If I, as an adult spank another adult because I think they are acting like a child, it is me who is the criminal.

Like America 2013…

BUT, if you’re a kid at a party, and you’ve had a couple of mixed drinks or a few beers, and you take 2mg of xanax, it can stop your heart, especially if you have no tolerance for the drug.

CNS depressants, especially benzodiazepines are sneaky like that, and xanax is a pretty powerful one. i said it above, i’ll say it again, grass is one thing, but a drug that can kill you outright under common circumstances probably shouldn’t be unscheduled.

not to mention the fact that xanax is SUPER addictive, a good friend of mine checked himself into the nut house when i was younger in an attempt to get off the stuff. a quick google search will give you tons of info on what a pain in the ass it is to stop, and the problems if you just quit outright.

You can say ‘fuck you’ to literally anyone in society without criminal consequences.

The fact that the judge and police are set aside from the rest of society is absurd, but also telling, as they (police at least) can quite literally get away with murder.

I can say ‘fuck you’ to just about anyone anywhere, and I might get smacked, I might get kicked out of Wal-Mart but I won’t go to jail.

Say it to a member of the protected caste, and suddenly it’s a crime.

The fact that most people think it is OK shows how deep the rot goes in our collective consciousness.

For some reason, everybody who responds to me seems to think I care about the procedures of the criminal justice system. I don’t. I worked for 6 months with a very level headed city judge. I have more than a passing idea how it works. Cases like the judge in the video are how it doesn’t work and it horrifies me.

What I care about is the ethics: is it right or wrong? Should the judge have sentenced this woman to 30 days? And the central question there is whether the state should have the power to forcibly confine a woman if it can’t demonstrate that she harmed anyone. If you cannot answer this question, then you aren’t debating me, you are just running around in circles confusing yourself.

Give her a lecture on manners? Make her write 100 times on a chalkboard? Fine. Throw her in a cage? That’s called kidnapping if anyone else does it.

No, sorry, fuck them – they deserve zero respect.

The judge is one of millions of accomplices to a criminal system. Fuck them.

i think we need to legalize some drugs too, but powerful, addictive benzo’s, hell no..

All the rules of due process would work just aswell without the ‘decorum’. It’s about the bloody law, is it not. A judge may sentence with or without ‘respect’, the outcome is the same. Heck they did get rid of the wigs after forever, and apparently the system was not particularly impaired by that.

However… watching the video again I really think the judge is being an asshole here and he’s playing a game for his own amusement. When he insists on getting an answer about the worth of her ‘jewerry’, she can’t answer that. Her jewelry is probably worth zilch, and she doesn’t want to admit to that. False pride. He sees it and plays on that. Then he says bye-bye. When she responds in kind he finds her in contempt. How unprofessional is that?

Decorum my ass.

He should have either fined her double for acting immaturely in the first place, or just let it go.  The fuck you that came afterwards was actually deserved, despite being a bad move on her part.

Also, 30 days in jail?  That’s a nice burden on the taxpayer for a flippant remark.  Maybe America should be looking to save money in the courtrooms if it wants to cut spending.    I don’t know how much that’ll cost, but it’ll surely be a couple of thousand at least, just to make this girl have less chance of being a productive member of society.

This is nothing but your opinion. The judge ruled otherwise, and has the full force of the law behind him. I guess when you are a judge, you will let people treat you however they want.

For the millionth time: Dred Scott. Can we stop pretending that judges are magically right?

So, let’s assume she has a drug problem.  Let’s assume, as you have, without knowledge, that she has never been in the court system before.  Let’s assume all that.  Let’s concede that she doesn’t ‘harm’ the judge by flipping him off.

You’re still wrong.  The court is not a foreign place.  It’s not a concept we don’t understand, even at the age of 18.  She has been arrested.  Cuffs were placed on her, she was taken in a police car to a police station and spent the night in lock up and was told prior to her hearing what was going on.

She understood that she was seeing a judge.  And she treated the whole thing like 1) a joke 2) something she could flirt her way out of and then 3) anger and defiance when her inappropriate behavior was called out on (and by the way, the bond, as set, was appropriate to begin with and still appropriate even after it was raised).  So, why should judges not be able to enforce the order and decorum we expect of the criminal justice system?  Why can’t the judge expect her to behave with a modicum of respect?  I have seen drunk, crazy and stoned people act with more decorum than she did.  

Are you European though? Because that can make a big difference.