#criminal justice specialist

[drvanessajones]

Dr Vanessa Jones - A Dedicated Mental Health Professional

Dr. Vanessa Jones, a Mental Health Professional, is fueled by her passion for helping others. While she is now semi-retired, she looks back on her career with a sense of fulfillment. Her personal life goals include becoming an accomplished equestrian and leaving a positive impact on those she encounters.

#dr vanessa jones #loxahatchee #criminal justice specialist #Mental Health Professional #drvanessajones

[drvanessawashington]

Dr Vanessa Washington - A Licensed Professiona Clinical Counselor

As a graduate assistant, Dr. Vanessa Washington taught lesson plans on criminal justice to college students. Dr. Vanessa Washington also conducted criminal justice and forensic science research during that time. Before that, Dr. Vanessa Washington served as a court officer at the accident investigation special investigations unit, where she was part of undercover prostitution stings.

#Criminal Justice Specialist #Loxahatchee #Mental Health Profesional #OPOTA #counselor

[friendofthecrows]

What studying criminalistics, forensics, or crime scene investigation is like in a class geared towards ppl wanting to be forensic scientists or crime scene specialists:

Professor: your week one quiz covers the assigned readings for week 1 :) you have 2 hours and it is NOT open notebook.

The assigned readings for week 1:

Professor: btw by next week you need to simulate and be able to properly document a crime scene complete with evidence handling in accordance with [three different regulating standards, 100-300 pages each] or you fail :)

What studying criminal justice in a class geared towards people wanting to be cops is like:

Professor: please write a paragraph on the good-faith principle, where evidence from illegal searches can be used if it's believed the officer was acting in good faith :) you only need 2 sources and your response should be less than 1000 words. I understand the material can be hard for some people, which is why there are 8 of these across the class, and they're mostly graded on effort and participation. I don't believe in tests or quizzes so you have none.

#hal rambles #criminal justice #forensics #i think most cops are bastards but another solid chunk of them are just fucking stupid #i am studying both criminal justice and forensics and the level of difficulty is just SO different #i think 11 y/o me could ace everything in my criminal justice classes #whereas one fuckup in forensics can fail your entire class #(for good reason. that is NOT a field you want to be making mistakes in) #Neither is policework but the difference is that if a forensic scientist messes up #all of their cases need to be re-evaluated #if a cop messes up 'well they made that error in good faith so we'll keep that evidence anyways' :) #up to and including shooting people :( #I think cops should either be held the standards of forensic scientists or they need to just. stop existing. #also most of the cases where evidence was terribly mishandled a cop was handling it instead of a crime scene specialist #most jurisdictions just don't have the resources + there aren't enough crime scene specialists #so if you've ever been interested in criminal justice but hate cops #You can make investigations a bit more likely to be evidence based instead of a witch hunt.

[zhensheng]

my country doesn't need me

yesterday, november 30, 2023, supreme court of my state recognized "the international LGBT movement" as an extremist organization. they say this will come into effect from january 10, 2024. the trial was held behind closed doors; even journalists were not allowed into it. the ministry of justice sued the air for 4 hours.

almost every day college teachers say i am the hope for my county, i am it's future. that it needs me as a specialist. that it needs me, that it loves me.

and then i open news and read that my state attacked the neighboring one, early in the morning, without declaring war. just like fucking hitler, in honor of the victory over which millions of dollars are spent on a parade every year.

read that for participation in this fucking war maniacs, rapists and murderers who were in jails and were pardoned by the president are returning to society. and they keep killing and harming people.

read that official representatives directly say that women do not need to receive higher education, but only give birth, give birth, give birth. just because they need more cannon fodder.

read that they banned transgender transition, calling it “sex change”, and now millions of transgender people are in danger.

read that the director of one of the schools wrote a denunciation against her own students for criticizing the authorities. and then she becomes one of the best teachers in the country.

read that a criminal case was opened against children aged 10 and 11 for “desecration” of the monument to the Great Patriotic War. criminal liability for murder in my country begins at age 14.

read that the whole world abandoned the citizens of my state just because of its government's actions. in addition to those in power, another 150 million people live here.

read that i was compared to al-qaeda, taliban and nazis just because I love my girlfriend. me, my acquaintances and friends, millions of people. from january 10, 2024, they will be able to give us 12 years in prison for “displaying extremist symbols". but the taliban are meeting with the president, and the police can beat me up for rainbow scarf.

read all of that and realize that my country doesn't fucking need me. neither as a specialist, nor as a citizen, nor as a person.

my country doesn't need me. it doesn't appreciate me. it doesn't love me.

my country doesn't need us, and this is a personal tragedy for 150 million of people.

моим русским читателям и всем россиянам, которые это увидят: ребята, вы не одни. нам всем тяжело, и к сожалению сейчас мы вряд ли сможем это изменить. но мы есть друг у друга, нас много, и мы любим. мы вместе. пожалуйста, берегите себя, не отчаивайтесь, и знайте, что самый тёмный час перед рассветом. всё пройдёт, всё проходит когда-то, и россия воспрянет от сна🕊️

#sorry for this sudden post i am scared and i need to speak out( #faggots are hunting gays again #путин хуйло #свобода россии #lgbtq #lgbtq community #lgbt russia #transgender #activism #kinda...

[ukrfeminism]

Rape trials will be “delayed for years” because two thirds of barristers who are accredited to prosecute sexual offences are considering quitting. 

Survey results published on Monday revealed that 64 per cent of barristers who prosecute rape and sexual offence cases do not intend to reapply to be ­accredited by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) amid growing complaints over pay.

The prospect of a profound collapse in the number of available prosecutors prompted the head of the Criminal Bar Association to tell ministers that “doing nothing to increase … fees is not an ­option unless we want to accept that rape and serious sexual offence trials will continue to be delayed for years, ­repeatedly postponed on the day because there is no barrister to prosecute or defend”. Tana Adkin KC added that “the human cost for victims of these crimes as well as innocent defendants is beyond financial measure”.

Of the 64 per cent who told the survey, which was commissioned by the association, that they would not reapply, 62 per cent pointed to poor pay and 50 per cent cited personal “wellbeing”. Some 78 per cent of barristers with less than five years’ experience said that they would not consider working on rape and sexual offence cases.

The survey results will heap pressure on the Ministry of Justice and the attorney-general’s office, which oversees the CPS.

Fears have been rising over the effect of court delays. Evidence emerged last year that hundreds of rape and sexual assault trials were collapsing every year as alleged victims dropped out of prosecutions. Data obtained from the Ministry of Justice revealed that more than 1,600 cases had collapsed over the previous five years in England and Wales after complaints were withdrawn ­despite charges having been made.

Legal experts say that the backlog of cases — which stands at a record high of about 65,000 — is prompting alleged victims to quit prosecutions because many find waiting up to three years for a case to come to trial to be too stressful.

To be eligible to receive rape and sexual offence prosecution instructions, barristers must be on the specialist advocate panel, which means that they have received CPS training on dealing with vulnerable witnesses. Training ­involves instruction in what the CPS says are myths and stereotypes around rape and sexual offences.

In 2022 criminal defence barristers settled strikes that had brought the crown courts to a halt after they accepted a 15 per cent rise in legal aid rates. Fees for prosecution barristers were not increased until a year ago, when they too were given a 15 per cent pay boost. And it is claimed that junior prosecution barristers are paid significantly less than their defence counterparts.

Association officials said that the average fee for defending in a five-day rape trial was £2,185 while the prosecution pay was about £300 less. They added that those prosecuting five-day fraud trials were paid about £380 more on average than barristers prosecuting rape cases. 

Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor and founder of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said that “the prosecution of sexual crime requires great expertise and knowledge, particularly given the traumatic nature of the crime and the need for understanding the complex laws and procedures surrounding such prosecutions that have developed to encourage victims to come forward and counter a victim-blaming culture”.

The Ministry of Justice said that the pay rise 18 months ago for defence barristers amounted on average to an annual boost of £7,000. It added that ministers had “also increased fees for those doing pre-recorded cross-examinations as part of our action to better support victims and see more rape cases reaching court, with an increase of over 50 per cent in adult rape prosecutions in the latest year”.

#Articles #mvawg #law

[foundfamilynonsense]

Y’see. I was getting so exhausted by Star Wars bc everywhere I looked there was more mandalorian content. I don’t just mean Din; it’s just everywhere. I can’t turn around with seeing another helmet freak.

So then I was like: oh Sabine is in Ahsoka? That’s cool. Bc at least this is a mandalorian I like.

The thing about Sabine is that she’s an artist. That’s her character. She’s obsessed with weapons like other mandalorians, but not in a “usamerican republican guns make me cool” way but in a weapon specialist and designer way.

She built weapons. She was good at it. Then she saw them destroy people she loved. A culture she loved. So now she used her knowledge of weapons and fought for things like freedom and justice. and she was an *artist* about it. She made explosive graffiti. She painted her armor so she was a walking canvas. She was interesting.

And so, with all the mandalorian stuff in Star Wars rn I thought, ok, well. Still obsessed with mandolarians, bc they’re making money. But at least we’re getting into the type of mandalorian I enjoy. A mandalorian who has a design and a interesting plot to follow.

And then they make her a Jedi!?

WHY?

Apparently we’re only obsessed with the rugged father Pedro Pascal mandalorian and the war criminal who no one mentions is a war criminal mandalorian. The interesting mandalorian gets her entire culture and backstory ignored so we can insult the Jedi order and pretend what the Jedi REALLY need is a warrior who’s not even interested and not force sensitive swinging around a lightsaber without even learning the code.

She can fight with Ezra’s lightsaber and not be a jedi. Go for it. But it’s becoming clear that they’re doing this to show Ashoka as somehow “more inclusive” than the order and like???? Why would you ruin a character your current audience would have preferred before?

#Disney: here are three hundred mandalorians #me: meh #Disney: and here is Sabine wren #me: 👀 #Disney: as a Jedi #Disney: lmao didn’t the Jedi order suck? I mean this mandalorian is going to be so much better at their job #pro jedi #jedi order #in defense of the jedi #anti ahsoka #anti ahsoka show #star wars

[zvaigzdelasas]

[CBC is State Funded Media]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called the decision to invite an elderly Ukrainian Second World War veteran who fought for Nazi Germany an "egregious error" that "deeply embarrassed Parliament and Canada." On Wednesday, he offered what he called "unreserved apologies" on Canada's behalf for the hurt it caused. Many experts say they're skeptical about the prospect of Canada's political leaders and institutions learning something from the now-infamous episode that capped President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's trip to Canada. Many historians will tell you that what we've witnessed over the last several days is history coming back to bite Canada — specifically over its refusal down the decades to acknowledge or own up to the decisions that allowed Yaroslav Hunka, who served with the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s.[...]

There was a reckoning of sorts in Canada during the 1980s. A public inquiry, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes, attempted to determine if Nazi war criminals and sympathizers ended up making this country their home and, if so, how many there were. The Galician division featured prominently in that investigation. Jewish groups, notably the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, gave the inquiry a list of 217 former members of the unit who apparently had immigrated to Canada. (The Deschênes commission concluded that 86 per cent of those named never landed in Canada and "no prima facie case has been established against" the 16 under suspicion.)[...]

Trudeau, in his apology, said everyone in the House of Commons regretted "deeply having stood and clapped even though we did so unaware of the context." The old phrase "ignorance is no excuse under the law" might be modified in this instance to include the word "history." After almost eight decades, it would be easy to chalk this up to a history-challenged staffer working somewhere within the labyrinth of the House of Commons, or to failure on the part the now-former speaker Anthony Rota — someone simply ignorant of the complexities and grievances. That may well be part of the political calculation. With Rota gone and with the prime minister having apologized, the reflex may be to rebury the past and carry on to the next political crisis.

But one war crimes researcher and historian says the international stakes, given Russia's use of the event for propaganda, make a thorough investigation — and public airing — indispensable. "I think the Canadian government owes it to itself to determine how on earth this thing happened," said Efraim Zuroff, a director at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office and a specialist in Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe.

It's not just about how such an invitation was extended. It's also about the airbrushing of history — Rota's carefully worded tribute mentioned Hunka having fought against Russia, as though Moscow had been the enemy at the time. "People are so ignorant [of] that history, it's pathetic," said Zuroff. "People suffer from such ignorance when it comes to the Holocaust and other things as well ... And it's a complicated subject. It took place in many different countries and played out to a certain extent in different ways."

Aside from the list involving the Galicia division, Zuroff has personally submitted to the Canadian government another 252 names of other suspected Nazis — or Nazi collaborators — from Eastern European countries other than Ukraine who are believed to have come to Canada. Out of that entire list, only one individual was ever charged. Following the Deschênes commission's report, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to make it easier to go after suspected Nazi war criminals. Much of that work came to a screeching halt with the failed prosecution of Imre Finta, a former Hungarian police commander who was accused of organizing the deportation of over 8,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. He was acquitted on the defence that he was following the orders of a superior. Zuroff said the Canadian courts that accepted that verdict are the only ones in the world that recognize that legal defence — and consequently, no one else has been prosecuted. Since that case was tried in 1990, Canada opted to go after war criminals through the immigration system.

Any meaningful reflection on the Hunka tribute must include an examination of how Canada has dealt with these cases, Zuroff added.

Beyond the legal context, a leading scholar at the University of Ottawa, history professor Jan Grabowski, said the country needs to acknowledge how people like Hunka — who fought with the Nazis for what he hoped would be Ukrainian independence — got into Canada in the first place. Britain and countries like Italy, where some members of the Galicia division ended up, were eager in the late 1940s to be rid of refugees and surrendered soldiers. Canada willingly accepted them and by 1950 had made a special accommodation for Ukrainians. According to the Deschênes report, the prevailing feeling in the government at the time was that these former soldiers "should be subject to special security screening, but should not be rejected on the grounds of their service in the German army."

The context of the time, said Grabokski, is crucial, because when the Cold War began, Canadians shifted to a totally different "frame of mind."

"Anti-communists were prized above everything else," he said. "So we need to understand that this was a totally different political situation and most of the time, the Canadian authorities knew that they were letting in people who were allies of Hitler. But it was not enough, let's say, to make them hesitate." The B'nai Brith demanded this week that Ottawa take this opportunity to finally open all Holocaust-related records to the public, including the second part of the Deschênes commission's report, which has been kept secret for almost 40 years. Instead of reflection, though, Canadians might be in line for more political theatre.

28 Sep 23

[mariacallous]

On November 17, the Russian Justice Ministry announced that it had filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court demanding that the “international LGBT movement” be banned as an “extremist organization” in Russia. The agency failed to explain what exactly the “LGBT movement” is, who leads it, or how it’s structured, but it claimed to have identified signs of an “extremist orientation” in its workings. The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider the request on November 30. Meduza has compiled some of the initial reactions to the suit from prominent Russian journalists, politicians, and bloggers.

Valery Fadeyev

Chairman of Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council

What LGBT movement? Is this a movement, an organization, that exists in Russia? That what my initial thought. We’ll have to look at the details of this lawsuit and see what we’re talking about here.

Yekaterina Mizulina

Head of the Safe Internet League

This means a serious barrier will be imposed against values that undermine Russia and destroy our identity. I want to thank the courage and professionalism of our law enforcement officers, Justice Ministry specialists, and Safe Internet League experts who helped prepare this historic event. We’re making progress.

Farida Rustamova

Independent journalist

The Russian Justice Ministry invented the “international LGBT public movement” and is now trying to ban it. In practice, this will likely mean they’ll be able to jail someone for having a rainbow flag on their social media avatar, for example. That’s the kind of electoral campaign Putin is running as he approaches his fifth term.

Leonid Volkov

Politician, Alexey Navalny associate

And so it begins: Putin’s “electoral campaign dedicated to traditional values” that we were promised, with Russia portrayed as a “family of families.”

Well, to be precise, it started a bit earlier, when they suddenly launched their anti-abortion agenda from all directions. Now is the second step. The fact that there’s no “extremist LGBTQ+ organization” is of no concern to anyone, of course; Putin’s political strategists need the image of an enemy that the elderly president can confidently defeat, and as a bonus, all Center E branches will get the chance to fabricate as many criminal cases as they want and receive promotions.

Ksenia Sobchak

Journalist and media figure

EVERYONE has finally fucking lost it. It’s just unbelievable.

We’re really going to find ourselves in the same league as North Korea, the Taliban, and Hamas pretty soon.

Yevgeny Popov

Deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, propagandist

The details of this lawsuit are not very clear, and, of course, we can’t predict what decision the court will make. So let’s refrain from speculating about it right now, because we’ve begun discussing even the rainbow openly and publicly. Let’s not be absurd — it’s impossible to ban a rainbow, wind, storms, or clouds.

As far as LGBT’s recognition as some kind of organization — let’s look at the explanations, the arguments from both sides. It will be a very interesting legal process. For now, I don’t have an understanding of how it will be interpreted.

Sergey Badashmin

Lawyer

Are they going to declare rainbows “extremist material?”

Maksim Olenichev

Lawyer

LGBT activists will continue their work; after all, there are millions of LGBT people living in Russia. But their work will get significantly more dangerous. The number of LGBT initiatives will most likely shrink, some will go underground, but the work of helping LGBT people will continue — in new conditions and with higher risks.

Sergey Parkhomenko

Journalist

Am I understanding correctly that this international LGBT movement that the Russian Justice Ministry wants to declare extremist and ban is not a specific organization, not a legal entity or an association of people, but just the general LGBT movement, small “m,” with no quotation marks, in its entirety, in all of its forms and manifestations, on a global level?

Or am I missing something, and they mean something or someone more specific?

Georgy Urushadze

Founder of the publishing company Freedom Letters

So you’re telling me that the Taliban can’t be declared extremist, but an entire human rights movement can? [...]

We’ll show them our flag. Along with our middle fingers.

[anarchywoofwoof]

on January 18, 2016, Mesa Police in Mesa, Arizona, responded to an incident at a La Quinta Inn after reports of a man pointing a hunting rifle out of his hotel room window.

the man, later identified as Daniel Shaver, 26 years old from Granbury, Texas, was seen aiming a gun towards the pool area. Shaver worked as a pest control specialist in Texas with his wife and two daughters and was in Mesa, Arizona, for a business trip.

when police arrived, they encountered Shaver and a woman in a hotel hallway. officers instructed them to kneel on the ground and crawl towards them. the woman complied and was not harmed.

however, as he was sobbing and begging for his life, crawling and complying with instructions, Shaver was shot and killed by then-officer 27-year-old Philip Brailsford (obvious content warning).

the situation escalated when Shaver, whose shorts were falling down, reached towards his waistband, leading Brailsford to shoot him five times.

it was later determined that Shaver was unarmed at the time of the shooting, and the rifle he had been seen with was a pellet gun he used for his job in pest control. additionally, he was likely intoxicated, as his blood alcohol level was later found to be 0.27.

following the incident, Brailsford was charged with second-degree murder but was acquitted after a six-week trial. the jury's decision was based on the belief that Brailsford had acted according to protocol, fearing Shaver was reaching for a weapon. this verdict, however, was met with controversy.

despite his acquittal, Brailsford's previous conduct had also raised concerns. he had been involved in a prior incident where he was recorded on video using force against teenagers during an arrest at a store. although investigated, this incident did not lead to any disciplinary action against Brailsford. this lack of accountability serves only to encourage bully cops like this one in his deadly encounter with Daniel Shaver. additionally, his service weapon had "you're fucked" engraved on the side. which should tell you a lot about his mentality toward policing.

​Daniel Shaver’s family ultimately settled with the City of Mesa for eight million dollars. this, obviously, does nothing to mitigate the underlying damage to the public's trust. Shaver's widow has expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome, highlighting a perceived failure of the criminal justice system to hold the officers accountable.

after eight years, since the death of Daniel Shaver in 2016, police have killed an additional 3,373 people, including a staggering record 964 in 2023. despite the murder rate falling - 2023 was a year that saw a significant decrease in homicides - us police violence is increasing.

let January 18th be a day we remember both Daniel Shaver and all other victims of police violence. no entity should be capable of bearing themselves the right to be play judge, jury and executioner of another human being.

#all cops are bastards #acab #fuck the police #ftp #1312 #daniel shaver #police violence #tw police brutality #tw murder #tw shooting #tw guns

[alpaca-clouds]

What an actually just system would look like

Okay, with me ranting about the entire justice system the entire week, let me talk about what we can do to actually create a safe and just society.

Because as I have established over the last few days: No, I do not thin that police and prison or punitive justice in general is not the way to go.

The first thing you have to understand is how poverty and crime are related. Outside of white collar crime, poor people are more likely to commit crime. But not because someone who is poor has some inherent trait that makes them more violent or something, but because poverty creates a environment that makes for crimes to happen.

Best example is of course stealing. Most people who steal steal, because they do not have the money to afford what they are stealing any other way. Now, I know people will often have a lot more understanding for people stealing food, than for stuff like electronics, but I gotta ask you: Does someone who is poor not deserve some escapism through games and the like? Saying they do not deserve it is classism as well.

So, yeah, if you are poor, you will be more likely to steal.

Also, if you are poor and struggle to get a normal job that pays enough and the like, you will also be more likely to get drawn into organized crime to make ends meet and with that are also more likely to be drawn into the associated cycles of violence.

Also, also, there is the fact that people who struggle with poverty usually have more mental health struggles, which are also predictors of people either getting involved with drugs and drug crime - or with violence against themselves or others.

And lastly, people who lack money, often stay in unsafe familiar situation with abusive partners or abusive parents, which obviously makes it more likely that the people end up victims of crimes through their abusers.

So, to make it very simple: One thing to fight crime would be, to just fight poverty. Which under the current capitalist system would be easiest if we gave out enough UBI to finance people's life. On a long scale obviously an alternative to capitalism is needed, but for now UBI would help a ton.

As it might be obviously from what I already wrote: Bad mental health also increases the likelihood of someone to end up criminal. So, having a better mental health care system would already be helpful.

But at this point the police problem comes in, too. In a lot of cases of police violence there is not only racism playing into it, but also the police not knowing how to deal with mental breakdowns. So, instead of police, they should send out someone who is able to deal with those situations. Specialists and the like. That should be possible, right?

Now, of course, there is the kinds of violence that are not necessarily connected to poverty. Because there is also a lot of violence connected to sexism, racism, queermisia and ableism. People thinking they can enact violence onto a certain group because they have learned and internalized that this group of people are worth less than them. This is the most complicated thing to deal with. For one, it is often the type of crime that already gets underreported and that the police often doesn't give a flying fuck about.

But a big thing to start is to actually make sure people are better integrated and that kids learn about diversity early on, learn that people are all people.

Something people have to realize is, that police does ot prevent crimes. The police just "solve" some crimes. (Please keep in mind: Even with murders, the world is not true crime, where there are complicated murders to solve. Most murderers will actually easily confess, often being the ones calling the police.) More than that: The police often also refuses to take up complaints if they know that the crime is unlikely to be solved. Which is why a lot of reported rapes never got taken up by the police.

Now, to the problem of prisons. People always think that someone who commited a crime needs to be punished. But I gotta ask you: Why? It does not make the original crime undone.

Instead we do know that actually the current prison system makes it very likely that people will end up criminal again. Why? Well, for one, if you have been in prison, in most countries you are very unlikely to get reemployed - so go into poverty. Also, through prison, folks are super likely to be drawn into organized crime once again. So... Yeah, that ain't working, is it?

So... I really think prisons are bad. There have to be alternatives to it. Like good therapy and such.

Just... The entire current system is build around ideas profenly wrong. So... it is just unscientific to keep it around, if you ask me.

#solarpunk #justice system #punishment is not justice #acab #fuck the police #universal basic income #ubi #anarchism

[drvanessajones]

Dr Vanessa Jones - A Clinically Certified Criminal Justice Specialist

Dr Vanessa Jones is a passionate Rational Living Therapist III who loves helping others. . She is Also a Clinically Certified Juvenile Sex Offender Treatment Specialist and a Clinically Certified Juvenile Treatment Specialist. She loves traveling to new and interesting places.

#Dr Vanessa Jones #Loxahatchee #Criminal Justice Specialist #Mental Health Profesional #Cognitive Behavioral Therapist

[ukrfeminism]

The court of appeal has quashed the prison sentence of a heavily pregnant woman so that she can give birth safely, in a case hailed as a landmark by campaigners.

The woman, 22, is almost eight months pregnant and has been diagnosed with potentially life threatening pre-eclampsia, which affects the mother’s blood vessels and the baby’s blood supply.

The woman was sentenced to five years for possession of a firearm and ammunition, and was serving two and a half years in prison. She did not discover she was pregnant until she was given a routine pregnancy test on arrival in prison. 

Campaigners have previously argued that no pregnant women should be housed in the prison estate. In September 2019, a newborn baby, Aisha Cleary, was found dead in a prison cell in HMP Bronzefield after her mother, Rianna, gave birth alone. According to government data, in 2022-23 there were 44 births by women in custody, 98% of them in hospital.

Pippa Woodrow, counsel for the pregnant woman, told a court of appeal hearing on Thursday that the risk of the woman going into premature labour was “live”, and that the management of her pregnancy in prison “does not even seem to meet the requirements of her condition”.

She added that the woman had “a significant history of trauma and mental ill health” and that she was “immature and vulnerable”.

In relation to her crime, Woodrow said: “She has no ongoing association with the negative peers who got her into this mess.”

In an oral ruling, Lord Justice Holroyde, the vice-president of the court of appeal criminal division, along with Mr Justice Garnham and Mr Justice Andrew Baker, said: “We regard this as a quite exceptional case.”

The judges quashed the sentence she had received from a criminal court and replaced it with a two-year suspended sentence with a rehabilitation requirement.

Addressing the woman, who listened tearfully to the judges’ ruling via a video link inside prison, Holroyde said: “This is quite an exceptional course the court is taking. We are doing it because of the exceptional features of your case.”

The woman’s mother, who was in court for the ruling, said afterwards: “I have got my daughter back. Thank you so much. She’s a good girl but she got caught up with the wrong person. Now she can give birth in hospital with me by her side and we can raise this baby together.”

The mother feared her daughter may suffer a similar fate to Rianna Cleary if she gave birth while in prison. She contacted Level Up, which campaigns for an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women, and provided her with help and support.

Janey Starling, a co-director of Level Up, said: “This landmark judgment marks a sea change in sentencing practices. Several other countries do not imprison pregnant women or new mothers and England’s courts are beginning to catch up. Prison will never be a safe place to be pregnant.

“The prison ombudsman, Ministry of Justice and NHS have declared all pregnancies in prison as high risk. This means that when a judge sentences a pregnant woman to prison, they are sentencing her to a high-risk pregnancy. That is unconscionable.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Custody is always the last resort for women, and independent judges consider mitigating factors, like pregnancy, when making sentencing decisions.

“We have made meaningful progress in improving the care available for pregnant women in jail, such as employing specialist mother-and-baby liaison officers in every female prison, and enhancing welfare checks and social services support.”

#Articles #law #health

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter 5. Crime

Beyond individual justice

The notion of justice is perhaps the most dangerous product of authoritarian psychology. The state’s worst abuses occur in its prisons, its inquisitions, its forced corrections and rehabilitations. Police, judges, and prison guards are key agents of coercion and violence. In the name of justice, uniformed thugs terrorize entire communities while dissidents petition the very government that represses them. Many people have internalized the rationalizations of state justice to such an extent that they are terrified of losing the protection and arbitration states supposedly provide.

When justice becomes the private sphere of specialists, oppression is not far behind. In stateless societies on the cusp of developing the coercive hierarchies that lead to government, the common feature seems to be a group of respected male elders permanently entrusted with the role of resolving conflicts and meting out justice. In such a context privilege can become entrenched, as those who enjoy it may shape the social norms that preserve and amplify their privilege. Without that power, individual wealth and power rest on a weak foundation that everyone can challenge.

State justice begins with a refusal to engage with human needs. Human needs are dynamic and can only be fully understood by those who experience them. State justice, by contrast, is the execution of universal prescriptions codified into law. The specialists who interpret the laws are supposed to focus on the original intention of the lawmakers rather than the situation at hand. If you need bread and stealing is a crime, you will be punished for taking it, even if you take it from someone who doesn’t need it. But if your society focuses on people’s needs and desires rather than on the enforcement of static laws, you have the opportunity to convince your community that you needed bread more than the person you took it from. In this way the actor and those affected remain at the center of the process, always empowered to explain themselves and to challenge the community’s norms.

Justice, in contrast, hinges on judgment, privileging a powerful decision-maker over the accusers and defendants who powerlessly await the outcome. Justice is the enforcement of morality — which, in its origins, is justified as divinely ordained. When societies shift away from religious rationales, morality becomes universal, or natural, or scientific — spheres ever further removed from the influence of the general public — until it is shaped and packaged almost exclusively by the media and government.

The notion of justice and the social relations it implies are inherently authoritarian. In practice, justice systems always give unfair advantages to the powerful and inflict terrible wrongs on the powerless. At the same time, they corrupt us ethically and cause our powers of initiative and sense of responsibility to atrophy. Like a drug, they make us dependent while mimicking the fulfillment of a natural human need, in this case the need to resolve conflicts. Thus, people beg to the justice system for reforms, no matter how unrealistic their expectations are, rather than taking matters into their own hands. To heal from abuse, the injured person needs to regain control over her life, the abuser needs to restore healthy relations with his peers, and the community needs to examine its norms and power dynamics. The justice system prevents all this. It hoards control, alienates entire communities, and obstructs examination of the roots of problems, preserving the status quo above all.

Police and judges may provide a limited degree of protection, especially for people privileged by racism, sexism, or capitalism; but the greatest danger facing most human beings is the system itself. For example, thousands of workers are killed every year by employer negligence and unsafe working conditions, but employers are never punished as murderers and virtually never even charged as criminals. The most workers’ families might hope for is a monetary settlement from a civil court. Who decides that a boss who profits from the deaths of workers should face no worse than a lawsuit, while a wife who shoots her abusive husband goes to prison and a black teenager who kills a police officer in self-defense gets the death penalty? It certainly isn’t workers, women, or people of color.

For every human need, a totalitarian system must provide it, subdue it, or substitute a surrogate. In the above example, the justice system frames the killing of workers as a problem to be addressed with regulations and bureaucracies. The media assist by focusing grossly disproportionate coverage on serial killers and “cold-blooded murderers,” almost always poor and usually not white, thus changing people’s perceptions of the risks they face. Consequently many people fear other poor people more than their own bosses, and are willing to support the police and courts in targeting them.

To be sure, in some cases the police and courts respond when workers or women are killed — though this is often to offset popular outrage and discourage people from seeking their own solutions. Even in these cases, the responses are often half-hearted or counterproductive.

Meanwhile, the justice system serves quite effectively as a tool for reshaping society and controlling lower class populations. Consider the “War on Drugs” waged from the 1980s up to the present day. Compared with work and rape, most illegal drugs are relatively harmless; in the case of those that can be harmful, medical attention has been thoroughly demonstrated to be a more effective response than prison time. But the justice system has declared this war to shift public priorities: it justifies the police occupation of poor neighborhoods, the mass imprisonment and enslavement of millions of poor people and people of color, and the expansion of the powers of police and judges.

What do the police do with this power? They arrest and intimidate the most powerless elements of society. Poor people and people of color are overwhelmingly the victims of arrests and convictions, not to mention daily harassment and even murder at the hands of police. Attempts to reform the police rarely do more than feed their budgets and streamline their methods for imprisoning people. And what happens to the millions of people in prison? They are isolated, killed slowly by poor diets and miserable conditions or swiftly by guards who are almost never convicted. Prison guards encourage gangs and racial violence to help them maintain control, and often smuggle in and sell addictive drugs to fill their wallets and sedate the population. Tens of thousands of prisoners are locked up in solitary confinement, some for decades.

Countless studies have found that treating drug addiction and other psychological problems as criminal matters is ineffective and inhumane; mistreating prisoners and depriving them of human contact and educational opportunities has been proven to increase recidivism.[84] But for every study that showed how to end crime and reduce prison populations, the government has gone and done the exact opposite: they cut educational programs, increased the use of solitary confinement, lengthened sentences, and curtailed visiting rights. Why? Because in addition to a control mechanism, prison is an industry. It funnels billions of dollars of public money to institutions that strengthen state control, such as the police, the courts, surveillance and private security companies, and it provides a slave labor force that produces goods for the government and private corporations. Forced labor is still legal in the prison system, and most prisons contain factories where prisoners have to work for a few cents an hour. Prisons also have the modern equivalent of the company store, where prisoners have to spend all the money they make and the money their families send them, buying clothing, food, or phone calls, all at inflated prices.

The prison system is beyond hope of reform. Reformist prison bureaucrats have given up or else come to support prison abolition. One high ranking bureaucrat who directed juvenile corrections departments in Massachusetts and Illinois concluded that:

Prisons are violent, outmoded bureaucracies that don’t protect public safety. There’s no way to rehabilitate anyone in them. The facility produces violence that calls for more of the facility. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Prisons offer themselves as a solution to the very problems they’ve created. Institutions are set up to make people fail. That’s their latent purpose.[85]

These are not problems to be solved with reforms or changes of law. The justice system has set its priorities and arranged its laws with the specific purpose of controlling and abusing us. The problem is law itself.

Often, people who live in a statist society assume that without a centralized justice system following clear laws, it would be impossible to resolve conflicts. Without a common set of laws, everyone would fight for her own interests, resulting in perpetual feuding. If methods of dealing with social harm are decentralized and voluntary, what’s to keep people from “taking justice into their own hands?”

An important leveling mechanism in stateless societies is that people sometimes do take justice into their own hands, especially in dealing with those in leadership positions who are acting authoritarian. Anyone can abide by her conscience and take action against a person she perceives to be harming the community. At best, this can push others to acknowledge and confront a problem they had tried to ignore. At worst, it can divide the community between those who think such action was justified and those who think it was harmful. Even this, though, is better than institutionalizing imbalances of power; in a community in which everyone has the power to take things into their own hands, in which everyone is equal, people will find it is much easier to talk things out and try to change the opinions of their peers than to do whatever they want or cause conflicts by acting as a vigilante. The reason this method is not used in democratic, capitalist societies is not because it does not work, but because there are certain opinions that must not be changed, certain contradictions that must not be addressed, and certain privileges that can never be challenged.

In many stateless societies, bad behavior is not dealt with by specialized defenders of justice, but by everyone, through what anthropologists call diffuse sanctions — sanctions or negative reactions that are diffused throughout society. Everyone is accustomed to responding to injustice and harmful behavior, and thus everyone is more empowered and more involved. When there is no state to monopolize the day-to-day maintenance of society, people learn how to do this for themselves, and teach one another.

We do not need to define abuse as a crime to know that it hurts us. Laws are unnecessary in empowered societies; there are other models for responding to social harm. We can identify the problem as an infringement on others’ needs rather than a violation of written code. We can encourage broad social involvement in the resolution of the problem. We can help those who have been hurt to express their needs and we can follow their lead. We can hold people accountable when they hurt others, while supporting them and giving them opportunities to learn and reestablish respectful relationships with the community. We can see problems as the responsibility of the entire community rather than the fault of one person. We can reclaim the power to heal society, and break through the isolation imposed on us.

#acab #anarchism #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #anarchy #anarchists #libraries #leftism #social issues #economy #economics #climate change #anarchy works #environmentalism #environment #solarpunk #anti colonialism

[theknightofivanhoe]

Justice League: Question’s Hard Drive Ch 4: Assembling the Team

Table of Contents

In a dark, dilapidated warehouse laden with dirty, rusted crates and oil drums, a tall, black-haired man with a thin moustache, wearing brown trousers and jacket over a black shirt was following another man whose jaw was as large as a brick, his hair neatly trimmed and chocolate brown.

“So Colonel…” the moustached man spoke up in a smooth, slightly deep voice as they walked on, “Been meaning to ask you something,” “What? Five years not looking attractive already, Lawton?” asked the brick-jawed colonel Rick Flagg, who did indeed wear the formal dark blue suit of a US army officer. “You ‘do’ remember the other option’s no years at all? I.E, years of having a head?” “Hey, I’m well aware five was the agreement.” the mercenary Floyd Lawton, codenamed Deadshot, clarified to him. “Just want to let you know,” he continued as Flagg led him on through the grimy building, “A little girl of mine’s just made it to eighth grade.” Flagg only inclined his head to the man, but turned back and kept walking. Floyd decided to prod a little further. “Surely it’d be possible to schedule a vi - ” “This is serious stuff we’re assigning you for, Lawton.” Colonel Flagg flatly interrupted him. “Missions for CADMUS leave no room for family reunions.” Halfway through walking, Floyd felt himself twitch in surprise and a certain amount of outrage. “Excuse me?” “You heard me, soldier.” Flagg stated, leading Floyd towards a table. “Just be glad your little tyke’s going places, while you stick to the task at hand.” 

Despite the withering scowl on his moustached face, Floyd took a chair while his boss towered above him on the other side of the table. “So, what costumed chumps do I draw a bead on this time?” he asked, deciding to cut to the chase. “It seems our League friends have set out to hamstring CADMUS’ activities.” Flagg explained to him. “There has been a breach at one of our office buildings by two individuals connected to the League who have claimed valuable data.” “Any way we can track them?” Floyd questioned, deciding to push aside the whole daughter issue, for now at least. “We have already sent out recon units to pick up a trail just until a team can move in and recover this data.” Flagg told him. The convict/mercenary smirked up at the bulky, imposing colonel. “I was just gonna say, if they even get your info as far as the Watchtower, we’re basically asking to go through the last mission all over again.” “Glad you remember.” Flagg cut in with a growing frown. “And in case you forget, we’re one explosives specialist short thanks in no small part to your trigger-happy stunts.” “Okay, okay, I know, Plastique was a big loss. So any fresh recruits you’re calling in for this one?” Floyd asked, aware of Flagg’s rather low opinion towards him and others who operated outside the law. Flagg gave him an even darker look.

“Lucky for you, Lawton, CADMUS is sending you on this mission in good company, the sort that’s every bit the same lowlife criminal scum as you.” This idea of ‘good company’ got Floyd raising an eyebrow. “Once the data is tracked, you’ll be taking point while your mission leader handles everything else.” Flagg stated as he folded his powerful arms. “And this leader…” Floyd responded with a finger to his pointed chin, “Anything in particular I should know about him. Or her?” “Yeah, there is. That he’s had some previous…connection with one of our targets.” The colonel grimaced for a moment before continuing. “Also, I was against calling him up from the very start, but my superiors won the debate. *And* he’s someone I’m sure you’ll get along with. Famously…”

With a mind as sharp as his shooting, Floyd couldn’t help but catch something else in the colonel’s plan. “There’s something else too. Why does it somehow sound like you’re not gonna be on this one?” “You’re right actually.” Flagg grimly answered. “I won’t be joining you on this one. Getting this data back from these two Leaguers requires types that are too nasty even for them. And I don’t fancy mixing in with those who are nasty even by your…already low standards.” “Right. Don’t want the true American hero dirtying his patriotic pinkies with all the blood that comes with saving his great ol’ coun - ” Both hands smacking down hard on the tabletop, Flagg leaned towards the mercenary in aggravation. “Watch it, Lawton…” he snarled, the backchat grinding on his nerves. “I may be leaving you in this guy’s capable hands just in the hopes of wiping that stupid grin off your face.” “Boy, I can’t wait.” Floyd half-growled, sarcasm laced in his voice like poison in a dart. The colonel seemed to be restraining himself from physical violence, straightening and breathing in lightly. “Well, now that you’re filled in…” he said as his eyes darted past Floyd, “Your stuff is in that case.” The moustached assassin turned and saw a grey rectangular case on the floor. “The mission leader will debrief you on the data recovery, including what you’ll be up against. You’ll take a chopper and report to him at Miss Waller’s helipad. So get suited up, pronto.”

“So…heard you guys have had a little trouble with some data…” The tall, lanky-looking man, whose whole face was cloaked by the shadows of the half-lit office, threw himself back into a chair in front of a desk, behind which sat the short-haired, heavyset black woman smartly dressed in a blue jacket, Amanda Waller, one of the heads of the CADMUS organisation. The glow of her desk’s lamp reflected off the man’s hair, which was styled in a greased-up pompadour, while his eyes shone with a certain desire for some thrills and spills, possibly even for violence in the bargain. Behind him stood a tall, burly henchman.

“You heard correctly. This theft has been unlike any other mission the League has staged.” Amanda Waller informed the man sternly. “Previous activities have always ventured into reckless shows of force, teams of these abnormal beings and disguised vigilantes staging all-out assaults on whatever their enemies, including CADMUS, throw at them.” This man, who had been selected for this new mission, listened with merely a casual amount of interest, having heard news (particularly through the criminal underworld grapevine) about the Justice League’s attempts at heroics. “So what about this one? Please, indulge me” he persuaded with plenty of confidence and cunning in his smooth, charming voice, before the frowning, no-nonsense Waller set a folder onto the table. 

“These two intruders left all of the building’s security personnel utterly incapacitated. Currently they are in traction.” she continued. “Did our gallant heroes attempt any negotiations before doing this?” the stranger inquired. “I have to admit, I’ve not known any of their type to get so down and dirty.” “Negotiations were never offered. Clearly the League has grown uncharacteristically desperate.” Waller explained as she looked from the man to the folder. “Those in condition to speak gave descriptions that match those of the individuals detailed in these profiles.” 

She opened the folder and the pompadour-sporting figure turned his focus to the two sheets and photos of the perpetrators behind this theft. First was the man in the fedora and tie, his face completely blank, no eyes, nose or mouth anywhere. There seemed to be only skin where his face should be. The newly-recruited boss had heard of some guy like this snooping around a few streets and alleys before. What truly caught his eye, though, was the young woman in the other profile. Through that horned mask, her dark eyes held arrogant majesty and unbound ferocity in equal measure. Her proud, smooth face, around which silky black hair elegantly cascaded, was enough for him to simply lock his gaze upon her ravishing beauty, his eyes gleaming as thoughts started to pour into his mind.

“These two choices indicate how aggressive the League has become lately.” He glanced back at Amanda Waller upon hearing her further elaborate on the robbery. “Most dismiss Subject A himself as a crackpot, an eccentric digging into conspiracy theories that needn’t be dug into.” “And yet he has data too sensitive to your little operations.” the man reminded her, leaning back in his chair nonchalantly. “A colleague of ours, Roulette, recommended you for CADMUS because, young man, she has reason to believe that you have a past…” Waller went on, folding her hands together, “A past with Subject B; Subject A’s recent partner. She joined the League after your little encounter with her in Gotham City. Her days with the League ended when a vendetta of hers against another mobster turned her into a maverick, too unstable and rash, even for the worst of their circus freaks.” “I always liked that babe…” The lanky man’s voice grew silken with interest as he eyed the file on this ‘maverick’ his employer referred to. “I need you to be serious about this…” Waller warned him with a glare as the tall henchman’s eyes darted to his boss in the faintest hint of apprehension. “A pair of misfits not stifled by the League’s scruples makes the loss of this information all the worse. We are aware of what Roulette has said about you, but calling you up for this mission, mobster background or no, was not a decision taken lightly.” “Hey, don’t sweat it, your royal majesty…” the mysterious figure boasted with a raise of a hand. “You’re looking at the guy who offed his own outdated uncle and gave the Gotham syndicate a new face. The old timers have had their fun, now it’s time for us daredevils to step into the spotlight. Just give me any more tips, say, their whereabouts, and we’ll be onto the suckers, packin’ a lot of heat…” “Well, someone’s eager for some action.” Waller observed, placing the profiles back into the folder.

“CADMUS has assembled the strike team that will retrieve this data. With your rise through the ranks of the Gotham mob and previous experience against Subject B, you’ll be taking the lead.” She pressed the touchscreen computer on her desk and a screen on the wall behind her lit up all ghostly-blue. 

The stranger glanced up at the five mugshots of this new team he would be in charge of. First was a man in a dark red bodysuit and silver mask, his left eye lens a white slit while the right was a circular orange targeting reticle. The second was a young Asian woman with short, neat black hair, a cold expression on her face and a crimson transparent visor over her eyes. Her shoulder armour, coloured the same as her visor, was segmented not unlike that of a Samurai warrior while a katana was slung on her back. The third was another man in a pale grey bodysuit, his whole face obscured by a mask sporting dark red, bug-eyed lenses and a pair of small antennae on either side. The next team member was stranger-looking; a slim, white-skinned man in a black top hat and dark grey jacket. The round black shades only added to his sinister appearance. Even more abnormal than him was the last member, who apparently had once been a human woman. Every inch of her skin was coated with golden fur, speckled with brown spots. The team leader noted the woman’s ears that took the form of a wild cat’s, her nose shaped into a snout and white eyes with pale green slits hungry for action.

“Well the pyromaniac hasn’t the best track record, but they’ll do.” he commented with folded arms. “Deadshot, Tsukuri, Firefly, Shade and Cheetah have been selected specially for the purpose of tracking this data, in addition to having prior engagements with the League.” Amanda Waller explained. “For a mission as sensitive as this, CADMUS has no room for small-time roughnecks.” “Trust me, lady,” her new employee promised with no small amount of pride. “With a rising star, that’s me, at the helm, these guys will really turn things around for your little operation.” “And remember, my friend…” Waller started methodically as a sliver of blue from the screen flickered across one side of the man’s face, “It’s not often we call on those from the criminal underworld to protect this country and its government…” “Well today we’re the lesser of the two evils, ma’am.” Waller just kept her stern face on this man despite his interruption and continued. “At this critical inflection point, money is no object for CADMUS. Whatever happens, this mission must, and ‘will’ end with us having that data right in front of us. You and your team shall obtain it from those two misfits…by ‘any’ means necessary.”

Chapter 3

Chapter 5

#dc comics #dcau #huntress x question #helena bertinelli #vic sage #amanda waller #floyd lawton #deadshot #the question #justice league #justice league unlimited #bruce timm #jlu #dc animated universe #fanfiction #fanfic #dcau fanfic

[soapver4]

A Stranger in the Lee Soo-Yeon Strangeverse

Merch idea: You're a vacationer in mystery mistress Lee Soo-yeon's macrohabitat, where each story so far begins with a lead character running into a corpse: in a store he shops at, at the home he visits for an appointment, along his commute, in a vehicle arriving at his workplace, and right above her on her vehicle. To enjoy your stay with maximal peace in this video game, you must keep the place as safe as possible:

Brave the embarrassment and stigma to report suspicious activities and domestic violence and other wrongdoings before they escalate or occur to more victims

Stop establishment patrons from taking any unconscious person away

Clean up after yourself so that no sign of carelessness or sloppiness suggests an abundance of easy victims to potential criminals

Join a mentoring program for at-risk youths

Join a neighborhood watch

Help out at a soup kitchen

Sign petitions for safer infrastructure and other robust security measures and for legal reforms to hold wrongdoers fully accountable

Pay all your rightful taxes to sustain a well-functioning justice system, including adequate hot spots policing (but with policy safeguards to forestall racial profiling)

Depending on the number of crimes accrued by the end of your stay, you get to collect rewards or penalties. There are two tiers of rewards: (A) a computer-generated, shareable gif of you slurping noodles with ace prosecutor Hwang Si-mok and warm-hearted police lieutenant Han Yeo-jin or having desserts with the dashing emergency medicine specialist and secret change-maker Ye Jin-woo and (B) shareable AI doodle of you in Han Yeo-jin's art style. The penalties? Computer-generated imagery of Lee Soo-yeon's villains cynically pointing weapons at your photo avatar. Sorry, you'll have to do more work to show off this other visual on social media. Naturally, the number of villains increases with the number of crimes.

A leaderboard publicizes all players' rankings. Every few months, active players have virtual access to a debate between socially-driven crime writers like Lee Soo-yeon and Kim Eun-hee and experts on criminal affairs. Physical attendance is possible with ticket purchase. The top 5% of players receive complimentary tickets. Let's keep in mind, though, that virtual virtue does not always translate to real-world virtue. Nonetheless, at a time when apocalyptic news ceaselessly rains down on us, the reminder that we have so much agency to sculpt our surroundings would be empowering, clarifying and inspiring.

#blood free #han hyo joo #kdrama #lee soo yeon #korean drama #grid #jtbc life #tvn stranger #video games #gaming #gamification #Soap 4.0

[justforbooks]

On the American football field, OJ Simpson ran around, past and through defenders with almost unmatched success. “The Juice” had legendary status, as both a collegian and a pro.

Undeniably handsome and charismatic, he appeared in films and on TV, and was known in the US for a Hertz television commercial in which he sprinted through an airport, hurdling all obstacles.

But the most enduring memory of Simpson, who has died aged 76 of cancer, will be a race he did not win, the slow-motion chase on 17 June 1994 during which he was a passenger in a white Ford Bronco, armed with a gun and threatening to kill himself, followed through empty Los Angeles freeways by a small fleet of police cars and swarming television helicopters broadcasting live to the world.

Simpson had agreed to surrender to authorities and be charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, who had been found stabbed to death five days earlier outside her home in LA. Instead, he ran. The huge audience drawn by the Bronco chase would soon be dwarfed by the worldwide attention given to the trial. Coinciding with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and specialist television channels such as Court-TV, it became a three-ring circus for electronic tabloid celebrity journalism.

The ringmaster was Judge Lance Ito, preening for the cameras, starstruck and deferential to Simpson’s “dream team” of big-name lawyers. They included national figures such as Melvin Belli, Alan Dershowitz and Robert Shapiro, but the dominant presence was the flamboyant local lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who had built his reputation filing suits against the Los Angeles police department.

Just as important may have been Simpson’s friend and former personal lawyer Robert Kardashian. After the murders, Simpson stayed at Kardashian’s house; when police arrived, Kardashian carried away a garment bag and some have speculated that it contained evidence of Simpson’s guilt. By returning to practise law as part of Simpson’s defence team, Kardashian was shielded against having to testify as to the contents of the luggage.

The trial lasted more than eight months, with Simpson’s team burying the prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden under a landslide of discovery (supplying and requesting vast quantities of material) and challenges to every piece of evidence.

Even Simpson’s cell-phone conversations during the Bronco chase, heard around the world, were ruled inadmissible. Clark’s decision to focus on Simpson’s 1989 charge of domestic abuse against his former wife backfired when the trial turned on the testimony of an LAPD detective, Mark Fuhrman, whose reliability was called into question when he was found to have lied about having used the N-word. This allowed the defence to recast the trial as a referendum on racism, positing that Simpson had been framed because he was black.

The climax came when Simpson tried on a glove, found at the crime scene, that was a key piece of evidence. Ignoring that it had been blood-soaked and repeatedly frozen and thawed, Cochrane seized upon Simpson’s inability to squeeze his hand into the glove. Incanting “If it does not fit, you must acquit”, he had found the visual metaphor to proclaim his client’s innocence. The jury took less than four hours to find Simpson not guilty, although Ito postponed the announcement until the next day to get maximum television exposure.

It seemed that all of the US, and much of the world, watched the verdict. Reaction was divided on racial lines: even sympathetic white people were convinced of his guilt, black people were sure he had been framed. Simpson announced publicly he would not rest until the “real killer” was brought to justice.

Within a year, Kardashian was publicly voicing his “doubt” about his friend’s innocence, while the Goldman and Brown families filed a wrongful death suit in civil court. With new evidence, and a lesser burden of proof than in criminal trials, Simpson was found guilty, and ordered to pay $33.5m in damages.

Born Orenthal James in San Francisco, he developed rickets and wore leg braces until he was five years old, by which point his parents, Eunice (nee Durden), a hospital administrator, and Jimmy (James) Lee Simpson, a janitor and cook, had divorced. He was raised by his mother in the Potrero Hill projects, where he ran with a gang called the Persian Warriors. His father left the family when OJ was four. It was not until later in his childhood, when he went to visit Jimmy unannounced, that he discovered his father was gay. Jimmy performed as a drag queen in San Francisco and died in 1989.

OJ turned to sports at Galileo high school, becoming a star of football and track. By the time he had played his second year of football at San Francisco City College he was being hotly pursued by major universities keen on his talent as a running back. He chose the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

His rickets had left him bow-legged, which helped him make quick cuts (sudden changes of direction), and accelerate out of them. At 6ft 2in and 15st 2lb (96kg), he was powerful enough to knock tacklers over, and with a speed of 9.4sec over 100 yards, fast enough to outrun them. Indeed, soon after entering USC, he was part of a 4 x 110-yard relay team that set a world record of 38.6 seconds, which still stands, as the 440-yard distance was soon afterwards discontinued.

That autumn on the gridiron, he led the nation in rushing (running rather than passing or kicking), the highlight being a late 64-yard touchdown run to help USC defeat its arch-rival UCLA. In 1968, he won the Heisman trophy, awarded to the top college player, by the largest ever margin.

He was picked first in the NFL draft, by the lowly Buffalo Bills, but his transition to pro football was not smooth. The coach, John Rauch, believed in a downfield passing game, which did not suit Simpson. But when Lou Saban took over as coach in 1972, Simpson became the focus of the Bills’ offence. Saban believed in power running, and built a powerful young line to clear Simpson’s way. They became known as “the Electric Company”, because they “turned on the Juice”.

In 1973, Simpson became the first player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, as the Bills made the playoffs. He was a first-team all-league pick (best in the league) every year between 1972 and 1976, but seven games into the 1977 season he suffered a severe knee injury. In the off-season, Buffalo sent him home, trading him to the 49ers. Simpson played two seasons in San Francisco, but after the knee surgery he was a shadow of his former self. He retired after the 1979 season, and returned to acting.

While still at USC Simpson had appeared in uncredited bit parts in TV series such as Dragnet, Ironside and It Takes a Thief; he received his first credit in 1969 on Medical Center. In 1974 he appeared in his first films, The Klansman and the disaster epic The Towering Inferno.

He had a profitable sideline in endorsements, and his series of Hertz car-rental ads ran from 1975. His career peaked in 1977, with a role in the first episode of the hit TV miniseries Roots, and a decent part in Capricorn One, a film about the faking of a landing on Mars. But his next film was ill-chosen – Michael Winner’s thriller Firepower (1979) was a bomb – and for the next few years most of his film work was done for his own production company.

In 1983 he joined the commentary team for ABC’s Monday Night Football, the highest profile sports programme in the US. Though he lasted for only three seasons, he moved on to a starring role in an early HBO comedy series, 1st and Ten, set in the world of pro football, which ran from 1986 until 1990. This tapping of comedy beneath his image led to his being cast as the incongruously named detective Nordberg in The Naked Gun (1988).

In that movie and two sequels, Simpson played the dull-witted slapstick foil to Leslie Nielsen, the butt of countless jokes playing on racial stereotypes and his sports celebrity.

At the time of the murders, Simpson had starred in the pilot film for a TV series, Frogmen, about an A-Team-like group of Navy Seals. Because of knife combat shown in the film, it was confiscated by the LAPD as evidence and has never been seen. His endorsement work dried up immediately, and, in the wake of the civil decision against him, he moved to Florida, where more of his assets, including his football pension, could be protected.

He did not participate in the 1995 TV movie The OJ Simpson Story, which starred Bobby Hosea, but more than 20 years later, two shows about the trial drew large audiences, showing the public fascination with the case: The People v OJ Simpson, a dramatisation starring Cuba Gooding Jr, and OJ: Made in America, a true crime documentary series.

In 2001 his house in Miami was raided by the FBI, searching for evidence of drug running and money laundering. Five years later it was announced that a book by Simpson, to be titled If I Did It, was to be published, with an accompanying special on Fox TV.

The book and programme were soon cancelled and, after lawsuits, a Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the book to the Goldman family, who published it in 2007 with the “If” of the title in extremely small print, and added the subtitle Confessions of the Killer.

Simpson maintained some income from selling his autograph at sports memorabilia shows, although he had been legally stopped from copyrighting his name or nicknames for commercial benefit.

In September 2007 he and a group of friends burst into a hotel room in Las Vegas and retrieved from two dealers in sports memorabilia items that Simpson alleged had been stolen from him. He was arrested and charged with armed robbery and kidnapping. The following year he was found guilty, and sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison, one for each million dollars he owed the Brown and Goldman families. Amid reports of his failing health, Simpson was released on parole in 2017.

In 1967 Simpson had married Marguerite Whitley. They had two daughters, Arnelle and Aaren, and a son, Jason. Aaren drowned in the family swimming pool in 1979, the same year that the couple divorced. In 1985 he married Nicole Brown. They had a daughter, Sydney, and son, Justin, and divorced in 1992.

He is survived by his children and three grandchildren.

🔔 Orenthal James Simpson, footballer, actor and convicted criminal, born 9 July 1947; died 10 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #o.j. simpson #in memoriam