DeSantis: Hang 'Em High and Disney Sues DeSantis
MTG Says the Darndest Things (Again), Why an Ex-NBA Player Escaped from Florida, Racist Guardsman Leaker Wants to Be Mass Murderer, Steely Dan Sings
Everybody’s an Expert
The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person overestimates their own competence despite a lack of knowledge or skills in a certain area. In daily life, this is reflected when someone who is an expert in a field gets advice from someone who has no training, experience, or education in that field. To which they mutter, “Everybody’s an expert.”
A recent YouGov poll emphasizes this wild fantasy of competence that many people have. Of the 20,000 people polled in the U.S., 1 in 3 (32%) felt confident that they could safely land a passenger airplane in an emergency, relying only on the assistance of air traffic control. Nearly half the men (46%) thought they could, compared with only 20% of the women. After all, they’ve seen it in the movies, so it can’t be that difficult.
What are the actual odds? “There is a zero percent chance of someone pulling that off,” said Patrick Smith, a commercial air pilot and founder of the Ask the Pilot blog. “Do people think they can perform transplant surgery? No. Then why do they think they can land a plane?”
I often think about the Dunning-Kruger effect because every day I read comments from incompetent and uninformed politicians, business leaders, and others arrogantly posing as experts. Yes, we all have a right to express our views, regardless of how lame they may be, but when it comes to making them public or to passing laws that affect others, we have a responsibility to support our views with actual evidence and not just the bluster of entitlement.
These political wannabes think they can pilot our country based on nothing but their own inflated egos, but their actual abilities have resulted in crash after crash. As today’s stories will show…
This Week in Florida Sinking Deeper into the Swap
DeSantis signs bill giving Florida lowest death penalty threshold in US (Tampa Bay Times)
SUMMARY: “People in Florida can now be sent to death row with an 8-4 jury vote, instead of a unanimous requirement, after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law Thursday morning.
“DeSantis pushed to reduce Florida’s death penalty threshold, citing the outcome of the Parkland school shooting case — where the gunman who killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High was given a life sentence after only nine of the 12 jurors voted for death.
“‘Once a defendant in a capital case is found guilty by a unanimous jury, one juror should not be able to veto a capital sentence,’ DeSantis said in a statement.”
MY TAKE: DeSantis continues his scorched-earth trampling of the Constitution with the same fury as Sherman’s March to the Sea. Florida now has the lowest jury vote requirement in the country. Is that really something to celebrate? Only if you want to waste money and execute innocent people.
The reason for the unanimous requirement is that putting someone to death is a serious matter not to be decided without the most safeguards possible. This is especially important when we realize that 1 in 8 people sentenced to death is exonerated. According to The Washington Post, “From 1973 to 2013, 8,466 sentences of death were handed down by U.S. courts, and 1,359 individuals were executed — only 16 percent. Even excluding those who remained on death row as of 2013, only about 24 percent of condemned inmates have been executed.”
Once we lower the standards by which someone is sentenced to death, we will undoubtedly make more mistakes. Yet, Floridians will still pay for those trials. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “Florida has estimated that the true cost of each execution is approximately $3.2 million, or approximately 6 times what it would cost to keep the person in prison for life.” And, no, society isn’t safer with executions. There’s no credible evidence it deters crime.
I don’t have room to debate the pros and cons of the death penalty here, just the incredible detriment to our justice system when we are willing to put people to death based on eight out of twelve. If four people are unconvinced, that should be a clear sign that the state has not made a compelling case for execution. DeSantis said, “Once a defendant in a capital case is found guilty by a unanimous jury, one juror should not be able to veto a capital sentence.” First, if they were found guilty by a unanimous jury, that means one person didn’t vote against them. That’s the meaning of unanimous. Second, even if I agreed (which I don’t) that one person shouldn’t hold up the conviction, why up the number to four people? What’s the research to justify that number? Third, why shouldn’t one person hold up a jury in a life or death situation? What evidence or legal theory is he presenting to say that a one-person scenario creates injustice? None. Just more pandering to those unfamiliar with facts.
[NOTE: For an interesting explanation of the history of the unanimous verdict, read “The Unanimous Verdict According to the Talmud: Ancient Law Providing Insight into Modern Legal Theory.”]
Florida prosecutor sorry for racist memo that singled out Hispanic residents (The Guardian)
SUMMARY: “A state attorney in Florida has apologized for a racist memo produced by staff in a rural county office of all-white prosecutors, advocating more severe punishments for defendants who are Hispanic.
“The document covering plea deals was exposed by a whistleblower former employee who worked briefly for Jack Campbell, state attorney for the second judicial circuit based in Tallahassee.
“It states that Hispanic drivers caught without a valid license are recommended for a guilty verdict and court costs while others avoid prosecution.
“In an interview with the Guardian, Campbell said he regretted the “error” in the production of the memo, which he confirmed as genuine, and said he had disciplined the “entry level” prosecutor who wrote it.
“…Mackenzie Hayes, the whistleblower, claimed in an account published by the news blog Our Tallahassee the memo was part of a wider culture of racism in the prosecutor’s office that covers a six-county region heavily populated with migrant workers.”
MY TAKE: Campbell further explains that the memo should have said “undocumented immigrant” instead of Hispanic, because undocumented people have no accessible criminal record. Still, this memo implies that because they are undocumented, they have a criminal record and should be punished accordingly. That assumption is discriminatory.
Also, the whistleblower isn’t citing just this memo. Hayes is also accusing the prosecutor’s office of “a wider culture of racism.” This memo could have been just a clerical error, except no one in the prosecutor’s office who read it pointed it out as being an error in their policy.