Random News Stories

[Captain X]

Thought I'd make a thread for random news stories that don't really deserve their own thread since I happen to have one of those and didn't see a thread for it.

Man Imprisoned for 16 Years for Raping Lovely Bones Author Is Exonerated

Alice Sebold achieved fame and fortune while Anthony Broadwater has been living as a pariah for over 20 years on the sex offender registry.

reason.com

The upshot here is that the woman who wrote "The Lovely Bones" lied about a man raping her, then went on to write two books about it for fame and profit while he lived in squalor because the patriarchal rape culture feminists insist runs this country was so anxious to convict and punish him even after letting him out of prison. This was apparently undone because one of the producers working on the adaptation of her first book, "Lucky," had a legal background and noticed inconsistencies in the story. After he got fired for asking about these inconsistencies, he hired a PI to look into it and found that this man was convicted on very shaky evidence, which basically consisted of trying to match hair follicles (not DNA, just trying to match how they looked), and then there's the fact that the alleged victim couldn't even point her alleged attacker out in a line-up, and actually had picked out someone entirely different from the man who ended up going on trial.

 

[Duke Nukem]

 

[Abhorsen]

Thought I'd make a thread for random news stories that don't really deserve their own thread since I happen to have one of those and didn't see a thread for it.

Man Imprisoned for 16 Years for Raping Lovely Bones Author Is Exonerated

Alice Sebold achieved fame and fortune while Anthony Broadwater has been living as a pariah for over 20 years on the sex offender registry.

reason.com

The upshot here is that the woman who wrote "The Lovely Bones" lied about a man raping her, then went on to write two books about it for fame and profit while he lived in squalor because the patriarchal rape culture feminists insist runs this country was so anxious to convict and punish him even after letting him out of prison. This was apparently undone because one of the producers working on the adaptation of her first book, "Lucky," had a legal background and noticed inconsistencies in the story. After he got fired for asking about these inconsistencies, he hired a PI to look into it and found that this man was convicted on very shaky evidence, which basically consisted of trying to match hair follicles (not DNA, just trying to match how they looked), and then there's the fact that the alleged victim couldn't even point her alleged attacker out in a line-up, and actually had picked out someone entirely different from the man who ended up going on trial.

Well this just sucks all around. Both the guy getting wrongly convicted and Sebold finding out that her rapist is free. All because of prosecutorial misconduct (he basically told Sebold who to point at after she identified the wrong person).

 

[Terthna]

Well this just sucks all around. Both the guy getting wrongly convicted and Sebold finding out that her rapist is free. All because of prosecutorial misconduct (he basically told Sebold who to point at after she identified the wrong person).

The fact that Alice Sebold hasn't offered to give him any of the money she's made off of the crime he was wrongfully convicted of kills any sympathy I might have had for her; even assuming she didn't just make it all up.

 

[Captain X]

Oklahoma and really all the red states should do the same. This will give the people who don't want to submit to the vaxx a place to go, as well as a state-specific militia that can't be Federalized and/or deployed abroad.

 

[Abhorsen]

The fact that Alice Sebold hasn't offered to give him any of the money she's made off of the crime he was wrongfully convicted of kills any sympathy I might have had for her; even assuming she didn't just make it all up.

She very much didn't make up being raped, there's plenty of evidence for that. And she did nothing wrong, so she doesn't owe him money. It would be nice for her to do so, but she isn't obligated here. She's just found out she's been victimized again by the prosecutor robbing her of justice so they could get a conviction. Have some sympathy.

As for the guy, he should end up being paid for the years he was in jail, so he'll at least get something.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Both she and the prosecutor are both open to some pretty staggering civil suits however.

 

[LordsFire]

She very much didn't make up being raped, there's plenty of evidence for that. And she did nothing wrong, so she doesn't owe him money. It would be nice for her to do so, but she isn't obligated here. She's just found out she's been victimized again by the prosecutor robbing her of justice so they could get a conviction. Have some sympathy.

As for the guy, he should end up being paid for the years he was in jail, so he'll at least get something.

If she did in fact let the prosecutor redirect her pointing out the perp in a line-up, then she very much did do something wrong. Lying while laying an accusation of rape is serious, serious business, as the man having his life ruined for decades proves.

 

[Bacle]

If she did in fact let the prosecutor redirect her pointing out the perp in a line-up, then she very much did do something wrong. Lying while laying an accusation of rape is serious, serious business, as the man having his life ruined for decades proves.

Yep, shit like that is how we got Mattress Girl.

 

[Terthna]

She very much didn't make up being raped, there's plenty of evidence for that. And she did nothing wrong, so she doesn't owe him money. It would be nice for her to do so, but she isn't obligated here. She's just found out she's been victimized again by the prosecutor robbing her of justice so they could get a conviction. Have some sympathy.

As for the guy, he should end up being paid for the years he was in jail, so he'll at least get something.

So lying isn't wrong in your opinion? I'll try to keep that in mind going forward.

 

[stephen the barbarian]

So lying isn't wrong in your opinion?

lying is wrong,
being wrong is not,
not trying to fix your mistake is pretty shitty

 

[Terthna]

lying is wrong,
being wrong is not,
not trying to fix your mistake is pretty shitty

But as LordsFire pointed out, if she did let the prosecutor redirect her pointing out the perp in a line-up, then she lied about recognize him as the perpetrator.

 

[Abhorsen]

Both she and the prosecutor are both open to some pretty staggering civil suits however.

She, not so much. The publisher stopped distributing the book once he was exonerated, which makes it not libel for either (as neither knew that what they were saying was wrong at the time, and actually very reasonably thought it was true).

The prosecutor is also immune under prosecutorial immunity, which is awful judicial activism that has no basis in written law, but exists nonetheless.

He'll get paid for time spent wrongly in jail, presumably, and hopefully there enough to live a decent life.

If she did in fact let the prosecutor redirect her pointing out the perp in a line-up, then she very much did do something wrong. Lying while laying an accusation of rape is serious, serious business, as the man having his life ruined for decades proves.

The prosecutor lied to her more like. What happened (from what I can gather) is that she initially ID'd Broadwater, then had to go through a lineup. She ID'd a different person in the lineup, but the prosecutor told her that Broadwater and that person were trying to trick her by standing next to each other, so maybe double check, at which point she made the 'right' decision. Given the fallibility of human memory, yeah, I could see her doing this easily. I could see anyone doing this easily, I've done it on a question in class when the teacher says "Are you sure?"

So yes, she screwed up by trusting someone she thought was helping her get justice. She may bear fault, but this isn't a lie. She did not know the truth and say something else, she was convinced a falsehood was true, then bought into it and believed it. In her excusing the screwup of the lineup on the stand, she did lie and say they were like identical twins, but a) she had been primed to say that, b) cross race face blindness is a real thing, so some confusion is expected, and c) memories aren't static, and mold to confirm our biases.

So lying isn't wrong in your opinion? I'll try to keep that in mind going forward.

To lie, one must know what they are saying is incorrect. She was wrong, and then convinced of an untruth in verifying her wrongfulness.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I wonder how people are going to rethink technology, especially connectivity after this. Amazon's outage caused people's Roombas to quit running, their refrigerators to turn off, their lights to quit working, and some people couldn't even get into their own homes because with Amazon's direct control Ring doorbells couldn't open the door anymore.

How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes Not So Smart After All

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

www.bloomberg.com

Meanwhile, I'm among those with a mechanical door lock, old refrigerator, and manual vacuum chuckling at the folks that thought they needed everything online and monitored by Amazon 24/7...

 

[The Whispering Monk]

I ain't networking my home b/c, by definition, that means other people than my family get access to my home.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I ain't networking my home b/c, by definition, that means other people than my family get access to my home.

Well that was my main consideration in not doing so myself, but seeing people unable to enter their own homes because their networked doorbell bricked the front door was just plain funny to me.

 

[Captain X]

Honestly, a lot of this comes from this odd need I see in people to put computers into everything.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

I mean...wth does my fridge need to speak through the internet?!

 

[Bear Ribs]

I mean...wth does my fridge need to speak through the internet?!

So that it can send texts to tell the repair center what's wrong. How it can send texts when it's broken is a mystery but it just can. Refrigerator repair persons of undetermined gender can't be expected to do things like diagnose problems on their own, it's just not reasonable.

It's absolutely, positively not so that they can cause your refrigerator to quit working when their data analysis of your spending habits and financial situation indicate you will likely buy a new refrigerator, so just put that thought out of your mind. In no way should all these refrigerators suddenly failing due to their service be taken as evidence that they can or would make your refrigerator fail.

 

[BlackDragon98]

I wonder how people are going to rethink technology, especially connectivity after this. Amazon's outage caused people's Roombas to quit running, their refrigerators to turn off, their lights to quit working, and some people couldn't even get into their own homes because with Amazon's direct control Ring doorbells couldn't open the door anymore.

How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes Not So Smart After All

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

www.bloomberg.com

Meanwhile, I'm among those with a mechanical door lock, old refrigerator, and manual vacuum chuckling at the folks that thought they needed everything online and monitored by Amazon 24/7...

Remember guys and girls, Big Brother can't watch you without electricity!