The only problem I have with this law is that it should protect everyone, not just first class citizens like judges and law enforcement. Other professions have disgruntled customers that wish to do people harm, especially other high-stakes professions such as doctors. The more we stratify society with special protections for specific classes of people, the more we drive a divide and feeling of disenfranchisement.
Totally agree. Get everyone's details off the internet and you get those who are more equal than others' off as well. You shouldn't get special privileges because you work for the government.
I understand and sympathize with this view. But it seems likely that a federal judge is more likely to be a target of something like this. Mostly because of the nature of their work.
Sure, but if you look at all type work injury/mortality related issues, I doubt federal judge is at the top of the list. What could happen here though is that even though federal judges arn't at that great a risk in overall work related injury or harm, because they are a high authority high yielding power role they might have their risk addressed first and foremost, while others don't.
We like to think that software engineering is a totally run-of-the-mill occupation, but even with the most basic imagination I can think of scenarios where a software engineer would be threatened by kidnapping/torture/murder/blackmail.
Not all software developers are making web-apps for the next big startup, some of them are working on extremely secret, extremely secure, extremely influential, and extremely deadly software, often times employed by extremely powerful entities.
I had a disgruntled ex-customer show up at my place when a startup went under. It wasn’t violent but certainly felt like it could have been. You don’t need to be working on secret deadly software for powerful entities.
You had a disgruntled person upset at a company. That's a threat and is scary. I'm not downplaying workplace violence -- it's a different threat with different precautions needed.
In the judicial situation, you have a specific unstable/desperate person focusing their anger at Judge X. A judge is a symbol of the state, control, and of a specific matter.
The person doesn't accept responsibility for his actions and holds Judge X specifically accountable for his loss of freedom/income/family/etc. In this modern world, you add on the dimension of unstable politically motived disturbed individuals goaded on by various means. We're fortunate as a society in that disturbed people tend to be disorganized and ineffective, but I think that things are changing that make some of these individuals more dangerous.
Without going into the details too much, the person held the founders (us) responsible for their financial loss. They made some anonymous death threats online first but we didn’t take it very seriously.
I’m sure judges and politicians are at higher risk of retribution, no doubt about it. I only argue we’re not immune as engineers and tech founders. Someone who’s deeply disturbed can direct their blame on anyone remotely involved in their life.
> But it seems likely that a federal judge is more likely to be a target
More likely than...? It would really help understand what you're thinking if you'd finish the sentence.
And I hope you aren't thinking "your average person". If we passed a law to address median risk disparities in all the places we could, essentially everything that isn't mandatory would be forbidden.
Was mostly responding to the parent comment of "You shouldn't get special privileges because you work for the government."
Maybe some people should get protection or consideration because of their occupation. Didn't mean to say that federal judges should have more than another occupation or situation that we may want to compare against.
Thanks for pointing out that I could have communicated more effectively, though.!
Exactly and not even that, look at the number of name and shame requests for rosters based on peoples votes? How long until one of those turns into a bad situation?
All data should be equally protected, lest we fall into the all animals are equal except some are more equal fallacy.
The New Jersey statute itself is arguably vague with respect to what constitutes "risk" and an intent to cause harm. Such arbitrary laws give law enforcement and prosecutors significant discretion and open the door for abuse to such an extent that I could see this being used to violate peoples' First Amendment rights. Another unconstitutional law out of New Jersey, color me shocked. :o
The public should be able to hold peaceful protests and hold public officials accountable.
Because unlike the most influential private individuals, they live in homes with sidewalks - not large gated compounds with their own security details, both designed to make sure the public don't get any chance whatsoever to protest.
Or is that somehow different? If they're politically influential - why, exactly?
Practically, it would mean that you'd have to have a police presence there, wouldn't it? Or are you going to assume that the mob will always play nice, and never decide to storm the house?
Absolutely correct, furthermore not only should the public be protected, but they should also be allowed to request an audit of who's querying their information. I had a (low-ranking) member of law enforcement run my plate and send a harassing letter to my family some years back. While it's fortunate nobody in my family was shot by a nutjob, I wasn't able to find out who it was until I ran into him by chance some time later writing a parking ticket (he was only a parking enforcement official).
I commented about this experience more in depth on reddit[1] and also brought up that federal judges have the US Marshals Service to protect them, and our state judges have county sheriff departments to protect them.
I don't think "first class" citizens is the right classification. There are certain fields/work that are inherently more risky or serve a critical component of society. We are seeing this exact thing pan out now with medical care--doctors and nurses are precious resources and if we don't protect them, we put our overall societal health at risk. Same is true for judges--if you don't protect them, you put the rule of law at risk which is a way of protecting everyone.
Equal protection under the law and freedom of speech.
It's a terrible story being told here and I am saddened by her loss but this judge and you, and I, and everyone else are peers.
Judges may be interesting and special for brief periods of time while they adjudicate on their bench but out in the world they are normal people just like everyone else. If privacy laws are inadequate for them then they are inadequate for all of us.
I can't imagine a situation where I would know, much less disseminate, the address of a judge but that is without any question speech protected by the first amendment.
I think it's worth noting that attacks on judges is probably more detrimental to society than most murders. It's similar for elected office, which is one reason we have these special protections.
That said, I agree with you. As Judge Salas says herself in this article, this is about the foundations of democracy. Peerage is certainly that too.
Also, since prosecutors and police are covered by this law, we need to think of this as mostly relating to law enforcement. They are the vast majority of this population.
Meanwhile, privacy is obviously an area that needs 21st century attention. We should at least get a reason why we don't get these protections too. Extending their rights to privacy separately from everyone else doesn't sit right with me.
> Equal protection under the law and freedom of speech.
The reality is that certain types of people are in fact more important than others. POTUS gets secret service protection -- something that most citizens won't get.
Does a federal judge deserve extra protection under the law than an average citizen? Probably. It's just a question of how much -- precisely for the reasons given in the article.
Now whether or not we should all have that right may be a question worth asking, but it seems pretty certain that federal judges are worthy of this kind of protection.
"The reality is that certain types of people are in fact more important than others. POTUS gets secret service protection -- something that most citizens won't get."
I'm not talking about that - and I have no problem if judges (or anyone else) have extra bodyguards or special limousines.
I can say anything I like about the president. The same is true for these judges. The equal protection I am speaking of is not what kind of armor their car has, but what I am, and am not, allowed to say to or about them.
Go ahead and say anything you like about them. Your political opinions are entitled to the highest order of protection under the 1st Amendment.
There's little reason to say that "X judge lives at Y address" is equivalently deserving of protection. We might choose to protect your saying so out of an abundance of caution, to avoid a slippery slope whereby we restrict too much speech. But the idea they're equivalently valuable things to protect in their own right needs a serious defense.
"We might choose to protect your saying so out of an abundance of caution, to avoid a slippery slope whereby we restrict too much speech. But the idea they're equivalently valuable things to protect in their own right needs a serious defense."
Investigative journalism revealing corruption.
It might not be the address per se but it will be similarly identifying and revealing information about a persons day to day life. This information would be communicated both while reporting the story, between reporters and other sources, etc., as well as exposed in the journalistic product itself.
Or, given five seconds of thought, that was the first, obvious thing that came to mind.
But there you go: you yourself just distinguished it, acknowledging that the address itself isn't what needs to be published in order to preserve society's interest in free publication about corruption.
So then what is the solution? If their life is not more important than everybody else’s then why do they get extra protection? Why can’t we extend the same protection to all? Why do we have special cases? Why can’t an individual, and a judge, be entitled to the same protection?
Their life is more important to protect from particular threats than everyone else's, because they're in a position where we expect them to make rulings based on their expertise and judgment rather than their fear or concern for popularity, and because they are more frequently in a position to garner someone's resentment or hatred than most of us are.
Just because we're all equal in the eyes of God doesn't mean our society should pretend the world isn't complex.
You're being disingenuous. There are different ways of measuring value, so when someone says "yes" you pounce on that even though that particular equivalency/measurement isn't the whole story when it comes to how we organize society.
No, you’re missing my point! To you, what is she? Some random person. Her life is not more important. If she’s scared for her life, then she should find a new job. Giving protection to certain people but not others is the definition of elitism. She’s a human just like the rest, is scared for her life just like the rest, yet only she gets extra protection? What you’re saying, pretty well directly, is she’s somehow better than the rest of us.
She is not some random person to me. She is someone I have granted (through my government) a position of power and trust, which exposes her to certain risks which I want to protect her from, because being scared for one's life is not a quality that I want in people adjudicating legal disputes and criminal sentences.
Supply and demand is a separate thing. People stockpiling these mask has led to this shortage. What you are suggesting with regard to protection is a universal right.
And yea, if a Dr is so scared of contracting a disease in a profession specifically putting them in this situation, they should also quit their job. Certain jobs require a strong stomach for risk. Don’t take it if you can’t handle it.
Also let’s not forget she not only didn’t teach her son to check who’s at the door before opening it, she can also very easily defend herself using her second amendment rights. Just like the rest of us.
How much First Amendment history and jurisprudence do you know? There's a naive view that speech is speech, and it's all protected, but that is an absolutely radical view compared to what "free speech" has meant for most of the post-Enlightenment period.
The comment said that it is without any question speech protected by the 1st Amendment. My comment is obviously following up on that.
I do not think it is clear that publishing a judge's address is the kind of speech that is necessarily protected by the 1st Amendment, and certainly not the kind that would have been considered inherently worthy of protection around when the 1st Amendment was written. And I suspect the claim that it is "without question" is a naive one.
I will answer. Publishing the address of an individual is absolutely protected by the First Amendment unless it can be reasonably deemed a true threat, or an incitement to violence, under the appropriate judicial tests.
You don't think a job which massively inconveniences petty and violent criminals - some of whom will be part of larger crime families and networks - is inherently risky?
> You don't think a job which massively inconveniences petty and violent criminals - some of whom will be part of larger crime families and networks - is inherently risky?
Those jobs are, but regular people have dangerous stalkers, are subject to harassment at their homes, or just want the peace of mind of some extra privacy, too.
No one's arguing that judges shouldn't have protection, it's just that the same protections should be available to everybody else. Limiting these projections to judges & police officers only really helps marketers and sleazy peoplesearch websites, etc.
I probably would think it was too. But instead of just guessing I looked it up. It's not. Not even close.
It's so far away from being risky, in fact, that having people in the field intentionally lying means I think they are lying for a specific reason and I think people should be concerned about that.
I'm not saying we shouldn't protect them. But why not extend these protections to the general public?
I used the term first class citizens because people in power tend to grant themselves more of it over time or have privileges (official or unofficial) which benefit them, and not just to protect them. For example, how often do you hear about police being given a ticket? Many laws explicitly except the people in Congress as well.
I see your point. "First class" is loaded, but I don't this is just about risk. That's evident in the content of the law and in both judge Salas' explanation for it.
"The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy"
Indeed it is. It's not just about likelihood of an attack occurring. It's about potential consequences. Killing judges is destabilizing... both directly and via reaction. They are an actually weakening to the governing system as a whole.
We do actually have totally separate ways of protecting elected officials, including unique laws. They are, essentially, "first class citizens." It's because attacks are likely and because the consequences of such attacks are dangerous.
That said, I sympathize with the OP. Separate laws for the specific protection of certain classes of citizens is well... also relevant to the foundations of democracies. Why can't these protections^ be extended to everyone?
"“Daniel’s Law,” which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel."
For example, pass a law making the distribution of PII unlawful if the intent of the distribution is to cause violence or unrest. The law itself would cover everyone evenly.
With a few sentence enhancement clauses, the same statute that protects everyone equally can add additional terms of incarceration or mandatory minimums for judges and law enforcement.
There are well-established exceptions that include incitement to violence. Wikipedia's summary:
"Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising."
Yup. Thankfully in a criminal investigation, the burden of proof for "intent" is typically on the prosecutor. I'd rather give the prosecutor a harder time than a defendant.
> There are certain fields/work that are inherently more risky or serve a critical component of society.
You mean like grocery delivery drivers and cashiers?
What about virologists? Or what about all of the PhD students in Field X, where X is not virology but some other thing that will be at the focal point of the next crisis but which everyone today thinks is unnecessary and figures we should stop over-produce PhDs for? 12 months ago you could probably come to a place like HN, complain that you can't find a good paying job with your phd in coronaviruses, and be told that academia is a pyramid scheme, that no one owes you anything and you should just learn to code and go work on a labor law arbitrage product at the center of an even bigger pyramid scheme.
Since we're on a technology forum, what about the engineers who implement the software/hardware that's used to manufacture PPE, or run simulations to help design mRNA vaccines, or write firmware for the machinery and devices used to mass produce vaccines? Or even more mundane but none-the-less useful stuff like designing and implementing intuitive UX for no-contact payment methods?
Anyways, what's the point of drawing this line between "useful resource" and "everyone else"? What if the role of government were to treat humans citizens with natural rights that should be protected by law, instead of as economic resources to be deployed?
Also, have you asked any essential workers how they feel about being treated as a useful resource? Instead of, you know, a human with natural and legal rights?
Perhaps judges don't need special treatment. Maybe, perhaps, personal privacy is incredibly important component of human dignity.
I hate seeing this with journalists too arguing that they should get special protections and rights. Everyone should have the protections and rights. Not just judges, not just journalists.
It's a worthy statement, but at the same time, this is not the same thing.
If we didn't provide special protections for judges, 1/2 of them would be dead.
Organized Crime is a very powerful thing, they kill people all the time for a lot less and witness intimidation is rampant.
Judges take on a much greater responsibility than most others.
If there's an opportunity for 'equity' in this special equation, it may be for those who provide testimony in the courts protections. Because they are not protected nearly as well, they are easy targets:
"a study of witnesses appearing in criminal courts in Bronx County, New York revealed that 36 percent of witnesses had been directly threatened; among those who had not been threatened directly, 57 percent feared reprisals" [1]
Imagine if people weren't afraid of retribution against gangs and organized criminals, the world would be a different place.
The US govnernment already spends $$$ to give its president the kind of protection that can be only dreamed by ordinary citizens. Bulletproof cars, Air Force One, a gang of bodyguards who are trained to put themselves between you and the bullet. Sometimes they literally block streets and your right to peacefully move or assemble. Your tax dollars at work.
Why such unfairness?
Because the world is full of bad actors and crazies dreaming of killing the POTUS, and it pays off in the long run to not have the president killed off in that fashion.
So what's the reason for not extending the proposed protections to all?
Also, the difference here is that the items you describe for the president are proactive measures based on credible threats. Not all judges have credible threats against them. This also wouldn't be a proactive measure - it's just a piece of paper.
Another problem that I have is that this is once again allowing law enforcement to further damage others, which they absolutely and totally refuse to take responsibility for.
Shoot someone who took a jab at you 6 times with a strong suspicion and history of racist motive ?
1) You're a private citizen: death sentence. Hundreds of thousands to millions in damages to be paid. And you can be DAMN sure nobody's will ever grant you any kind of clemency.
2) You're a police officer: Not only do you go free, you don't have to pay any damages and the incident is stricken from your record ... You MAY be asked to resign if protests get too bad.
If by some magic, there are damages to be paid, they will not be extracted from the perpetrators of the crime.
This, and worse, is what these protections will also be used for. Defending law enforcement personnel from the consequences of their own mistakes, their own racism, from attacking their ex-girlfriends or ex-wives, ...
Not everyone has the same risks. Take child protective services workers as an example I’m familiar with.
These folks can be systematically targeted because of their job, which is much harder to protect yourself against. I understand your thought process, but it seems unfair to not provide basic protections to people working on our behalf.
Then covering you too would be an approximately zero cost to that law. Yet it would cover retired judges, nearly-judges, people who aren't judges but have similar problems we haven't thought of yet, and have the moral advantage of treating everyone the same.
That's just a reason why you aren't supporting the protections for everyone. What's your reason for opposing it being applied to everyone?
Just because you feel there is no risk of a disgruntled person targeting you, doesn't mean that there are other people who don't have risk in other jobs (like doctors or managers).
This rings true in the UK as well. With mainstream publications and members of government attacking “lefty lawyers” and “unelected judges” simply for doing their job, which is to uphold the law, we need to take the rhetoric we apply to these situations seriously. There need to be serious consequences for credible threats of violence against people, even when made by people in the public sphere.
Furthermore, I hear a lot of people say things like “how can lawyers defend people who do such horrible things”. I think it is an important part of our education to understand civics, and why we are entitled to a defence, rather than just subjected to the whims of an inquisition. Having a well-resourced defence for alleged criminals (and other legal aid in civil cases) means that we can be certain as a society that we get the right person for crimes, and ensures the system runs as intended.
I'll be honest in saying that I do think the so called "lefty lawyers" are usually defending people most don't like (e.g. foreign criminals), but I also hate the government's characterisation of the lawyers themselves. Like freedom of speech, people have a right to a defence.
In fact, part of having a strong legal system is the fact that it optimises for false negatives. Better to let 100 criminals go free than one person unjustly imprisoned.
Yes, you’re right, they are (the solicitors) often defending people that are not well-liked. However, in a lot of cases, the government is losing the cases, as the govt is violating the law. Rather than attacking the process, the govt is in a position to change the law if it wants to.
A side note. Barristers in the UK do not choose their clients. There’s what’s called the “cab-rank rule”, which says that if a barrister is instructed on a case they are sufficiently competent in, they must take the case without prejudice.
> “how can lawyers defend people who do such horrible things”
It's perhaps worth noting that (in the UK at least), that should never happen, at least in the sense of a defence lawyer trying to get a "not guilty" verdict for a defendant they know is guilty:
"It's obviously unethical and illegal for a lawyer to deceive a court knowingly. If my client tells me he's guilty, I can't say he's innocent in court. I cannot call him to give evidence that I know is false or I would be a party to his perjury."[0]
Of course I'm sure it does happen all the time, but you don't need to justify a system where lawyers are lying for the benefit of their client, because that's not the system we are meant to have.
Correct. Lawyers are not allowed to raise an argument that is known to them to be false. If a lawyer is told by their client that they did it, the only defence that they can legitimately raise is if there were some mitigating circumstance.
Reason behind the attack. Good read. Basically the attacker, a lawyer, had sued the army to allow women to register for draft, and felt that the female judge was delaying the case. He was fighting for the women's right to be treated equally when it comes to drafting.
I've been online for 25 years. There were always trolls, devil's advocates, provocateurs, apologists... But something has changed in the last 5 years. It's like all those roles have been rolled up into a uniformed propaganda department.
Oh wow, this is a very isolated take, seemingly based solely off on snippet from TFA. I initially thought the same because I was genuinely surprised women couldn't already register, but a quick internet search of the assailant's name gave me whiplash. If outspoken misogyny isn't your bag, you may want to look into him further before getting behind him.
> angered by the pace of a lawsuit he had filed in my court.
> In my case, Roy Den Hollander, a New York lawyer who had filed a suit against the male-only military draft, harbored deadly grudges. On July 11, 2020, he killed a lawyer in California. Eight days later, he came to our door and killed Daniel. Too late, I learned that he had often described himself as “anti-feminist.” In a self-published memoir, he described me as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama.”
Aside from easy access to guns, we can add slow legal system and political radicalization to the compounding factors of this tragedy.
Really seems like someone who made a vexatious litigant out of themselves on the back of "mens' rights" pet issues should probably have a full-time FBI tail.
What won't be popular: the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal.
Not at all saying that this specific case is a matter of positional abuse ( definitely appears to be a tragic lone mental health case, which is a whole other problem in our society entirely ) - merely stating that the right to bear arms is intended to be a check against it.
I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the state, but that is a very different thing from "extrajudicial reprisal."
The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns.
There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure.
But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.
Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine.
In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
That's fair, and we've seen in the last half-century or so that the US military can lose to asymmetric warfare when it can't lose to nuclear powers.
But, I don't think that e.g. the guerrillas of Vietnam were morally ambiguous simply because they engaged in asymmetric warfare against the US military. They were fighting against identified soldiers in a declared war; they had the right to engage by the international rules / norms of war. They killed people who had taken up arms against them. (Yes, most of their opponents were forced to take up arms; that doesn't make the opposing force morally ambiguous in its opposition.)
They're very different from various terrorists (domestic and foreign) who have attacked the US in recent years, who also reached the conclusion that only asymmetric warfare would work against the US, but chose to attack non-combatants - office workers, children, etc. And they weren't merely casualties of a morally-ambiguous operation; they were direct targets. (As it happens, these terrorists were not particularly effective, either.)
So even if we want to grant modern interpretation to the Second Amendment and read in the right to do whatever is effective against the government of the US (instead of talking about what it was crafted to do), it still seems to me like it should be about making sure you have the arms and the training to defend yourself against an illegitimate government and establish your own, perhaps through asymmetric warfare if needed - which is still very different from randomly attacking individual officials whom you have declared corrupt in an otherwise-legitimate government (let alone their family members).
>> the second amendment was crafted specifically so that functionaries of State power can't abuse their position without the risk of extrajudicial reprisal.
What makes you say that? I'm not disagreeing, necessarily, but is there any writing to support this reasoning? Who held this position?
The difference when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations. Any division is amplified then. All it takes is someone to lose it and it’s a cheap solution. And everyone knows it. The communities you speak of are a division.
I worked for a large defence contractor in the US for a number of years and got to see the contrast in professional and personal relations between their European and American employees. It’s scary when you see.
> when there are ubiquitous firearms and not is the level of fear and nervousness among strained relations
100% disagree. The saying "armed society is polite society" is absolutely true, at least when it comes to the interaction between arms and western social ethics. Obviously your results may vary in the Congo or Chicago or whatever.
Even if we accept the (most likely contextually false) premise that reducing firearms access for non-criminals also meaningfully reduces firearms access for criminals, I do not have any preference (ceteris paribus) between getting shot, stabbed, or having my head bashed in. In fact, I might prefer getting shot.
In the more realistic case where criminal firearm attainability is less than perfectly correlated with non-criminal firearm attainability, it makes sense for non-criminals to be armed as well.
There's also the MAD dynamic; people are less likely to physically escalate if there is a possibility of a high-severity response.
> it’s a cheap solution
A murder charge for an unjustified shooting is hardly "cheap".
I love this feature. It's great knowledge. Some people want to censor the morons but that would remove the amount of morons you could readily identify.
In the pre-internet days your ability to propagate stuff depended on your credentials. With appropriate credentials you could speak on radio, TV or publish a story in a newspaper. With the internet and social media your ability to propagate stuff (and go "viral") depends on your story (even if not truthful) not on your credentials. This is the reason why almost half the population now believes in and acts on conspiracy theories. We need to bring back the world where how far your story propagates (or how powerful the weapon you can own) depends on your credentials.
Surely there are many factors that would drive that. Widespread availability of inexpensive guns being only one. Punishments for unlawful possession being another that vary wildly across the globe.
In general, I don't disagree but isn't the second point ultimately a tautology? Certainly an otherwise law abiding citizen might arm themself with no intention of committing a further crime.
True. In general, the more laws there are, the fewer law-abiding people there are, since there are more laws to violate.
For example, I don't think the recent decriminalization of weed in various US states probably hasn't caused very many people to start using it. But in the same way, the laws against it didn't do much to limit its use.
implying gun-control would have prevented this crime?
maybe. the article describes the crime in a way that suggests stabbing would have worked as well, and the criminal was angry/motivated enough to kill by any means.
When citizens aren't armed, dumb criminals can't find guns. (Where would they get one?) Smart criminals understands that using a gun in a society without guns will make themselves feature prominently in national news, and the police will make it top priority to arrest them.
I mean, just visit any country where ordinary citizens don't carry guns.
According to Wikipedia, 0.20 out of 100,000 people died of guns in 2015, of which only 0.02 are homicides. As for the US - 12.21 out of 100,000 total, 4.46 homicides.
Seems like British criminals do have a really hard time finding guns.
In our country, less than 10% of murders are between people who do not know each other. And if you do not live in the specific bad neighborhoods that account for nearly all of our murders, then our crime statistics are literally the same. My town of 100,000 had 0 murders last year.
If you are able to solve the problems plaguing both East London and West Baltimore, I'm all ears, however it seems the war on murder will rage on
Criminals well into the crime world decided to commit a crime will find a gun regardless of the country they are in.
US is arming the average Joe with no gun training, or psychological evaluation, the guy that is selling weed at the corner of SF, Karen that is angry at the customer service and the full of hormones schoolchildren.
Now given that all of these people have access to highly lethal guns, law enforcement has to be more pro-active than other countries, thus all of the expenses to buy war machines for neighborhood police depts.
The "Everybody should be armed" narrative is spread by people who can't even properly justify their reasoning. They always throw a "they should have been armed and they wouldn't die" or something as dumb "all school staff should be armed". I learned to ignore them and their wild west fantasies.
Good idea. I've found the best way to engage (if you want to engage) is to just take the argument seriously, and ask what kind of society they envision, in detail. It gets awkward quickly.
There's a subreddit that lists news stories of self-defence situations with a firearm. They don't make the news because they are all local stories but it happens all the time.
The idea that the US can somehow turn back the clock with hundreds of millions of legal guns already purchased is laughable. Almost every attempt at the state or city level has completely backfired. That train passed long ago. And the denial of this has only ever worsened the problem. I'd go as far as saying it's an anti-science position in 2020.
An aggregator of stories on a given topic can make anything seem to happen frequently. This would, by design, ignore any stories that don't fit the narrative. It may be a good source for stories on that exact topic, but is by no means an accurate indicator of frequency, especially as a sole source.
Unless you correct for education, wealth distribution and Asher things like gang affiliations that's be selection bias too; there's just much more than "firearms deaths/firearms ownership" going on.
Or the moron goes to the hardware store and buys a bottle of acid instead. Or, in cases more typical than either of these, the moron is an ex-husband and uses his fists.
Although taking away arms would resolve the issue in the short term. But an alternative approach would be to provide better education and raise awareness around firearms, which would benefit the society in the long run.
"Providing better education" has been the progressive backstop for the last 100 years. Turns out that marginal returns on additional education are pretty close to zero. This is depressing, but pretty incontrovertible when you compare between A) returns on education in high-expenditure countries like the US vs low-expenditure EU countries (very similar) B) return on education in the same place across time, with the trend usually being that education expenditure goes up over time and educational returns don't change.
Above a certain minimal level of education, demographic outcomes like crime rate seem to be 70-80% predicted by entirely heritable characteristics, with very little environmental interaction.
> Above a certain minimal level of education, demographic outcomes like crime rate seem to be 70-80% predicted by entirely heritable characteristics, with very little environmental interaction.
This is just racism in a language that's palatable to HN.
In this specific case, I think her son could of been stabbed to death too with a sharp object. There are many way to violently kill someone, gun bans or not.
That’s not the way the law works. I am surprised a federal judge is unable to understand this, but of course she has lived through the worst thing a parent could experience. And it is indirectly why we in the USA have a second amendment. Hear me out before downvoting me.
The police, sadly, are not here to prevent crime. That’s why people who get restraining orders continue to live in fear. Our legal system simply has no concept of preventing crime except through statute. That’s why some of us, especially those living in rural areas where the police could be half an hour away or more, are afforded self protection through firearms.
I don't understand what this comment has to do with the article. The author doesn't discuss reforming firearm laws. She is trying to get support for a new law that increases privacy guarantees for judges. What exactly is she unable to understand?
I feel for her but this entire line of reasoning and Daniel's Law are hypocritical and self-serving.
For our nation’s sake, judicial security is essential. Federal judges must be free to make their decisions, no matter how unpopular, without fear of harm. The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy.
Since Daniel’s death, I have vowed to do everything I can to make similar tragedies less likely. Last month New Jersey passed what is known as “Daniel’s Law,” which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel.
Where are protections for defense attorneys? Or private citizens who serve on juries - especially in unpopular cases? Surely their sense of safety must also be foundational to our great democracy. This "remedy" here is extremely inequitable, and I'd rather see protections extended to everyone, not just classes that have lawmakers' favor.
Only in movies do judges get every ruling right. There is an error rate, but thats the best case scenario. In reality many judges are political hacks, and cowards that will rule in line with their political backers when it matters. This has been true for as long as humans have lived in civilization.
Laws like this just give them more cover.
>In reality many judges are political hacks, and cowards that will rule in line with their political backers when it matters. This has been true for as long as humans have lived in civilization. Laws like this just give them more cover.
The law in question[0], in part, requires:
"The bill amends the Open Public Records Act (“OPRA”) to exclude from the definition of a government (i.e., public) record the portion of any document which discloses the home address of any active or retired 1) judge, 2) prosecutor or 3) law enforcement officer.
Further, the bill prohibits government agencies, individuals and businesses from knowingly publishing on the internet, or otherwise making available, the home address or unpublished home telephone number of any active or retired judge or any active or retired prosecutor."
Now there's certainly an argument to be made that such restrictions, if we are to have them, should be much, much, broader, given the harassment (including SWATting[1]) of other folks outside the specific job functions mentioned in the law.
I'm trying to view your comment in the best possible light, but I keep coming back to the last sentence:
"Laws like this just give them more cover."
How, exactly, do you mean that restricting access to the home addresses of such folks "gives them more cover?"
Is it your assertion that judges and other folks should have their home addresses available as some sort of extra-legal check on their authority?
What purpose does that serve? So that those who disagree with such people can go over to their house with a fruit basket and calmly discuss how their decision was incorrect and caused harm?
That seems pretty unlikely. As such, I'm forced to interpret your statement as:
"We should publish the home addresses of these people so they can be harassed, threatened, assaulted or killed if they make decisions I disagree with."
If I misunderstand you, please explain and accept my apologies.
In a democracy we are ruled by consent. I fundamentally oppose secrecy for those in power. We are not afforded such privilege as citizens. There are existing laws, that would severely punish anyone harassing a judge. But a judge is part of the community. Judges need to be accountable to the communities they rule in. If they do something that would result in a violent mob showing up at their house.
Like for example, overturn an election unjustly. Then we are already down the path of severe political instability.
The machinery of the state is set up to protect judges. If judges are being tracked down and killed in large numbers. Then its a sure sign that the state is failing too. In such a case, I would rather that the state fail quickly.
Having secret judges, secret tribunals, or anonymous judges, would only make oppression easier. This is what dictatorships do.
And your logic would equally fit any politician, as most have received death threats. And some have been harassed at their homes.
> If judges are being tracked down and killed in large numbers. Then its a sure sign that the state is failing too. In such a case, I would rather that the state fail quickly.
Oh right, so what you are saying is that once the killin starts, you hope it ramps up fast!
Like the other commenter said, I hope I don't live near you.
You make a bunch of valid points. Thanks for clarifying.
>Having secret judges, secret tribunals, or anonymous judges, would only make oppression easier. This is what dictatorships do.
But I don't really get what you mean by this. We don't have secret or anonymous judges. And anyone who wants to address any particular judge knows exactly where to find them -- at the relevant courthouse.
In fairness, we do have the FISA court, whose proceedings are secret (and I don't like that one bit), but the judges who sit on the FISA court aren't anonymous or "secret." And again, if someone has an issue with any of those judges, they can just go to the relevant court and do so.
Going to people's homes to intimidate or harm them or their families is repugnant to me personally and to a free society in general.
You said that "Laws like this just give them more cover."
Are you advocating that people go to people's homes to intimidate, threaten and harm people and/or their families as a check on how they deal with others?
That sounds a lot like the vigilantism you appear to decry.
Or are you claiming that we live in a failed state, so any actions taken against public figures is not only acceptable, but encouraged?
I guess the tl;dr is that you didn't answer my question. Will you do so now?
I want judges to be safe. I also want to understand the motivations of this attacker. Their actions weren't justified, but having a long-running court case that can decide the course of your life can cause many new problems. What level of desperation would cause someone to lash out like this? There will always be unreasonable people, but I wonder if this outcome would have been different if courts did indeed process cases in a timely way. We know it is especially cruel to people who have nothing to defend themselves with.
An openly misogynistic lawyer who is believed to have killed the son of a female federal judge in New Jersey had a list of more than a dozen other possible targets, including three other judges and two doctors, three people with knowledge of the matter said. ...
While his precise motive for making the list remains unclear, Mr. Den Hollander had received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and F.B.I. agents earlier this week were exploring whether that news set him off on a mission of revenge against those he believed were his enemies.
... Mr. Den Hollander described himself as an anti-feminist and had made a career out of filing lawsuits, some of them frivolous, alleging discrimination against men. He also published blog posts in 2006 arguing women were inferior to men and advocating physical violence against them. In one post, he said women should be strapped to missiles and dropped in the Middle East.
The article explains his motivations. Apparently he was driven by his ideology rather than personal desperation. From the article:
Roy Den Hollander, a New York lawyer who had filed a suit against the male-only military draft, harbored deadly grudges. On July 11, 2020, he killed a lawyer in California. Eight days later, he came to our door and killed Daniel. Too late, I learned that he had often described himself as “anti-feminist.” In a self-published memoir, he described me as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama.”
Limiting it to just a select protected class is creating asymmetries that strike me as Un-American.
Slipper slope to there being harsher penalties for even mentioning a judges name. LEO covering or removing their name tags and badge numbers for "safety".
It’s so odd to see a presumably very intelligent person believe that we can legislate a solution to this problem. Maybe mandated physical security for all judges (which is how it’s done in may other countries)? But Daniel’s Law just introduces a bit more friction that would almost certainly be surmounted by a highly motivated individual. The law is just window dressing.
I don't think it should be any more illegal to kill ones another than anothers.
It should be equally, maximally illegal to kill people and everyone should have the same guarantee to personal safety, no matter how much at risk they are.
Here in DK we have some weird law that somehow, murders related to gang activity is punished harder (read: more illegal) than other murders, this is insane! It signals that gang members are more important, and killing them therefore punished harder.
> In my house, the only way to see who has come to the front door is to peek through a bay window. In mid-July, after four months of Covid-19 restrictions, home deliveries occurred almost daily. Daniel’s killer took advantage of this familiar routine, coming to our door posing as a Fed-Ex delivery courier.
This to me is the most incongruous thing about this story. Why bother with a disguise if your intent is just to shoot everybody? He ended up just going home and killing himself, so it's not like he planned a big escape.
Salas was also coincidentally(?) overseeing a class action lawsuit against Deutsche Bank in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, leading to much speculation. The NY Times piece does a good job placing the motive solely on the FedEx hitman.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt if our political leaders wouldn’t immediately bash judges if a decision doesn’t go their way. With the current election fraud outrage I see this even get worse.
It's crazy how many places people's personal information is. DMV databases and voter files are semi-public, but there are also things like data from credit reports.
I definitely agree that there should be a law like this, but one that basically makes distributing EVERYONEs home address or phone number illegal. I've been asking for this for years.
Why? Those people who attack, who hurt, who punish, who bind - at best, what they do is a necessary evil. But they are acting from positions of institutional power. The more you are considered out-of-order, abnormal, criminal, you are generally weaker, have less recourse, less able to protect yourself and more tempting to abuse.
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I also disagree with the judge's conclusion on the question of means rather than ends. Instead of giving judges special protection, I would rather US society did something about its horrible gun culture. The number of killings in the US is spectacularly high. And always it seems that the solution they opt for is _more_ violence, militarization, retaliation through superior firepower, body and vehicle armor etc. US police is already heavily militarized, being fed a nearly-infinite supply of military surplus equipment. Now we'll have fortified compounds where judges are isolated from people? No. That actually does reminds me of Judge Dredd, even if not of the exact details.
This going to be an unpopular opinion I'm sure, but maybe if you are a judge who holds the power to literally destroy lives on a whim with your judgements, you should be fully accountable for those actions. And yes, maybe this means having your personal information public for all to see.
If you make a shitty judgement and destroy someone's life and you end up getting targeted as a result, then maybe you shouldn't have made an unjust judgment and destroyed someone's life. Your judgements should have weight, and shouldn't be made lightly.
Maybe if there was more personal accountability in our justice system then the American judicial system would stop focusing so much on prison profitability and punishment, and would start focusing more on positive concepts like rehabilitation and social support structures?
> If you make a shitty judgement and destroy someone's life and you end up getting targeted as a result, then maybe you shouldn't have made an unjust judgment and destroyed someone's life. Your judgements should have weight, and shouldn't be made lightly.
In regards to woman's son's death, this is entirely victim blaming. What judgement did she make that destroyed someone's life? What did she do that warranted her son being killed?
I think your opinion is valid to have. Mistakes are made that nobody would ever want to suffer from and regardless if the victims gain financial freedom from the mistakes (that rarely happens).
Realistically, I don't believe Judges will ever face real consequences and what's more probable is the system adapting towards lesser punishing modals. Also providing the ability to expunge records completely and universal income for criminals unable to obtain a job after their release. The punishment for a crime shouldn't be unemployment/homelessness for life.
There are other professions such as in the medical field that can really damage a persons life as well. Not everyone has the money to sue or even win a malpractice case and lawyers won't always take a victim's case as pro bono. Persons severely wronged, deeply need a way to feel some remedy and or we will continue to see vengeance outbursts. Especially from persons that see others being remedied for what they believe was much lesser in comparison to what happened in their own situation and where they constantly think the only reason they're not obtaining a remedy is from grossly unfairer situations they're in because of the wrong that happened in the past.
I think the foregoing is similar to why there are so many school shooters in USA. People need a remedy from being wronged and sadly all we have is a remedy system for the fairly well off. That also caters once in a while to someone that isn't so well off.
It's crucial be able to hold government officials accountable. However, I think your argument is based on the premise that people only decide to kill others as a result of a carefully reasoned decision. This is not the case. There are plenty of legitimate ways one can take action after being wronged by the government, from appealing to a higher court to going to the media; killing people is not one of these.
People who kill others in situations like these rarely come to their decision based on fact and rationality. As much as we need more accountability, putting government officials - or anyone else - in a potentially life-threatening situation at a time where armed terrorists regularly make death threats based on baseless conspiracies is not a good way to do that.
What if you make a fair judgment and still destroy someone's life? Should they still come to your house and kill your child, or is that only allowed if it was an unjust ruling? Who decides if the ruling was just or not?
Judicial elections are also problematic - we've seen what lobbyists can do to Congress, and there's no reason to expect them to be more tame in a scenario where the Judiciary is also elected.
Nobody disagrees with holding judges accountable but from the context, what you're advocating for sounds like a blood feud and we all know how those tend to turn out.
