Alabama Municipal Judge Carlton Teel is packing more than legal principles under his robe. When a defendant Brian (Bryant) Keith Ford reacted badly to a sentence and started swinging his crutches at the judge, Teel whipped out a gun and then a deputy shot Ford in the side.
Accounts differ on how much danger the man posed — with some witnesses saying that he was not attacking the judge when he was shot. Others say he tried to grab the gun.
Ford was in the courtroom on a harassment charge from a neighbor who said Ford had cursed at her in December after accusing her of talking about him to police.
Teel reportedly fined him $800 — a rather modest sum when one considers he now faces serious criminal charges and remains in critical condition.
The most disturbing account was:
Sara Williams said she was sitting in the front row when the man, whom she knew, got agitated after the judge fined him $800. He waved one of his crutches in the air.
“The police were hollering for him to get down” when an officer opened fire, she said.
Williams said she yelled “Don’t shoot him no more!” right before the officer fired again.
If that is true, it is hard to see why potentially lethal force was used. However, others describe Ford as attacking the judge.
Do you believe judges should be allowed to pack heat in a courtroom?
Source: ABA Journal
Dr. Harris,
I enjoy your postings though I must say, I don’t agree with everything you have said. You have as much right to be here as anyone else, it is not a private club (for weenies).
“What if mistakes happen because new learning is happening and for no other reason whatsoever?
What if accountability is not happening because it is neither possible nor necessary?” J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E.
—————————————-
Well you lost me in the chasm between new learning and the necessity of accountability.
The kind of new learning you describe (that occurs without accountability) occurs as a natural state to infants and toddlers…even then accountability is simply assumed by the parent so it isn’t removed completely. Buddha is correct, this thinking leads to lawlessness and fascism….and I would venture further, if we are not accountable we do not learn.
As adults we are beholden to take the consequences of our actions on our selves and others into account. That is what provides the opportunity to learn. When we hurt or harm others…we can make ‘amends’, one way to prevent further harm…a true sign of learning.
As far as the ‘State’ aspect of this…if there is a pattern of people ‘gaming’ the system over and over again (and they work for government)…the fascist system is already here. Not prosecuting a murder? It’s already here. Allowing an exploitative death? It’s already here.
When ‘mistakes’ are not ‘mistakes’…it is not a learning channel…except perhaps the lesson that whatsoever you do to another you thereby do to yourself.
Dr. Harris, thanks for those clips…I do love Sci-fi and I WANT one of those tiny elephants!!! 🙂
One of my favorite authors is Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaids Tale’ is a classic. There is a proved precognitive quality to many Sci-fi ballads…the cautionary aspect IMHO is not simpley abstract!
I never even heard of this series but I see that Netflix has it on CD. Thanks for the tip!
@Michelle: I’m not sure what you mean by “fully provide.” Do you mean justify?
It is possible I feel the opposite: I believe prosecutors should have much less leeway in deciding who to prosecute for crimes; I think the amount of discretion they have now has led to cronyism and corruption, particularly among the police.
We have seen several cases described here by Turley, and I have read several on my own, of cops shooting and/or killing innocent people, or tasing them, when they are not committing a crime: Then the D.A. chooses not to press charges. In my town, councilmen and mayors have gotten away with blatant corruption and law-breaking and are never prosecuted, because at least the last three D.A.s keep telling us how this would be “counter productive.”
Although it would be more expensive and require more taxes, I would rather put my trust in petit juries at trial and an expanded role for grand juries for the purpose of the discretionary part; OR I think citizens should be given the right to appeal a prosecutor’s decision to not prosecute. Particularly in cases of serious crime, like murder, or government corruption.
The role of grand juries would be expanded because currently, they only review cases the prosecutor already wants to try, and my outrage is directed at cases where a crime has obviously been committed and the D.A. is using their discretion to refuse to prosecute an obvious or sometimes even self-admitted criminal, because the criminal is a cop or a politician or a rich man’s son.
RE: MichellefromMadison, February 12, 2011 at 1:16 am
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What if mistakes happen because new learning is happening and for no other reason whatsoever?
What if accountability is not happening because it is neither possible nor necessary?
Defense attorneys and prosecutors should both face a severe penalty if they cannot fully provide for the crimes brought, or the crimes defended because right now there is zero accountability for their mistakes.
Found the trailer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jM36yVPz_A&w=480&h=390]
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 11, 2011 at 11:49 pm
I am not shocked by your words, only saddened by what they reveal, yet what they reveal is what I have need to learn.
When lawyers cannot avoid violating the law, surely it no longer is the law that is being violated by the lawyers, but the lawyers being violated by the law.
That this would happen has long been foretold.
Some have eyes to see and ears to hear and look and listen well.
Some have eyes to see and look where it is not.
Some have ears to hear and imagine not hearing what it is.
Thus is fairness as of the parable of the sower and the seed; the fertile soil, the rocks, thorns and all else.
I seek to be understood, not because I am worth being understood; because being understood is the way of life affirmed.
At the dawning of a new day, one person will be the first person to see the first ray of light seen on that new day; neither the person nor ray of light is more or less special than any other person and any other ray of light; yet one person first will see that first ray of light. That first person may or may not recognize the ray of light or the dawning of a new day. Eventually, one person will be the first to see a first ray of light at the dawning of a new day and see that ray of light for what it is.
Have I seen the light of the dawning of a new day? Perhaps, perhaps not; only, how am I to know or understand if I make no effort to share what has been given to me.
I ask you to tell me how, as a child, you were terribly hurt, during the terrible twos, and, as you are truthful, you tell me, and I attend to your hurting and call upon the healing for which your spirit languishes to come into your life when you are ready.
Of course, I have no power to call healing to come, as I am ordinary. Curiously, being ordinary means being perfectly unique.
What I have been doing on this blawg is a process of psychoanalysis comparable to the one I did with my peer patients during those aforementioned psychiatric hospitalizations.
During those hospitalizations, it was given to me to properly and safely analyze people whose ability to adapt to contemporary society was near the practicable minimum.
On this blawg, I have been analyzing those whose ability to adapt to contemporary society is near the practicable maximum.
It would be unethical for me to psychoanalyze people save for one detail; what I do is only a routine part of my everyday life; being autistic as I am, I am given no access to any sort of “theory of mind” whereby I can make predictions of other people’s behavior. In infancy, to connect with my immediate family, I developed a simple psychoanalytic method which does not require the usual psychoanalytic dyad transference-countertransference mechanism. What I do is to be inwardly truthful and thereby allow the mirror neuron system to migrate other people toward increased truthfulness. Because this is not anything I do other than as part of my ordinary way of being able to live, and because I do this without deception, people who have internalized deception, in attempting to get me to mirror them in ways they expect, and who encountered difficulties during the first psychosocial development stage of trust or mistrust work at making me reflect them as they are reflected by non-autistic people.
I care about how you are affected by my writing and commenting, yet your interpretations are within you and not within any control I can exercise.
The way I do research about public safety aspects of the structure of human society, as, and only as, an aspect of my everyday life, and not in the form of laboratory experimentation, is why my research with human subjects did not require Institutional Review Board attention when I presented my work for ethical evaluation to the University of Illinois at Chicago Office for Protection From Research Risks. At the time I did my doctorate, it was, I understand, realatively rare for human subject research to not pose risks that would merit IRB review.
Had I not known people broken so as to commit suicide and/or murder in response to the brain damage trauma of exposure to the adversarial system, I might be content to let it be.
Alas, those of the adversarial system are, I find, among those best able to adapt to contemporary society, and therefore tend to make the rules for everyone else, even though many people do not share the beliefs of the few who function effectively as definers of social structure.
Were the adversarial system applicable only to those who believe in it, no conflict as I observe would arise. Alas, I find myself, as do other autistic people, threatened, sometimes with potentially lethal effect, for not sharing the beliefs of those who believe they have the power and the right to define other people in terms of themselves. Such authoritarianism is not an aspect of my life.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJZi3OkzlWA&w=480&h=390]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-z_XPyoif0&w=480&h=390]
All six episodes of Masters of Science Fiction are available, the last time I checked, on a pair of DVDs.
Thanks again Buddha. 🙂
One lives to be of service, MFM.
I have to say, ditto that! Thanks Buddha. 🙂
Brian,
I don’t care what you do as long as the gallery realizes you’re an illogical propagandist relying upon obfuscation, circular logic and bullshit.
Just don’t be shocked if you get the periodic smackdown when you spew particularly antisocial or destructive propaganda. Really. I don’t mind. It causes me no distress at all.
As to this? “You present the traditional view superbly. Within that view, my work is plausibly utter nonsense, something I recognized decades ago.” There’s no “plausibly” to it.
Your “work” is simply utter nonsense. End of line. Unless, of course, one considers its marginal antisocial/anti-legalism propaganda value.
You can tell me I “just don’t understand” all you like too.
Because that’s just funny, Obfuscation Boy.
I understand you just fine. As do others here now. Some came to the conclusion upon their own. Others once your mask was chipped away around the edges.
But understood, you are.
And exposed by that understanding.
Long ago, I became immune to being bullied.
Of course, what I know and understand is circular when symbol and symbolized are regarded as identical.
What is escaping some folks attention is the profoundly subtle way in which I was forced merely to survive to develop psychoanalytic skills instead of theory of mind skills, merely to not likely be murdered by one of my time-corruption-traumatized kindergarten classmates.
By the third day of kindergarten on the way home, walking while holding my mother’s right hand with my left hand, on the northeast corner of Rainier and Ferdinand, in Seattle, I had managed to psychoanalyze the most proficient of my kindergarten classmates enough to have found a decently plausible way to avert being murdered for putting my most severely socialization-trauma brain-damaged classmates into a fatal-for-me focal catatonic stupor decompensation.
For those who do not yet get it, I am not working to communicate with the intellect or cognitive brain function, my words are chosen to reach the affective/procedural brain function, where words never are able to find a home.
Because the procedural brain is aware of what I am doing and tends to welcome it, the declarative brain is necessarily experiencing significant distress in response, not to what I am doing, but because of flashback hints to the terrible twos abuse through which everyone who is a true believer in the adversarial system has to have gone as that is the only identifiable pathway to becoming a true believer in the adversarial way.
In a post some time ago, I mentioned meeting a fellow at the now-closed Merrimac Bar on North Avenue, in Chicago, not all that far from Narragansett. One person, with adequate melanin ws being disrespected by a younger melanin-lacking person. The younger one challenged the older one to a game of pool.
The older one seemed not to be very good at pool, and the younger one much better. Only, once in a while, the older one accidentally scored, and accidentally won the game. The younger one said something like, “Hey, boy, want to play again?” So the older one asked the bartender, a woman, is he talking to you? She said, “Do I look like a boy?” I was sitting at the bar, next to the older one and said to him so loudly that the younger one could not help but hear me, in effect, “I don’t know about anyone else, but you sure look like a real man to me.”
There are, among those who think of society as their home, those who have survived nearly unbearable prejudicial abuse. Such people become the actually-strongest to walk the earth. They need not demean others in pursuit of a false sense of worth. Such people have often given me a helping hand when I needed it, and to them, I will be forever grateful.
To those on a merrygoround of vicious cycle traumas, the rotating frame of reference of their lives seems as though stationary, and the world around them going in circles.
Sorry to say, I am not on the merrygoround, so, if you see me going in circles, it is you who are actually spinning.
Who, here, understands what centrifugal force is, as in a centrifuge? If you know that there is no such thing as centrifugal force and that there is centripetal acceleration, you may recognize the physical principles which identify what is and what is not going in circles. If not, you may be a true believer in centrifugal force. There are rather simple ways to tell whether one is, or is not, in a non-accelerating frame of reference.
Think I am making an effort of persuasion?. If so, you are mistaken.
The aforementioned wormhole is dimensionless, bereft of any volume in which anything can stay. So, I cannot stay there, no one and no thing can.
You may tire of this transactional process; it continues to provide me with valuable brain trauma data.
I am neither “teasing” nor playing any sort of self-aggrandizing transactional game in the manner of the games of transactional analysis interest.
And I find no fault with any person in any way.
And BTW: Part of what the Egyptians have been explicitly citing in their protest are the lies and self-serving nature of the ruling regime. Part of what I am protesting here are your lies and self-serving idiotic circularity you think is a suit of armor but is as transparent as your attempts to puff yourself up as some studious intellectual above the common man, sans either study or intellect.
Get back in the wormhole and stay there.
When seem to notice that two or more people cooperate, even unwittingly, in constructing a shared error, methinks that the mirror neuron system is likely to normatively be hard at work.
That is how, “If everyone is doing it, its okay” bandwagons often start up.
I do not experience the tyranny of the majority as necessarily guided by accuracy of observation.
The late Sidney J. Harris (buried in in Blossomberg Cemetery not far from the grave of someone I actually knew) wrote a rather neat (to me, anyway) book, Majority of One (Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
If, like Sidney (my favorite columnist in The Chicago Daily News, while it lasted) I am, in the whole world, a majority of one, that is sufficient for me, so long as I am not actually doing harm to anyone. For me, imagined harm is as unreal as harm, as is unimagined actual harm actually real harm.
If, on this blawg, I be a Majority of One, then such majority is all I need.
The comments here are very helpful in assisting my efforts in unrlddling the brain-trauma consequences of adversarial environments.
@Brian: I do not just “believe,” I “know.” I feel no compulsion to lie about it or soften the blow, I have no need for your approval or any future interaction with you, I KNOW you are a fraud, a bullshitter, a faker, and a liar.
I know it because what you claim is physically impossible to do. So fuck off, dumbass. I am commenting in truthful and ethical fashion; it is you that is trying to deceive people. I am not polite, I will grant you, because in this case politeness only invites more of your lying bullshit, and the world could do with less of that.
That you find my life and my life work dishonest and or absolutely meaningless merely further validates my prior research findings. Again, I find what you write very informative, and I thank you for the effort you have made.
When I no longer notice your comments as though attempts to discredit my work I will stop protesting your sincere, methinks, albeit traditional and therefore mistaken view.
You present the traditional view superbly. Within that view, my work is plausibly utter nonsense, something I recognized decades ago.
And yet, in perusing the days news, I observe that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak capitulated and some thirty years of authoritarianism as government as though ruled by Mubarak appears to have succumbed to the Egyptian vox populi; though I have no clear sense of what sort of authoritatian-authoritative balance will be with what ends up replacing the Mubarak system.
If authoritarianism is fine with you, which appears evident to me in your assuming authoritarian understanding of me and my work, why did the Egyptian folks protest as they did.
You desist from making up fantasies about me and about my work, and I will not protest the fantasies not made up.
You will not bait me into returning the sort of epithets you send my way. I have vastly more integrity than would allow me to return my objections to your “caricatures” (perhaps that is a very wrong word) of who I am and what I am doing.
Were you to state your opinions in the form of opinions, I would not be required by my having a P.E. license to object. Perhaps no one ever told you how to state an opinion as opinion instead of mistakenly stating opinions in the form of facts.
I have been consistently, allowing for the ordinary typographical errors indigenous to blog and blawg commenting, and herewith illustrate.
You wrote the following two personal opinions in the manner only appropriate for actual facts:
One of your opinions as written falsely in fact form: “You are a fraud.”
Another such opinion of yours, falsely in fact form: “You are a liar.”
How would you properly write those personal opinions so they are truthfully written in opinion form? I shall show you…
For the first cited of your personal opinions, the following is one proper way for you to write in the future:
“I believe that you may be acting fraudulently.”
And for the second cited of your personal opinions:
“I find that what you have written may be false in one or more aspects.”
Because they focus on separating opinion from fact and identifying each accurately, I participate when convenient in The Reality-Based Community (Mark Kleiman and others).
I understand that Dr. Kleiman is a public policy professor at the University of California – Los Angeles, School of Public Affairs.
There are lots of folks who know and understand how to comment in truthful and ethical ways, even in the presence of intense disagreements on issues, while never attempting to berate someone with whom a serious difference of perspective exists.
My goodness, even I, stupid as I am, am readily able to achieve that. As I have been demonstrating, repeatedly.
Brian,
Hey, when more than one person comes to the same conclusion about your drivel on multiple topics?
They’re probably on to something.
Put that in your circular logic and smoke it.
Carry on.
@Brian: I think you are stupid. Honestly, I think you are incapable of critical thought, I think you are incapable of processing facts and logic, I think you are either a simpleton or a charlatan, because you use words without regard to their meaning, they mean whatever you feel like they should mean, or they mean nothing at all.
A jury understands the difference between an avoidable mistake and an unavoidable error. The words “mistake” and “avoidable” have meanings, but you redefine them to be absolutely meaningless, and then prove something idiotic, and then strut like you have done something. You haven’t. There is little point in arguing with you using words when we cannot even agree on what the words mean.
I am not feeding your delusional world view. I have tested your claims quite simply; by using my mind to see if they present a coherent world view that remotely describes reality — And they do not. In fact, they are so far off they are just garbage, meaning unsalvageable. You are a fraud. You are a liar. I have already pointed out how and where. The record is there for all to see, so feel free to re-read it.
Hmmm.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” may be of the classical form of the near-ubiquitous “equivalencing of denotation with connotation” error.