Rafe wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 1:27 pm
tomneal wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 8:45 am
Today's fun fact:
Greta Thunberg and Kyle Rittenhouse were born on the same day
Hm. Let's see. If I had the opportunity to sit down and have a coffee and chat, but could choose only
one of them...
Interestingly, Kyle just came up in a phone call with a Very Democrat friend. She called to point to the sentence handed down to truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos for the April 2019 wreck that killed four people in Colorado. Her hypothesis was that the courts are rigged by conservatives and that white Rittenhouse got off scot free after murdering two men and wounding another with an Evil Black Rifle, while Latino Aguilera-Mederos had the book thrown at him with 110-year sentence just because his brakes failed. I didn't follow the Colorado case closely, but unwisely contradicted my friend by telling her that if was simple, accidental mechanical failure, Aguilera-Mederos would have been neither culpable nor negligent and it would never have gone to trial.
She said I was completely mistaken. It was nothing but an accident; the brakes failed. And as proof she said that's why an online petition to release Aguilera-Mederos has over 3 million signatures. But that there had been
videos of Rittenhouse
shooting those men. That the entire justice system is rigged and our country is in rapid decline all thanks to conservatives.
I made my second mistake and asked her if she actually had any details about the two cases, had followed the trials or knew the specific charges and verdicts.
To her credit, she came clean and said that (in not so many words; I'm paraphrasing) to her, facts don't matter. That (like seemingly all ardent leftists) it's what she
knows that counts. And she knows a 26 man in Colorado who has skin that's brown was sentenced to 110 years just because the brakes on his truck failed.
My third mistake was a quick Google. "Actually," I said, "at trial the jury found Aguilera-Mederos guilty of 4 counts of vehicular homicide, 6 counts of first-degree assault, 10 counts of attempted first-degree assault, 4 counts of careless driving causing death, 2 counts of vehicular assault and 1 count of reckless driving. The DA's office says that they proposed plea deals to him, but that he declined to consider any alternative other than what would amount to a Class C Misdemeanor in Texas, basically a traffic citation. There's no way the charges could even have been brought, much less the jury find him guilty on all counts, if the crash was a result of accidental, mechanical failure.
"It seems," I said, "that the big furor over the sentence has to do with Colorado legislation that's been on the books for almost 30 years, a minimum-mandatory sentence provision for certain violent crimes. So the penalty ruling looks like it was largely out of the judge's hands, and Colorado law says the affected convictions have to be subsequent, the time can't be served consecutively. That's why the very long sentence."
"So tell me why Rittenhouse got away with murder without so much as a wrist-slap, and he used an
assault rifle?!"
"Well, first, it wasn't an assault rifle. And second, the jury found him not guilty on all charges. He didn't 'get away' with anything. He was found not guilty, and rightly so. I followed that trial closely."
The call ended, but before she hung up she said something about my close-mindedness being tragic and that I'm incapable of applying logic to the humanity of situations. I found the "applying logic" part pretty humorous, but I didn't call her back to tell her that. She probably won't speak to me for a couple of weeks anyway. Oh well.