I’m reading “The Witches” by Stacy Schiff, about the Salem Witch Trials, and this trial doesn’t sound far off from what happened in 1692:
1. Extremely partial judges
2. Insistence on your own innocence is considered to be evidence of your guilt and, further, your lack of remorse
3. Chaos in the courtroom (in Salem, it would come in the form of accusers feigning being harmed in real time by the alleged witches)
“Sexual predators” are the new bogeyman under everyone’s bed. It would be amusing if it weren’t resulting in long prison sentences for convicts who should’ve been granted mistrials, or in some cases not been tried at all!
Can we please get some more info about what evidence there is against the Alexander Brothers?
Is there any good evidence they raped or drugged people at all? Or is the evidence so flimsy that they were forced to resort to prosecuting them for "trafficking"?
I'm not going to go over every piece of evidence, sorry. That would probably take something book-length, and this article was always mainly about yesterday's insane sentencing hearing. The full court docket is publicly available if anyone would like to peruse it, and now includes the trial transcripts, which were finally added earlier this month.
Michael… no one is reporting on this area of criminal prosecution with the precision and insight you do.
I wish that I could share your work with people I know who need to learn this stuff. I do not dare because your stylistic flourishes (“Judge Psycho”, for example), which I am happy to filter out because I value what you do, will absolutely undercut your credibility, and maybe mine, with the audience I have in mind.
It really matters. It’s not a stranger’s job to overcome the flattening and uncharitable characterizations your stylistic choices create.
There's a good De Niro film from 1991 called Guilty by Suspicion. He plays a film editor whose life falls apart after he is accused of communist ties in the fifties.
It's very timely given our current witch hunt era. I'm not sure our judicial system based on the presumption of innocence will survive contact by such as Judge Psycho and her fellow "believe all women" fanatics.
The language of accountability has come to mean maximal punativness, we know that. But I love that the judge had to flex her "progressive" props by talking of atonement. Puritanism much
I wanted to say something really sexist, but at this point this kind of proudly biased, proudly activist behavior has probably been institutionalized across the federal government. Who---not what. Who's gonna tell you no when you skirt the rules? On this subject?
Never heard of this case before. Skimmed the Wikipedia article and a linked NPR article and neither discuss much actual evidence besides testimony. The main evidence seems to be a video of one of the brothers supposedly "engaging in sexual activity with an incapacitated 17-year-old girl". Do you have any opinion on this main claim?
You've made the point elsewhere (correctly) that the abolitionist/defund crowd seems strangely supportive of draconian anti-trafficking laws. But this is a new thing. There is a history of activism against draconian trafficking laws, which seems to have been lost. Google shows me activism by ACLU, EFF and several other groups against expansive trafficking laws. Here is a relevant piece showing the anti-immigrant, racist history of these laws.
God help you if you're a man put before a female judge for a sex crime case. If the charge is one of these broad and expansive laws such as 'sex trafficking', by which they may simply mean sex that occured after crossing a border (but worded to sound scary) - you're screwed. Sex crime laws in the West have historically been written with loaded, moralistic language - "crimes against nature" etc. - and this is the latest incarnation...
Pray to God the judge has grown kids and pray they're male: then she might have *some* sympathy by knowing the male experience first-hand. (How horny men are, especially in their youth, and how that can lead to poor judgement and decision making).
Pray to God she's critically minded, sees the nuance in individual cases instead of painting with a broad brush. And pray she sees harsh sentencing as an ineffective waste of taxpayer money and someone's life, recognizes the harm that depriving families of their father's, of their sons and brothers, households and communities of wage-earners can bring. Plunging families into destitution, poverty and dysfunction.
Pray she's studied up on the more liberal countries (Norway, etc.) that treat their inmates with decency. Pray she has seen how much better and healthier society could be if we didn't have people on the street who'd been broken and crippled into severe mental illness after years of state-sanctioned torture inside prison wall, with harms often far outstripping the debatable harm the individual (intentionally or not) brought upon another person. (Think statutory rape - rape in law if not in fact - sexting, and other non-rape and even non-contact offences, which are punished in America as if they were equivalent to a violent rape)...
We have seen The War on Drugs, but now we're in "The War on Sex", as one edited volume led by the renowned scholar David Halperin was titled... As one of his students - a contributor to the volume - argued in his award-winning dissertation "Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights" (2017), legal stigma has simply been redistributed over time, and in the process used as a pretext to expand the carceral state and its regulatory power...
In academic circles, you can find people like Laura Agustin and Heather Montgomery, as well as sex workers themselves, who've criticized sex trafficking laws (sometimes called "sex tourism" in the past), as stripping women of their agency. Treating them as defacto "victims" who must necessarily be traumatized / psychologically harmed by selling sex...
Years ago now, Kaitlyn Tiffany (a journalist), wrote "The Great (Fake) Child-Sex Trafficking Conspiracy" for The Atlantic (2021). Quite brave, and there are many such critiques out there. But few with such a large and growing platform as Michael's... 😎🔥 Few who are willing to stray from the terrain of writing into going on Piers Morgan to debate...
I haven't even read the article yet! I'm just ranting and so glad we have someone like Michael pushing back on the "everyone's an evil bastard out to rape and murder you" narratives. Very publicly and very visibly injecting a dose of the much more mundane, less sensational reality into the mix. ✨️✨️
The judge sounds childish and odd. I read there is a sex video with a woman who is slurring, can hardly walk, as well as there being predatory language in texts that goes far beyond referring to women in crude ways.
". . . but as usual, appellate judges will almost certainly vindicate the vengeful ravings of Judge Psycho, and all of society will be saddled with yet another extreme expansion of ideologically-radicalized 'trafficking' law."
I think "as usual" is an overstatement. No way of proving this one way or the other at this juncture, of course, but stick a pin there. I am not intimately familiar with this case and will want to go back to your prior article, but I think you will be proven wrong on this point. To be sure, I know from firsthand experience that our appellate courts can and do affirm wrongful convictions and sentencing misconduct more frequently than we would like -- but they also reverse truly gross miscarriages of justice more frequently than many assume.
It seems like their only hope is that the appellate court finds the current "sex trafficking" laws unconstitutional. As MT has shown, as of now the Feds can claim pretty much anything is "sex trafficking" so there's little chance that the appellate court will find that the evidence was legally insufficient if they agree with the law as interpreted by the government. And if they reverse the conviction and send the case back to this judge, it seems certain that she'll allow her grudge and bias against the brothers to punish them even more severely.
I’m reading “The Witches” by Stacy Schiff, about the Salem Witch Trials, and this trial doesn’t sound far off from what happened in 1692:
1. Extremely partial judges
2. Insistence on your own innocence is considered to be evidence of your guilt and, further, your lack of remorse
3. Chaos in the courtroom (in Salem, it would come in the form of accusers feigning being harmed in real time by the alleged witches)
“Sexual predators” are the new bogeyman under everyone’s bed. It would be amusing if it weren’t resulting in long prison sentences for convicts who should’ve been granted mistrials, or in some cases not been tried at all!
Can we please get some more info about what evidence there is against the Alexander Brothers?
Is there any good evidence they raped or drugged people at all? Or is the evidence so flimsy that they were forced to resort to prosecuting them for "trafficking"?
I'm not going to go over every piece of evidence, sorry. That would probably take something book-length, and this article was always mainly about yesterday's insane sentencing hearing. The full court docket is publicly available if anyone would like to peruse it, and now includes the trial transcripts, which were finally added earlier this month.
I believe there are concurrent state trials for assault and rape.
Michael… no one is reporting on this area of criminal prosecution with the precision and insight you do.
I wish that I could share your work with people I know who need to learn this stuff. I do not dare because your stylistic flourishes (“Judge Psycho”, for example), which I am happy to filter out because I value what you do, will absolutely undercut your credibility, and maybe mine, with the audience I have in mind.
It really matters. It’s not a stranger’s job to overcome the flattening and uncharitable characterizations your stylistic choices create.
There's a good De Niro film from 1991 called Guilty by Suspicion. He plays a film editor whose life falls apart after he is accused of communist ties in the fifties.
It's very timely given our current witch hunt era. I'm not sure our judicial system based on the presumption of innocence will survive contact by such as Judge Psycho and her fellow "believe all women" fanatics.
The language of accountability has come to mean maximal punativness, we know that. But I love that the judge had to flex her "progressive" props by talking of atonement. Puritanism much
I wanted to say something really sexist, but at this point this kind of proudly biased, proudly activist behavior has probably been institutionalized across the federal government. Who---not what. Who's gonna tell you no when you skirt the rules? On this subject?
Could you go over the evidence? Lots of talk about a video?
Never heard of this case before. Skimmed the Wikipedia article and a linked NPR article and neither discuss much actual evidence besides testimony. The main evidence seems to be a video of one of the brothers supposedly "engaging in sexual activity with an incapacitated 17-year-old girl". Do you have any opinion on this main claim?
You've made the point elsewhere (correctly) that the abolitionist/defund crowd seems strangely supportive of draconian anti-trafficking laws. But this is a new thing. There is a history of activism against draconian trafficking laws, which seems to have been lost. Google shows me activism by ACLU, EFF and several other groups against expansive trafficking laws. Here is a relevant piece showing the anti-immigrant, racist history of these laws.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/04/why-laws-fight-sex-trafficking-often-backfire/
God help you if you're a man put before a female judge for a sex crime case. If the charge is one of these broad and expansive laws such as 'sex trafficking', by which they may simply mean sex that occured after crossing a border (but worded to sound scary) - you're screwed. Sex crime laws in the West have historically been written with loaded, moralistic language - "crimes against nature" etc. - and this is the latest incarnation...
Pray to God the judge has grown kids and pray they're male: then she might have *some* sympathy by knowing the male experience first-hand. (How horny men are, especially in their youth, and how that can lead to poor judgement and decision making).
Pray to God she's critically minded, sees the nuance in individual cases instead of painting with a broad brush. And pray she sees harsh sentencing as an ineffective waste of taxpayer money and someone's life, recognizes the harm that depriving families of their father's, of their sons and brothers, households and communities of wage-earners can bring. Plunging families into destitution, poverty and dysfunction.
Pray she's studied up on the more liberal countries (Norway, etc.) that treat their inmates with decency. Pray she has seen how much better and healthier society could be if we didn't have people on the street who'd been broken and crippled into severe mental illness after years of state-sanctioned torture inside prison wall, with harms often far outstripping the debatable harm the individual (intentionally or not) brought upon another person. (Think statutory rape - rape in law if not in fact - sexting, and other non-rape and even non-contact offences, which are punished in America as if they were equivalent to a violent rape)...
We have seen The War on Drugs, but now we're in "The War on Sex", as one edited volume led by the renowned scholar David Halperin was titled... As one of his students - a contributor to the volume - argued in his award-winning dissertation "Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights" (2017), legal stigma has simply been redistributed over time, and in the process used as a pretext to expand the carceral state and its regulatory power...
In academic circles, you can find people like Laura Agustin and Heather Montgomery, as well as sex workers themselves, who've criticized sex trafficking laws (sometimes called "sex tourism" in the past), as stripping women of their agency. Treating them as defacto "victims" who must necessarily be traumatized / psychologically harmed by selling sex...
Years ago now, Kaitlyn Tiffany (a journalist), wrote "The Great (Fake) Child-Sex Trafficking Conspiracy" for The Atlantic (2021). Quite brave, and there are many such critiques out there. But few with such a large and growing platform as Michael's... 😎🔥 Few who are willing to stray from the terrain of writing into going on Piers Morgan to debate...
I haven't even read the article yet! I'm just ranting and so glad we have someone like Michael pushing back on the "everyone's an evil bastard out to rape and murder you" narratives. Very publicly and very visibly injecting a dose of the much more mundane, less sensational reality into the mix. ✨️✨️
from an old haaretz article:
"The severity of the punishment is determined not by the gravity of the act but by the social capital of the group that sues and judges"
The judge sounds childish and odd. I read there is a sex video with a woman who is slurring, can hardly walk, as well as there being predatory language in texts that goes far beyond referring to women in crude ways.
“victim impact” struggle session — the very existence of which is an affront to all good (or rational) sense.😆 ❤️
". . . but as usual, appellate judges will almost certainly vindicate the vengeful ravings of Judge Psycho, and all of society will be saddled with yet another extreme expansion of ideologically-radicalized 'trafficking' law."
I think "as usual" is an overstatement. No way of proving this one way or the other at this juncture, of course, but stick a pin there. I am not intimately familiar with this case and will want to go back to your prior article, but I think you will be proven wrong on this point. To be sure, I know from firsthand experience that our appellate courts can and do affirm wrongful convictions and sentencing misconduct more frequently than we would like -- but they also reverse truly gross miscarriages of justice more frequently than many assume.
"...but they also reverse truly gross miscarriages of justice more frequently than many assume" -- not when it comes to "sex trafficking."
It seems like their only hope is that the appellate court finds the current "sex trafficking" laws unconstitutional. As MT has shown, as of now the Feds can claim pretty much anything is "sex trafficking" so there's little chance that the appellate court will find that the evidence was legally insufficient if they agree with the law as interpreted by the government. And if they reverse the conviction and send the case back to this judge, it seems certain that she'll allow her grudge and bias against the brothers to punish them even more severely.
Exactly it's a problem of legislature, implemented by politicians. Why? Votes