Hey David,
Thanks for your reply. I'm half-dissociated when I post to this list, so if you ever don't like my personality you can ask me to change it ;p. I just don't want to harm or blame others more than I already do, and I seem to partially be here towards some vague idea of technologically skilled forthrightness in the public posts on this list.
You wouldn't know you hadn't received it if you didn't. You reply to most of my emails. Did you receive an email from me that you did not reply to, in which I referenced MOVE?
I'm sorry, I'm not intentionally ignoring it, I just don't know which you are referring to. Please repeat the point so I don't miss it. Thanks!
I also have trouble looking for emails when people say stuff like that =S. How does it feel for you? Everyone assumes it's so easy to do stuff that they can do.
I'm not trying to make a grand point, other than it's hard to criticize the justice department's treatment of Assange given that he has done everything in his power to avoid it. Any perceived wrongs against him
If it is illegal to try to avoid an appeal, it would be a separate crime. If we were to punish people for unrelated crimes at trials, everyone would have their suffering mathematically squared. That is definitely not the intent of the law. The law defines the punishment for crimes, not the irritation of its enforcers, David.
I'm sorry, I'm not quite understanding your point. Can you re-state it succinctly so I can respond to it better?
It sounded like you were validating an idea of USA government workers making things hard for Assange based on their personal opinions. Below it sounds like you may be saying that you do not mean this.
To repeat my point, I'm merely saying the US has done precisely nothing to punish Assange yet: he hasn't been on US soil, in US
Stundin article? Did you see the Stundin article?
courts, or really touched by the US at all. The US has *attempted* to extradite him for trial, but so far has been unsuccessful. Assange has been accused of breaking a variety of laws in different countries (sexual abuse, immigration violations, etc) , and has done
It is obvious that those are not the accusations that governments are concerned with.
his best to run from all of them -- going so far as effectively imprisoning himself in an embassy for nearly a decade -- all to avoid showing up in *any* court for *any* of these.
So, the Stundin article reported that the USA had actually gone to great efforts to _frame_ Assange. This was very difficult to learn. It was the person doing it who shared it, and they may have put themselves at great risk.
If it is a government that is trying to frame you, is attending court in their country a good idea?
To a very large degree, nearly all of Assange's suffering has been entirely self-imposed hardships caused by running from the long arm of the law.
==> People run because they are in danger <==
Let me find and paste a quote for you.
The ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange
On Feb 17, 2020, Doctors for Assange demanded an end to the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.[1] Yet no responsible authority has acted. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and two medical experts visited Mr Assange in prison in May, 2019, concluding that his treatment constituted psychological torture, a form of torture aimed at destroying the personality of an individual.[2] The situation has deteriorated since then, with continued abuses of Mr Assange's fundamental rights and the medical risks posed by COVID-19.
Again, the only point I'm trying to make is that you can't blame the US court system for being unjust when it's been denied the ability to do anything at all. This isn't to say that Assange is guilty/innocent -- I genuinely have no idea. And thanks to his extraordinary efforts to avoid trial, nor does anybody else either (at least, nobody who believes in the concept of justice being decided in courts, and not in the press).
Other things than just those two things are acting here.
Yes, let's make sure those laws are properly interpreted and enforced. But all of that *starts* with him showing up in court so we can all actually hear the charges and see the evidence for real, and see what our institutions actually do about it. Running
This of course rarely happens. Trials are held half-privately and then people are locked up in prison and communications with them are censored. By the time they come out they are totally different people.
That is the situation right now. Julian has no way to prepare for a trial fairly because he is imprisoned elsewhere. Can the USA get him his writings so he can prepare a defense with his lawyers that is backed by evidence?
"This of course rarely happens" -- are you sure? There's something like 400 thousand federal trials every year; and *millions* of state trials. Are you saying that it is *rare* for people to get justice? My sense is that the
Well, I'm mostly exposed to political convictions. Everyone I know who has gone behind bars (aside from the people I met when I was behind them myself) was in there politically. (At my trial I was released, but I was influenced to accept a needless guilty-plea for charges unrelated to why I was jailed.)
Political convictions can go reasonably nicely or severely inhumanly poorly.
overwhelming majority of cases are executed competently and reasonably -- even if imperfectly -- and are just so boring that nobody talks about them. We are talking about single-digit numbers of court cases in this thread; we are explicitly talking only about the most extreme of the most extreme outliers. Please don't misinterpret these extraordinary edge cases to be the common case.
What's your opinion on convictions for nonviolent drug crimes? Do you think they influence street culture?
Unless of course you have just given up on our nation entirely and think even attempting to enforce our laws is inherently unjust. But at that point, you've taken such an extreme position, nothing less than revolution will satisfy you.
We actually have restorative justice programs in many areas. There are cities and states where an accused criminal can opt for mediation rather than punishment today, David.
I'd love to learn more about this; I'm not familiar with mediation as an alternative to trial for criminal cases (I thought that was only an option for civil suits). Can you link me to some good resources you recommend to read more? Thanks!
I likely conflated civil and criminal. But if you can figure out who your accuser is, you can mediate with them to resolve the reason they're accusing you (or alternatively so that you turn yourself in), humanly.
I get confused around this topic I value, but here are two early audio snippets from a course on nonviolent communication:
I think their official website is
cnvc.org, but the really poignant websites are elsewhere, and they do restorative justice but don't specialise in it specifically.
I know you asked about mediation as alternative to conviction. I've found some links on that in the past (it's the prime thing people try to do with restorative justice) but I am handling some difficult psychological experiences, and links like this are not easy for me to find and relate right now. I'm sorry.