Comment Inept much? (Score 1) 284
Who is more inept? The inept or the inept who hired himt? ~Obiwan (while working IT)
She was Canadian. We had a marriage contract, executed in Quebec, CA. Unlike WA, "prenuptual agreements" have no weight there: marriage contracts are notarized, and can cover performance (who does what household duties) as well as assets. It required whoever does not work outside the home to maintain the home, raise the kids, etc. If both worked outside the home, we were to support the household in proportion to our incomes. Standard fare.
Well, she didn't. I remained faithful, but withheld certain "perqs" of marriage.
When she cheated, I figured I had the moral right to divorce her lazy ass. What I didn't realize was that, under WA law, her cheating gave her the right to have me thrown out of my own home, lest I be arrested, on the grounds that she was fearful that I might find out and get violent. So that I might support our kids, I left freely. Of course, that was construed as my abandoning our kids, so I had no chance at custody in the divorce. I regained it after she was found neglectful of them.
That marriage contract? Because it wasn't a prenup, it held no legal weight, precisely the reason we got a marriage contract instead of a prenup in the first place!
After the divorce, she was held in contempt for not selling the house she could not pay the mortgage on (for which I remained responsible, but with her having to make the payments, and I having a power of sale that I ended up exercising). When she lost custody, she alleged I never paid child suport for our son (I threw in an extra $100 a month for an allowance). The state hassled me for the money EVEN AFTER I provided canceled checks with her endorsement on them! I had to hire a lawyer to get them off my back.
But, the problem here isn't what she did as much as the laws that let her get away with it. And, for my part, I was stupid for having married her in the first place.
Then again, in the end, the kids were placed with me, with sole legal custody as well.
Well, I am not in jail and I have primary residential and sole legal custody of my kids.
Make of that what you will.
Well, it was a deputy prosecuting attrorney for Snohomish County in February/March 2010. I'll leave it at that.
As we had negotiated a plea bargain for a guilty plea to disorderly conduct in order to dispose felony asault on a minor charges, there are no grounds to sue.
I thought about it: here I was, carrying a screaming child into a store, with the child yelling, "Help, he is killing me. He is kidnapping me". A passerby might certainly think it was true and assault me. One standard for "disorderly conduct" in WA is doing something that invites assault. The classic example is uttering a racial epithet. As much as I thought I had done nothing wrong, the law is the law, and should I not like it, my options are to petition to have it changed. The standard met, I pled guilty to DC, and moved on with my (successful) petition for primary residential and sole legal custody of my kids. The judge in that case praised my choice to remove uncertainty about my being subject to future prosecution.
I had other options. I could have taken him back to his mother. I could have gone to the police with him and his shoes in bad shape. I could have called CPS. At the time, I thought anyone could see that this child was neiher being choked (he was screaming at the top of his lungs), and certainly not being killed. If police responed, the situation could have been made clear. I did not count on his hurting himself in vengeance so as to allege abuse, or his mother acting on it.
So, at this point it is best to (a) let it go, but (b) share how "the system" works, so others might be wary.
These days, local police know of his history of alleging abuse when he has some privilege revoked for bad behavior.
The statute of limitations on class C felonies in WA is five years.
All my communications with the DA were through my attorney.
Sue to get them dropped? Unlikely. There was probable cause for an arrest (the standard for which is very low).
Bullshit. To myth24601 as well. I'll address his/her point first.
Charges rarely get "dropped". Cases simply don't get pressed. Felony arrests can be prosecuted up to five years later in many places (WA, for one), once sufficient evidence is obtained to make a case. The constitutional prohibition against being placed in double jeapardy means prosecutors only get one kick at the can, unless the same evidence can be repackged under a different charge.
In 2010, when my ex had custody, my son was hungry. As she hardly ever fed our kids, she let me take him to dinner, and wrote a permission slip (as I did not have visitation rights that day, and insisted on one). Well, she let the poor kid out, in February, with one shoe having the sole completely flop off. I told him, either before or after dinner, I'd get him new shows. He chose after dinner. Well, after dinner, he wanted to go home to mom, and I feared she'd have police waiting to illustrate the "poor footwear" that "I" had on him. So, I took him to Payless for those shoes first.
My son has issues. He suffers from Conduct Disorder (Oppositional Defiant Disorder in his younger days, that psychologists and psychiatrists have not been able to stem). In order for him to not run into traffic, I had to carry him into the store, all the while him screaming "He's choking me! He's killing me! Help, he's kidnapping me!" I handed a worker one shoe, asked, for a matching pair, got them paid, and took him home to his mother. Unbeknownst to me, on the way, he brusied himself with his seatbelt buckle.
He alleged I struck him, she called police, they interviewed store staff ("He was choking and trying to kill the child he was kidnapping"), and there was plenty of probable cause to arrest me for felony assault of a minor. I spent four days in jail before being able to post bail. Getting to one's own money behind bars is surprisingly difficult: banks won't release it to attorneys without a notarized power of attorney, and while your lawyer can visit you in lockup, a notary might be made to wait weeks. Lawyers are generally not permitted for front bail monies, because the offer can be used as a incentive to force an attorney-client relationship under duress.
Well, the case against me fell apart: he refused to testify, and his mental illness came to light.
Were the charges dropped?
No.
I got custody of my kids 18 months later, but to remove the uncertainty of a possible felony prosecution over the next 3-1/2 years, I had to get the original charges disposed. Despite not prosecuting me, the DA refused to drop the charges unless I pled to "something". I chose disorderly conduct (as someone might have thought I was actually kidnapping my son, and assaulted me: in WA, acting in a manner that might invite assault is disorderly conduct), and paid a $1200 fine. The original charges were disposed.
All this is public information. I could not hire a nanny for my son through nannies4hire.com because of my arrest record. But, and this addresses the AC: I had no trouble getting a new job some years later. Decent employers research things like this.
I thought about this and think it justifies citizens' right to bear arms to include nukes: so long as the jackbooted things don't back off, we periodically (every few minutes we're holding out), kill a million or so who did not come to our aid, and therefore supported the unlawful government act.
1. Yeah, Barack Obama says he can kill any American if he does not know whether he poses a threat or not.
2. I don't know if Barack Obama poses a threat to me.
3. Sadly, instead of "Profit!" I rather see either a predator drone or Gitmo in my future.
The proper thing for these parents to do is organize, arm themselves, head down to the school administration buildings, and kill every official, employee, and agent in sight. If the school board members are not there, hunt them down, and kill them too.
No doubt, that would result it an armed SWAT response, arrests, and deaths.
It would not be legal.
But, it would be proper, and therefore should be legal. Specifically, it should be an affirmative defense against the charge of murder that the slain (a) be an (1) elected member of government, (2) employee or (3) other agent thereof; and (b) (1) had committed, (2) passed into law, or (3) supported the passage into law of (c) an unconstitutional measure that (d) was (1) applied, or (2) applicable, to the accused. In this case, the students', and by extention their parents' fourth amendment rights were violated.
Governments are supposed to exist at the pleasure of the people and be their servant, not the other way around.
The founding fathers didn't go far enough with the second amendment. They had the right idea, that in extremis, armed rebellion against a tyrannical state was justified. But, they failed in thinking a separation of powers and enumerated restrictions on government powers, would be sufficient to ward off that necessity. So, now we are left with a society that has no idea when to take up arms against the state, save the vague notion of "when enough others do". And so, we just sit and look at one another. When the time comes (and, it will), the response will not be a gentle local reminder of who's the boss, but rather a widespread revolution that runs a clear danger of leaving a power vacuum, as revolutions tend to do.
It would have been far better for there to be a "rulebook" as it were, that clearly enumerates, but not in an exhaustive sense, when to kill an agent of the state.
Government is best viewed as a beast of burden: useful for a time, but to be put down when it has outlived it's usefulness, or otherwise become ornery.
Trust no agent of the state who is not willing to enumerate a number of actions that, if they undertook, would justify their killing under the affirmative defense of protecting constitutional rights.
Radical? Obviously, I don't think so. Affirmative defenses are not legal "walks in the park". They shift the burden from the state having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the accused having to prove innocence under the specific affirmative defense shield, having admitted to comitting the act under consideration.
I can attest to that, having escaped Canada for the U.S.
I is also illegal to spend your own money to save your own life: everyone has to be on the same government health plan, "to be fair". Cuba and North Korea are the same.
That's interesting, since I've been sinking email for my domain at home for over a decade now. And yes, because that is clearly running a server, I've always gotten business class service from the cable companies. The DSL providers that I used in the past had loose enough terms of service that running a server wasn't an issue: I was up front about the mail and ssh servers, and all they cared about was that I didn't run an open relay (which I had no intention of doing, and appreciated when I messed up my config once and they told me).
Though, personally, the assymetry bothers me, as it results in a "producer" vs. "consumer" divide on the 'net, which really should be about interconnectin peers -- running servers should not be an issue.
I can even understand a provider wanting bandwidth asymetry on their last mile, and prohibiting the running of servers tends to achieve that (though game traffic bandwidth can be quite symmetric direction-wise), but it's the wrong approach, IMNSHO.
I think that's called an armed revolution.
Actually, the principle of estoppel HAS been used in divorce cases to compel a man to continue to support his now ex-wife in "the manner to which she has become accustomed".
Bullshit. My then-wife was so lazy, CPS required me to hire a maid and nanny to care for the kids, because she was neglecting them,
Don't hit the keys so hard, it hurts.
