with normal memories. I guess I just have enough rationale now to understand that memories aren't always exact replications of events.
This American Life had an interview with a man who remembers his wife waving at Jackie Onassis, but his wife insists he was not actually there. He still "remembers" the encounter clearly, but accepts that it couldn't have happened. Here's an amusing animated version of the story:
Another interesting anecdote: Those who recover memories of alien abduction will have positive or negative experiences depending heavily on which 'therapist' they visit: The memories probably get created (or fleshed out based on unrelated vague impressions) during the sessions.
> How should a town atone for its negligence? The jury determined that Gage County, along with Price and Searcey, owed the Beatrice Six, as they have come to be known, more than thirty million dollars, four times the county’s annual tax revenue.
The most remarkable part of this is that there might actually be negative consequences for the mishandling of this for the parties responsible.
The article really made me feel for Joseph White. Poor guy, out of a sudden he gets accused of a crime he never committed. That's pretty bad in itself, especially when fighting with inhuman US judicial system. And then the prosecutors find 5 other 'accomplices' who remember him committing a crime and then testify against him! It says a lot that he was the only one who persevered and continued to fight through this Kafkaesque horror ultimately proving his innocence.
Exactly this. The US is a remarkable country, but how can they suffer such unjust and downright pernicious justice and health systems? That puzzles me.
The American dream, the idea that anyone can make it in America if they just work hard enough, may be behind this.
As some have pointed out, the American dream is a type of 'just world hypothesis': that people get what they deserve.[1]
This belief sometimes cuts both ways. If people are poor, it's their fault, if people are sick, it's their fault.
I think it is not despite being a remarkable country, but precisely because of America's exceptional growth and prosperity that this belief persists.
Even though the nearly unlimited land, cheap (or even free) labour and geographical isolation that fueled this mythical prosperity are not the case today, I think many Americans still hold on to this belief, and that it colour's their attitudes to people who face structural disadvantages.
It isn't like most of us sit around enjoying it. It has grown and changed over the decades, even centuries. To understand America and the large systems we have you have to start at the Civil War and work your way forward. The years history complicate in subtle ways few appreciate.
The balance of the federal government and the states, and the three branches of our government operate and interact in complex ways. Though we are definitely one country, and you can generally rely on things to be consistent from one state to the next, they are their own legal entities and things that you can do in one state can land you in prison in another.
Factor on the modern age of media and the gravity of the interests that want to keep things certain ways and it gets easier to see why it is so hard to shift our society as a whole -- it truly is quite diverse, even if predominantly white.
I can appreciate the complexity of those systems. Moreover all countries have their issues...
But you seem such an innovative and industrious people! Therefore seeing how your justice, health and even education systems are deeply dysfunctional -- to say the least -- and possibly impossible to fix, is mind boggling.
There are people in power who benefit from the population being, on the large, tied to their (as-large-as-possible) employer and home at night afraid of crime.
I spent quite a bit of time in Beatrice in the '90s and none of this surprises me. I can still picture the sign when entering the town "Home of ViseGrips". There were a lot of bizarre things that happened there though.
I remember early primary school experience where I wanted to say to a girl I liked her. For several years when I was around 15 I remembered actually doing it and getting "friendzoned", until I found a diary from around 10 where I described that I wanted to do it, but never actually did.
It made me realize how remembering imagining doing something is very difficult to distinguish from remembering actually doing something, if it's distant past and you only remember fragments without context.
EDIT: also reading stuff you wrote when you was 10 removes all illusions you had about your past genius.
I wonder what really going on inside the mind here
My sister tells a story-
when she was in college, a hypnotist came to her school to do a show, she was the one of the people called up on stage and hypnotized
anyway... she did what the hypnotist told her to do, but she's unsure of whether she was actually hypnotized, or whether it was merely the social pressure of being up on the stage, and playing the expected role
Clearly humans are susceptible to psychological manipulation or bullying
I'm not entirely sure it follows that that's how the neurons are actually firing inside the mind
Derren Brown - a stage hypnotist that is quite well known in the UK - actually specifically wrote in one of his books ("Tricks of the mind" at least includes a part on this) that he too is not sure whether or not his subjects are actually under his control, or even whether or not that is a question that makes sense, in as much as they do what he asks of them.
He makes the point that a lot of people "wants to help" and play along, and some people are easier to get to play along than others, and it is hard to decide where someone wanting to play along or being easy to convince crosses over the line into someone who is "put in a trance" and "compelled". Not least because the appearance of altered states/trance as well can be a result of someone "playing along".
Further, he makes the claim that what matters isn't the rituals, but making the subject believe. He recounts a story of someone who came to him when he was learning hypnosis. Brown believed he had hypnotised this person before, and when he did he would leave a "trigger" to make it easier to hypnotise the same person next time. He claims he simply snapped his fingers and went "sleep!" to the person in question, who then apparently immediately closed his eyes and appeared to go into trance, before Brown realised he'd never hypnotised him before: What mattered was that this person came to him thinking he would hypnotise him, and either this was actually enough to bring him into a "trance", or it was at least enough to make him believe he was going into a trance and act accordingly because it was what he believed would and should happen.
The entire chapter on hypnosis in that book is full of doubt and questions about whether or not he is actually causing something, or whether people are simply doing it to themselves. It's one of the things I like about him - he's a sceptic who is open that what he is doing is tricks, and that he doesn't even really know for sure exactly what goes on with some of what he does - just that it works in the sense of creating the show he wants.
I went to a talk on this a little while ago by a guy who claimed to have trained Derren Brown (how true that is... perhaps he was an early influence).
Anyway, this guy was also a stage hypnotist and he said he wasn't sure whether he believed there was such a thing as hypnosis either, in very similar terms. Some people just want to please, others are looking for license to act up in public. Of I tell you to go over there and kiss that woman n the cheek, you might do it, you might want to do it, and via the magic of hypnosis, you have ceded responsibility for the act to me.
But also that yes - if people are doing what is suggested to them, then what is the functional difference?
Out of curiosity, what college did your sister attend?
When I was a freshman, they brought in a hypnotist and I volunteered. I went through the motions and when he asked us to visualize ourselves in a situation, I went with it and played along. After a couple of minutes, I was sure that there was nothing special going on. I walked back to my seat and observed the rest of the show.
Ha - im my reply to a sibling comment to yours I mentioned a talk by a hypnotist. By way of a demo he had us to close our eyes, bow our heads, clasp our hands together and imagine they were glued in place, telling us there were probably one or two of us who would be unable to move them after a couple of minutes of listening to his voice. Sure enough there were. Did nothing for me.
He also said it was impossible to tell whether those who said this were telling the truth, just wanted to please him, or wanted to act up or get attention.
Perhaps those in your group who stayed were more inclined to just go along with it.
OK. My experience was at Lock Haven University but I was thinking that it would be cool if by random happenstance, I was reading a story about an event I had attended.
Lawrence Wright published a book titled Remembering Satan which describes the case of Republican Party Chairman Paul Ingram and his confession of satanic ritual abuse of his children, which was later suggested to be a case of false/suggested memory:
"Psychologist Richard Ofshe claimed that Ingram, because of his long-standing and routine experiences in his church, was inadvertently hypnotized by authority figures who conducted his interrogation, although no mental health professionals were present, and that the confessions were the result of false memories being implanted with suggestion."
I once found this wiki, complete with OCRs of multiple books on the subject, devoted to recovering from satanic rituals, brainwashing, mind control, programmed false identities, etc.
Not sure what's more scary: that this may be really happening, that people may be capable of imagining and really believing it, that people may be not believing it but still writing about it.
She longed to be the kind of person who was confident enough in her own sense of goodness that she would know definitively that she could never commit murder.
> The attorneys for the county argued that the six should get no more than three hundred thousand dollars each in damages, and suggested that it was Winslow’s fault that he had been repeatedly raped while he was serving his sentence. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should be abused like that in prison,” one of the attorneys said. “But you saw him testify here. You saw his video. Mr. Winslow is effeminate in nature.”
I can understand that it's his job to downplay the damages but this is despicable.