Shkreli has repeatedly flaunted his wealth, privilege and false sense of superiority. Although not illegal, it's offensive. Offending the public, whether right or wrong, has consequences. Shkreli is getting a taste of mob justice, or just what he asked for.
Pretty much everywhere, if the justice system doesn’t reflect the population’s desire for mob justice, the people will administer it extrajudicially. The places with low bloodthirst traditionally have strong civic fabrics and low violent crime. If those things change the justice system will adapt or die.
Isn‘t this a chicken and egg problem? If people don‘t get to know court proceedings when they happen it doesn‘t give them more outrage and justice porn and calms down the overall atmosphere. To compare, Swiss people generally don‘t care about what happens in courts, they care about the next direct democractic vote (and get riled up about it sometimes), but I consider that at least more at the root of politics and not targeted at individuals.
The justice system is theoretically supposed to be somewhat isolated from this by limitations on democracy. But we've sort of morphed our way out of half of those limitations and we're almost getting the bad stuff without getting the good. The system is very prone to mass public opinion, but there's hardly anything any one individual can do to actively participate in the system. There used to be a strict upper limit of 40,000 citizens to one elected representative. Now the average is something like 20x that iirc, which is such a large number of people that it isn't really practical for most people to self organize and get their representatives attention on an issue. At the same time, people can get hyped up about what they read in internet tabloids or are told through the media, and politicians will be forced to respond to that.
>At the same time, people can get hyped up about what they read in internet tabloids or are told through the media, and politicians will be forced to respond to that.
This is spot on. That gives a heck of a lot of power to news organizations. That's scary when thinking of the quality and journalistic integrity of many, if not most news organizations. People react much more strongly to what they read/watch/listen to on the news. If the news can get them hyped up on a topic (opioid crises is the latest) then the politicians react, typically just enough to get the news off their back. We're left with ham-fisted solutions that make the problem worse. x30 years.
Yes, social media definitely plays a huge role here. At the same time, the average person has next to no power at all. They have virtually no influence on mass opinion, little chances of having any influence on it, and even if they could, mass opinion typically doesn't have much influence on public policy unless its of the 'Manufactured Consent' variety. Perhaps we should be talking less about Russian Twitter bots 'hacking' our democracy and more about the fact that our democracy was barely working long before the 2016 election.
Criminal punishment in a republic [0] is exactly the institutionalization of the idea that offending the public has consequences. Hence, in the US, the popular styling of criminal cases as “The people vs. defendant”.
[0] a “republic” in the sense of a regime where government is notionally an institution for the interest of the public rather than a private property interest of a ruler or distinct ruling class; in non-republics, the non-public “owners” are the persons of whose offense consequences are institutionalized by the criminal justice system.
It's breaking the laws of the country who are indirectly created by the "public," it has nothing to do with mob mentality. We are a nation of laws. In fact, republics are a safeguard against mob mentality which can happen in direct democracy.
Until being offensive is illegal, it should hold no bearing in a just trial. Fortunately, we have the first amendment, which makes being an obnoxious asshole in and of itself perfectly legal.
You only go to jail for being offensive in authoritarian-ruled governments. If we're not better than mob justice, please install decent people in NYC's legal system.
That's quite disingenuous. Entirely different circumstances and facts.
You're using the absolute maximum prosecutors were threatening Swartz with in order to extract a plea deal. They would not have brought anything near that to trial had it gone to trial, much less convicted him on it. In fact, in your link, this is what he was offered: "During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison".
The statute Swartz was charged under has also widely been recognized as flawed. Not the case with what Shkreli was charged with.
That is the issue though, someone has to decide whether to "throw the book at you" or not. As long as someone is left to decide that, then you risk things like "being offensive" working against you, or "showing remorse" helping you.
The allowance for empathy, compassion and mistakes are what lead to the (to you) unfair punishment that was given.
Yeah, no. I'm rejecting your argument. The two are nowhere near the same. Shkreli purposefully did what he did, and more so, he showed no remorse in doing it, and he insulted the court.
