By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Angela Corey has become a minor legal celebrity for her tough-minded prosecution of the Trayvon Martin murder case. Her toughness has also drawn the ire of U.S. House member Corrine Brown in a racially charged case in Jacksonville. The case involves Marissa Alexander who was charged under Florida’s “10-20-life” law which mandates progressively tough penalties for violent felonies when firearms are involved.
Saying he had no choice, Judge James Daniel sentenced the mother of an 11-year-old to 20 years in prison after a jury convicted her of aggravated assault for firing a warning shot to discourage her estranged husband from choking her. In a cruel irony another judge had rejected Alexander’s invocation of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, ruling she wasn’t in fear for her safety when she returned to her house to get the car keys she had forgotten after she ran into her garage in an attempt to escape.
The prosecutor was singled out for failing to exercise discretion in the case. “There is no justification for 20 years,” Brown told Corey, “All the community was asking for was mercy and justice.”
Corey had offered Alexander a plea deal which carried a three year sentence. Alexander bet on the good sense of the jury, and crapped out. Judge Daniel seemed frustrated by the case:
“Under the state’s 10-20-life law, a conviction for aggravated assault where a firearm has been discharged carries a minimum and maximum sentence of 20 years without regarding to any extenuating or mitigating circumstances that may be present, such as those in this case.”
Rep. Brown was not so diplomatic saying, “She was overcharged by the prosecutor. Period. She never should have been charged.” Brown, the Jacksonville congresswoman, told reporters that the case was a product of “institutional racism.” Corey said the case deserved to be prosecuted because Alexander fired in the direction of a room where two children were standing.
Mandatory minimum sentences ignore mitigating factors and punish under a “bright-line” test. They are the darling of the “law and order” crowd who see the world in stark shades of black and white and who eschew any discretion for “lily-livered” judges who have the disturbing habit of mixing compassion and justice in sentencing decisions.
Proponents of the 1999 “10-20-life” law point to the fact that violent gun crime rates have dropped 30 percent statewide since the law was enacted. Is 20 years fair for a woman trying to defend herself? Should the prosecutor have heeded Rep. Brown’s suggestion and backed off the charges altogether? Can a law be just in the face of a result that flies in the face of “natural justice”?
Source: CNN
`Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
So, where are all the George Zimmerman defenders?
Have not seen one come on and post in support or defense of Marissa Alexander.
She stood her ground with a gun, so where is all the rabid support for her that rallied around Zimmerman?
I’m alone on that.
System puts “idealist707 You are commenting, bla bla” in the middle of the text space. difficult to read what you are writing there. and it’s been that way for days now.
I’ll be back tomorrow when I’ve digested my giu zao (apell it in chinese) and slept off my Tingsao beer.
The sauce was fantastic.
Don’t let the injustice ruin your appetite for prosecuting torturers and wife abusers. Mine never hit me, but she
sure could make me feel atomic small. I’m along with that I’m sure. ?????
Well, it looks like I’m back again. That’s cool.
They are still tinkering with the system. And one got ticked off today at WordPress.
The wonders of mankind. We who can’t even follow one golden rule. So, justice. For those who are part of the topsitters.
Idealist, times DO change. And statistics change. Because of the Marissa Alexander case, the statistics now show that Rico Grey put her in the hospital once so that was a man committing domestic violence, but she was convicted of violent assault (a felony) so that was a woman committing domestic violence. So now, the statistics show that from that one family, it can be shown that “women commit as much domestic violence as men.”
In terms of SERIOUS domestic violence, that one family’s statistics show that women commit MORE SERIOUS domestic violence than men.
See? Times change.
This reminds me of a case I was actually involved in — not as a victim or perp, but yet again…
A woman came over from Ivory Coast with her 7-year-old son. She married an American man and they lived with him, his daughter (no mom in sight) and her and her son in an apartment that had a doorman. The guy started beating his wife right in front of his daughter and her son. This was repeated three, four, five times. Then one day she told him that if he beat her again, she was going to fight him, and she informed him that she could win. He did not believe her. What he did not know was that she had been a physical education teacher and Olympic games coach (shot put, javelin and some other upper-arm-strength sport) in Abidjan. So the next time he decided to beat her up, she defended. He grabbed a chair to smash her with and screamed to his daughter to bring him a knife, saying, “I will kill her!” His daughter froze, and did not bring the knife — she loved her new step-mother, but feared her father. The woman snatched the chair from the man’s hands, threw it against the wall, and flung him off her with one hand, then grabbed her son with the other hand and fled down four flights of stairs to reach the front desk and have them call the police.
Meanwhile the guy got a knife, cut his own leg, sat in a chair and dialed 911 saying his wife had attacked him and tried to kill him, and he needed help, and she was trying to escape. The police arrived. The wife spoke only broken English and the husband was very fluent and was ex-military and had “command status” and the thing ended up with the wife in jail for “felonious assault” and the child in the total care, custody and control of his step-father, who the police had assumed was his father.
The woman was forced into a plea for time served because her court-appointed lawyer would not take any time with her case (only made $35/hour on these appointed cases). We had to find her pro bono counsel for her appeal, and we did, and she got the appeal overturned and got her son back. But the police report was still there, and the statistics are that SHE committed domestic violence against HIM. SERIOUS, too. (The lawyers spent good time on her appeal and succeeded but were not interested in working on the sociological ramifications of what had happened.)
So that’s just a little piece of the puzzle. And it is a big puzzle with many, many pieces. And the puzzle SHOULD be telling us who is doing what to whom, but often, it is not so easy to understand.
This is one reason I am very concerned about the feds’ investigation. What is going on in Florida now, even though Zimmerman has been charged, is still going on within a system that really stinks to high heaven. The “Florida Justice System” is an oxymoron.
I worked hard on a death sentence case in Florida — it ended, of course, with the death of the defendant — and I was appalled. I don’t even have the mental energy to write the story here.
well if you are angry it must be all lies. or something. If you are angry you are the guilty party?
How and why did Corey keep the background of this man from the jury? Sorry but I think that would be really criminal in itself in this case. The factual past of putting Marissa in the hospital. Because of this, anytime he was yelling it would cause fear in her, obviously.
Bettykath, you did just fine, you laid it out, it was comprehensible.
The guy admitted all that he needed to admit to make it obvious that what Alexander was doing was defending her own life. The description — his description — of his attack on her in the bathroom, and her desperate attempts to get away from him, were something like you’d see on TV right before the cops burst in to save the damsel in distress.
This guy would probably have killed her one day — if not that day, then another such day. And he would have probably tried to claim it was self-defense when he did.
Just read the “victim” deposition. He admitted that he was instigator in their altercations. In this instance he pushed her with his body (as if this was better than putting his hands on her), he tried to keep her confined, and was verbally abusive. She’s so tiny that he can easily lift her and put her out. All of her “violence” was slapping in reaction to his manhandling. He told her repeatedly that if he couldn’t have her, no one would and he knew people who could do it for him.
He had been trying to keep her in the bathroom. She managed to get out. She went to the garage but he knew she couldn’t get out. She probably knew it, too, and went to get the gun from her truck, not to leave. The gun incident happened in the house, not the garage. He called his boys into the room when she had the gun. She wanted him to leave but he kept up the verbal abuse until she fired the gun in the air. He was so angry he didn’t know what he would have done if he had gotten his hands on her. She had lots of reason to be fearful of him and angry.
This isn’t as coherent as I like but I’m too angry and upset to fix it.
shano 1, May 13, 2012 at 12:08 pm
I would be afraid and angry if someone was attacking me and had me trapped in a building.
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Me, too. The fear is a realistic response and the anger is what may provide the strength to survive.
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Part of Angela’s problem is that she is a strong woman, not something that women are supposed to be, or at least they’re not supposed to show it.
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I have done a fair amount of traveling alone in a motor home. A couple of guys, at different times, suggested that I carry a gun. They would get the gun and show me how to use it. I declined. First, I think it would give me a false sense of security, security that I could better attain by using my brain. Second, it’s highly unlikely that I would actually fire a gun at someone or, in the seconds that I was deciding not to fire, or to fire and miss, I could easily end up arming an attacker. Not a good thing to do.
Who says times change? The Harrapans were trading with the Sumerians prior to Hammurabi. But their writing is as yet (?) undeciphered. Said to have made the first cities. The source of all evil, IMHO.
And so it goes.
Shano, our justice system is remarkably abuser-friendly. Ordinary people have a hard time getting really good service from government agencies, and when they are told they have to jump through certain hoops, they jump. Abusers, on the other hand, know much more about how to coerce, intimidate and manipulate others, and they employ all their techniques to make government employees do their bidding against the targets they have identified. Furthermore, they are terrific at “out-victiming” their victims. If you look back at the thread Prof. Turley put up when George Zimmerman started his web-site, you will note that Zimmerman’s approach was, “Look how terribly this incident has affected my life, boo hoo for me, ain’t it a shame?” He called the shooting a “life altering experience” — HIS LIFE. He wanted to just kill and then go along without any negative effects in his own life, of course. Why couldn’t people just let him do that? After all, he explained why he felt he needed to kill Trayvon Martin, shouldn’t that be enough trauma for the poor guy?
Although bureaucratic people may complain among themselves about pestiferous abusers and sociopaths who harangue them until they get their way, still, the easiest path is the path of least resistance, and if they give these people what they demand (“Prosecute Her!”) that’s the easiest way out for them. So often they do. Then they may have to cover their rear-ends later, but of course, that’s not all that hard to do.
It’s one of the oldest stories in the old book. In fact, I think it was already written in cuneiform before Hammurabi wrote his Code. It went something like this:
“DO WHAT HE SAYS OR HE WILL PESTER THE LIFE OUT OF YOU.
QUICKLY. SO HE WILL LEAVE.
YOU CAN TAKE CARE OF THE REST OF IT LATER.”
Idealist707, I am absolutely sure that you have met lots of female psychopaths/sociopaths, even up there in your chilly winter wonderland. You just did not get close enough to be mauled badly enough to realize which women WERE that way. Maybe it says something about YOU — that would be terrific (a sociopath-resistant normal). Maybe it says something about the kinds of women you have had in your family (thus, the kind of women you gravitate towards).
Once a friend of mine told me that his mother had to have surgery for colon cancer and that she would have to wear a colostomy bag after that and she was horrified, as was he. He said, “I have never met anyone who had one of those!” I said to him, “of course you have; you never knew it because they didn’t tell you and they didn’t take off their clothes and show you!” He was flabbergasted. I explained, “If one out of every 300 adults wears them, then each time you go to the mall you pass by someone wearing one. You don’t notice. It’s not something you are ever aware of, and that will be what your mother experiences too — nobody will know.” He had a hard time believing that but then, he mentioned that he was sure it was correct, and it made a big difference in how he reacted.
You can’t spot a sociopath just because you spend a few hours or even a few days with them. But if you get into their lives or they get into yours, YOU WILL KNOW IT, just not soon enough.
Oh, about fun?
Probably they have the same kind of fun that any male psychopath/sociopath would have. I’m not sure. My mother-in-law used to have fun starting a fight between her two sons, and then pretending to moderate the fight while she served dinner, while rolling her eyes and making gestures to everyone else, and while adding a stray comment or two to whichever son was dominant at the moment (after which the other one would drink a toast to him). I wish I could recreate that scene on the big screen. Looking back at it, it was hilarious; at the time, NOT.
Are there female psychopaths/sociopaths. And what kind of fun do they have? Jusr curious. Never met one.
Top Shot said:
“Which just probes that it’s not the gun that kills, it’s the idiot that pulls the trigger.”
And my take is that far too many bright people speak out with the same over-simplistic mindset:
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
Unfortunately, that mantra ignores a truer, slightly more complex reality.
In the world of public health, for example, we recognize the existence of “toxic synergy” – items that by themselves are considered safe, but often pose unacceptable health hazards, in combination.
In my experience, there exists no better example of toxic synergy, than the combination of a human being under stress, and a firearm, with its instantaneous ability to take a life.
To my mind, it is seriously under-evolved thinking to posit a “firearms for all” doctrine – that is, for those who might legally possess them – as wise, simply because thousands of citizens (such as you and your family) possess the maturity and restraint to carry one without ugly consequence.
How many more holes do we dig, for how many more children?
The error of our ways – I think – is in the fallacious belief that ANY adult ought to be able to purchase a gun, simply because, as nearly as we can tell, they haven’t proven they shouldn’t.
As societal discipline continues its alarming erosion, we need to recognize the inherent flaw in our own, originally decent-minded, reasoning.
Rico Grey must have done all that to Prosecutor Corey.
I hope it does not end up consuming her….
“Angela Corey is unfortunately getting bits and pieces from somebody who prefers to pervert justice, which is Rico Gray,” Marissa said. “I find it very difficult for her to believe anything that he has to say. That’s pretty much where she’s going wrong, to begin with.”
She is on a razor edge with the Trayvon Martin case coming after this one.
Dredd, Anon, the serial domestic abuser (like Rico Grey) fairly easily gets lots of dates and/or wives, etc. One of the reasons is that he tells each new woman how DIFFERENT she is from that other terrible woman who came before. That woman was vicious, nasty, promiscuous, selfish, greedy, lazy, blah blah blah. He is priming the pump for the new woman to be VERY subservient. If she passes, he will keep up the compliments until he feels dissatisfied about something and then the criticism and bullying will start, but by then, he may have been able to convince her that SHE is to blame for his sudden change of opinion about her comparative excellence.
Another reason may be that the guy could just be a very good sociopath. He will THEN be adroit at charming his prey before consuming them. In fact, the early behavior (dating behavior) of sociopaths is generally fantastic. Their dates say, early on, that they have never been with anyone so kind, understanding, courteous, loving, demonstrative, romantic, gallant, blah blah blah. It is probably kind of mesmerizing. And then…
anon 1, May 12, 2012 at 7:16 pm
This guy is a complete and utter asshole.
I fail to see how he is representative of “Men”.
I do wonder how he is so successful in partnering with women. What’s up with that?
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anon 1, May 12, 2012 at 7:17 pm
I didn’t mean you Dredd.
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Damn. For a minute there I was flattered.
Anyway, one has to realize that our subconscious world, hidden in plain sight, has more to do with these behaviors than we care to admit.
Shano, that’s my point. New York Supreme Court Judge Louis Friedman (now deceased) actually admitted to journalists that he took custody away from a mother because she seemed angry. NOT angry at the children, mind you, angry at her ex-husband! So he thought she was not as good a parent as she should have been based on his perception of her anger. When the journalist questioned him about what she had done or said that displayed anger, he admitted — NOTHING — but she had “angry body language.” This is just an example. And it’s just an anecdote. But I have seen enough things happen in court between men and women to have formed the hypothesist that: When a judge perceives a woman as “angry” in a court proceeding in which the woman’s character, personality or actions are in issue, she is more likely to lose than if the judge does not perceive her as “angry.”
I would be afraid and angry if someone was attacking me and had me trapped in a building.