guru0010 - Slashdot User

Comment Let's even the playing field! (Score 2) 429

by guru0010 on Thursday April 04, 2013 @12:14PM (#43358433) Attached to: Aaron Swartz Prosecution Team Claims Online Harassment

Let's get one thing perfectly clear about the United States justice system. It is not equitable and in no way just. Police are not objectional investigators any more that Prosecutors are looking for justice. The job of the police is to strictly gather any evidence that they can use to pin the accusations on the individual. They interview using coerction, lies, and threats to try and break a subject. Once they "think" you've done something the game is over. They are not out for the truth any longer, they are out to set you up. Prosecutors are the same. They will level 30 or more trumped up charges to intimidate the individual into accepting a plea bargain. The plea bargain adds a "win" to their statistics and doesn't cost them an arm and a leg to prosecute and get a win. Let's change the laws to even the playing field. Don't allow them to use lies, coerction, or threats to gain a conviction! If they are the upstanding honest hard working individuals that they claim to be then this would be fine by them. Also remove their protections under "color of law". If they screw up, make them personally liable for any and all damages. Then you will begin to see an equitable system of justice.

Submission + - DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political (tumblr.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @05:00PM

An anonymous reader writes: The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.

Submission + - EPA to Reuse Toxic Sites for Renewable Energy

Submitted by pickens on Sunday October 11, 2009 @04:51PM

pickens writes: Hugh Pickens writes:

The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal power plants because using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. "In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere," said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. "We don't want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that's pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places." The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Included in the 4,100 sites are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts — more than the country's total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data. "We want to push these contaminated sites and really encourage these things to happen," says Shahid Mahmud, co-chairman of the federal agency's national mining team, "because the sooner we can get it done the better off we are from the environmental and climate change perspective."

Slashdot Top Deals