#legal system if it was good

[sonic-channel]

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"Maryland Gov. Wes Moore issued a mass pardon of more than 175,000 marijuana convictions Monday morning [June 17, 2024], one of the nation’s most sweeping acts of clemency involving a drug now in widespread recreational use.

The pardons forgive low-level marijuana possession charges for an estimated 100,000 people in what the Democratic governor said is a step to heal decades of social and economic injustice that disproportionately harms Black and Brown people. Moore noted criminal records have been used to deny housing, employment and education, holding people and their families back long after their sentences have been served.

[Note: If you're wondering how 175,000 convictions were pardoned but only 100,000 people are benefiting, it's because there are often multiple convictions per person.]

A Sweeping Act

“We aren’t nibbling around the edges. We are taking actions that are intentional, that are sweeping and unapologetic,” Moore said at an Annapolis event interrupted three times by standing ovations. “Policymaking is powerful. And if you look at the past, you see how policies have been intentionally deployed to hold back entire communities.”

Moore called the scope of his pardons “the most far-reaching and aggressive” executive action among officials nationwide who have sought to unwind criminal justice inequities with the growing legalization of marijuana. Nine other states and multiple cities have pardoned hundreds of thousands of old marijuana convictions in recent years, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Legalized marijuana markets reap billions in revenue for state governments each year, and polls show public sentiment on the drug has also turned — with more people both embracing cannabis use and repudiating racial disparities exacerbated by the War on Drugs.

The pardons, timed to coincide with Wednesday’s Juneteenth holiday, a day that has come to symbolize the end of slavery in the United States, come from a rising star in the Democratic Party and the lone Black governor of a U.S. state whose ascent is built on the promise to “leave no one behind.”

The Pardons and Demographics

Derek Liggins, 57, will be among those pardoned Monday, more than 16 years after his last day in prison for possessing and dealing marijuana in the late 1990s. Despite working hard to build a new life after serving time, Liggins said he still loses out on job opportunities and potential income.

“You can’t hold people accountable for possession of marijuana when you’ve got a dispensary on almost every corner,” he said.

Nationwide, according to the ACLU, Black people were more than three times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. President Biden in 2022 issued a mass pardon of federal marijuana convictions — a reprieve for roughly 6,500 people — and urged governors to follow suit in states, where the vast majority of marijuana prosecutions take place.

Maryland’s pardon action rivals only Massachusetts, where the governor and an executive council together issued a blanket pardon in March expected to affect hundreds of thousands of people.

But Moore’s pardons appear to stand alone in the impact to communities of color in a state known for having one of the nation’s worst records for disproportionately incarcerating Black people for any crimes. More than 70 percent of the state’s male incarcerated population is Black, according to state data, more than double their proportion in society.

In announcing the pardons, he directly addressed how policies in Maryland and nationwide have systematically held back people of color — through incarceration and restricted access to jobs and housing...

Maryland, the most diverse state on the East Coast, has a dramatically higher concentration of Black people compared with other states that have issued broad pardons for marijuana: 33 percent of Maryland’s population is Black, while the next highest is Illinois, with 15 percent...

Reducing the state’s mass incarceration disparity has been a chief goal of Moore, Brown and Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, who are all the first Black people to hold their offices in the state. Brown and Dartigue have launched a prosecutor-defender partnership to study the “the entire continuum of the criminal system,” from stops with law enforcement to reentry, trying to detect all junctures where discretion or bias could influence how justice is applied, and ultimately reform it.

How It Will Work

Maryland officials said the pardons, which would also apply to people who are dead, will not result in releasing anyone from incarceration because none are imprisoned. Misdemeanor cannabis charges yield short sentences and prosecutions for misdemeanor criminal possession have stopped, as possessing small amounts of the drug is legal statewide.

Moore’s pardon action will automatically forgive every misdemeanor marijuana possession charge the Maryland judiciary could locate in the state’s electronic court records system, along with every misdemeanor paraphernalia charge tied to use or possession of marijuana. Maryland is the only state to pardon such paraphernalia charges, state officials said...

People who benefit from the mass pardon will see the charges marked in state court records within two weeks, and they will be eliminated from criminal background check databases within 10 months."

-via The Washington Post, June 17, 2024. Headings added by me.

[pynkhues]

There's something to the picture that all this season and the release of the first three seasons' scripts have painted of Logan and Caroline's divorce not as one of maternal abandonment, but one of maternal dislocation and suffocating abuse that's ruining me right now.

The way Caroline tried to take her children and flee in the dead of the night to Morocco, the way Logan took meetings with every worth-its-salt law firm in the city to cut off Caroline's access to them, wielding the legal system like an axe to an umbilical cord, the way Caroline's one recourse was to try and keep their position in the company, to keep them with something even if she gave it away later as they rejected her in adulthood. The way she stayed for their adolescence in New York even as Logan froze her out, the way she had to bargain for Christmas even in their adulthood, the way she sat in the pews with the rest of the women Logan loved and hurt and discarded while her children cried, with no tools or ability to comfort them, the way she sat as her son wrote her out of her own motherhood as he gave their father sole credit in creating them, stood opposite her daughter as she told her she wouldn't see it, i'm just gonna do it the family way like it was on Caroline and not their father, that she never got to see them.

Something about the way it feels like Logan trained them how to bark at her scent, to make sure she stayed away from the door.

[existennialmemes]

If you kill someone, they come and arrest you, and your subsequent trial is paid for by our taxes

If an insurance exec commits medical fraud by allowing an AI system to reject covered claims which results in the deaths of thousands, their families have to sue them at their own expense

[eleccy]

no but the way one of my favorite things about the krisnix dynamic is the way that apollo is such a blank slate at the beginning of aa4 and the way phoenix and kristoph are both trying to convince him to their respective “side” it’s so funny

like, they’re out here waging ideological warfare and kristoph is trying to steer apollo to follow his training and just be the calm, logical lawyer he trained him to be and phoenix is just like “but what if something something chaos” and it’s JUST enough to plant the seed of curiosity and doubt into apollo’s little mind and apollo’s like “ooooooh i just gotta know now sorry mr. gavin this is about the truth!!” and phoenix just gives kristoph that shit-eating grin like “haha kristoph you trained him for months maybe years all it took me was like five mins” and kristoph can’t fucking stand that shit. and of COURSE apollo is going to be curious, he has inborn perceive for god’s sake, and phoenix is the only one who knows that. even giving apollo a SHRED of an idea that there might be more to finding the truth of the case has apollo on the scent like a bloodhound and because of that, phoenix is able to play apollo against kristoph perfectly even when kristoph thinks he has full control of all of the pieces on the board (he doesn’t, phoenix has been eating the pieces while he wasn’t looking. metaphorically)

also why the fuck do two veteran lawyers care so much about what one rookie thinks. is it just the fact that apollo’s the only attorney in the room who has the power to do anything during 4-1 so they both have to play kingmaker in their game of chess to win, or are they just that petty that they have to “win” apollo as well

[sysig]

Let him dad her!! (Patreon)

[001139]

a story about a flight instructor who hallucinates his dead student

[fluentisonus]

marius having been a german translator in the 1830s makes him perfectly positioned to later be reading early marx & engels when you think about it

[sangfielle]

it's funny because being raised by lawyers gave me a brain that understood the law and how things Ought to work and i tended to act according to that in response to some of the transgressions against me, like i would bring them up to my family and be like "this is illegal in x ways and you need to stop" but it also was heavily impressed upon me that none of that shit mattered At All. my white family is lawyers and cops depending on whether theyve gone to college or not. i remember bringing up some legal issue in response to my mom threatening me once and her going "who exactly do you think is going to enforce that against me?". evil. deeply

[none-ofthisnonsense]

Angry that I can't witness the count in person. Let us SEE damn it

[frameconfessions]

The Pom-2 gifts chemistry levels for each of the hex syndicate members got datamined (it's on the wikia) so the anon talking about the protoframes models getting datamined might get their wish for SFM animation stuff made with them. 👀

.

[reasonsforhope]

"Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] definition-shifting court ruling means nearly 50 governments must now contend with a new era of climate litigation.

Governments be warned: You must protect your citizens from climate change — it’s their human right.

The prescient message was laced throughout a dense ruling Tuesday from Europe’s top human rights court. The court’s conclusion? Humans have a right to safety from climate catastrophes that is rooted in their right to life, privacy and family.

The definition-shifting decision from the European Court of Human Rights means nearly 50 governments representing almost 700 million people will now have to contend with a new era of litigation from climate-stricken communities alleging inaction. 

While the judgment itself doesn’t include any penalties — the case featured several women accusing Switzerland of failing to shield them from climate dangers — it does establish a potent precedent that people can use to sue governments in national courts.

The verdict will serve “as a blueprint for how to successfully sue your own government over climate failures,” said Ruth Delbaere, a legal specialist at Avaaz, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes climate activism...

Courting the courts on climate

The European Court of Human Rights was established in the decade following World War II but has grown in importance over the last generation. As the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, an international human rights organization, the court’s rulings are binding on the council’s 46 members, spanning all of Europe and numerous countries on its borders.

As a result, Tuesday’s [April 9, 2024] ruling will help elevate climate litigation from a country-by-country battle to one that stretches across continents.

Previously, climate activists had mostly found success in suing individual countries to force climate action. 

A 2019 Dutch Supreme Court verdict forced the Netherlands to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent, while in 2021 a French court ruled the government was responsible for environmental damage after it failed to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. That same year, Germany’s Constitutional Court issued a sweeping judgment that the country’s 2019 climate law was partly “unconstitutional” because it put too much of the emissions-cutting burden on future generations.

Even in the U.S., young environmental activists won a local case last year against state agencies after arguing that the continued use of fossil fuels violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment."

But 2024 is shaping up to be a turning point for climate litigation, redefining who has a right to sue over climate issues, what arguments they can use, and whom they can target. 

To start, experts overwhelmingly expect that Tuesday’s ruling will reverberate across future lawsuits — both in Europe and globally. The judgment even includes specifics about what steps governments must take to comply with their new climate-related human rights obligations. The list includes things like a concrete deadline to reach climate neutrality, a pathway to getting there, and evidence the country is actually on that path...

Concretely, the verdict could also affect the outcomes of six other high-profile climate lawsuits pending before the human rights court, including a Greenpeace-backed suit questioning whether Norway's decision to grant new oil and gas licenses complies with its carbon-cutting strategy.

An emerging legal strategy

In the coming months, other international bodies are also expected to issue their own rulings on the same thorny legal issues, which could further solidify the evolving trend. 

The International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights all have similar cases working through the system.

"All these cases together will clarify the legal obligations of states to protect rights in the context of climate change — and will set the stage for decades to come," said Chowdhury, from the environmental law center."

-via Politico, April 9, 2024

[spyglassrealms]

Oh my god. That was the next county over. That happened just north of here.

Butler County —you magnificent yahoos— you did your best. Now leave it to Pittsburgh and our chief export: medical malpractice!

[marinecorvid]

blorbos from my brain

[irenespring]

Sorry for the politics post but TRUMP WAS FOUND GUILTY OF ALL 34 CRIMINAL CHARGES. ALL OF THEM. No matter what happens (appeals, a lot of bullshit, and many many bad op-eds, probably), today is a big day. The first United States president convicted of crimes. Hilarious given how many United States presidents have actually done crimes but still! Hahahahaha. Brain is playing "Hava Nagila" over and over again.

[pallas-cat]

ngl the paranoid idea that a bunch of people i know including my family are now only willing to see me if i get my shit together is pretty strong

as if i should message them with "i swear i won't do insecure rambling in front of you i am somewhat normal my apartment is presentable i have a job please forgive me" (obv won't but a girl has rejection sensitivity but it's unfortunately close to the shit my brain circus says)