Pelosi's Husband Attacked

[CJD]

(10-30-2022, 12:49 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: You're putting me in the annoying place of having to defend Jessie Waters here, but I get what he's saying.  Although less true in SF now than under Boudin, the DA's in places like SF and LA County are notoriously soft on crime.  Get arrested for hitting someone in the head with a hammer, you'll get charged, most of the time, with 245(a)(1) PC: Assault with a deadly weapon.  Sounds about right, no?  Wait for it... but it's likely to be charged as a misdemeanor as the crime is what's known as a "wobbler".  The vats majority of the time it's charged as a felony.  Under the previous DA here, Jackie Lacey, I only saw it charged as a misdemeanor once, and I actually got why.  Under the current POS it's filed as a misdemeanor around 50-60% of the time, if not more.  Except, guess what?  Anytime the incident made the news, even if it was less severe than other, similar, incidents, it's always, always charged as a felony.


What Watters is saying, albeit in a snide manner, is that he wants this attacker to receive the same degree of leniency typically showed by these soft on crime DA's.  Essentially, don't be extra harsh on this guy because his victim is high profile and the incident made national news.  Treat this guy like the thousands of other such attackers that didn't make the news.  I completely agree with your take on his tone and facial expressions, but his point is absolutely a valid one

You are being very charitable towards his reasoning for requesting leniency. I think it's much more likely that he just likes that a political opponent was assaulted.

But who knows, maybe I'm just not being charitable enough.

I am sympathetic to your frustrations with these DAs though. In my opinion, the leftist viewpoint on crime is that a lot of crimes, like robbery, theft and drug use (and even, to an extent, drug sale), are a product of desperation, despair and/or hopelessness and solving the problems that cause those things (such as systemic racism and other policies that keep poor people poor and desperate) should be the primary concern rather than dropping the hammer on individual criminals and writing them off as just inherently evil people ("super predators" and the like).

It also means bail reform so that a person isn't stuck in jail for months on end awaiting their trial only to be found not guilty just because they couldn't afford their bail (but ruining their life in the process due to lost wages, lost housing, lost family and friend connections etc). A way to do this would be to accelerate trials in which the suspect does not post bail. It could also mean decreasing (or possibly eliminating) bail for non-violent offenses. I think level of evidence should also be a major factor in bail. I would like to see charges be categorized into tiers based on the amount of evidence/level of certainty of the prosecution against the person and bail set accordingly (if someone is arrested and charged on circumstantial evidence rather than witness testimony or video evidence, they should be given lower bail than someone where there is tangible, visual evidence of their crime etc).

That all takes time and effort to develop and some of it may be too difficult to implement (expecting police to reliably tier suspects from "definitely guilty" to "possibly guilty" may be virtually impossible because of certain cognitive biases), but those are the kinds of reforms that I believe "leftists" should support.

I don't like the idea of just down-charging every violent offense to the point where people can assault others and not be charged for a felony because of it.

Relevant note, I'm not familiar with what SF/LA DAs are doing and am just taking your word on the way they operate. If there's more nuance than that, I have not looked into it far enough to have any further opinion.