Moral question on OJ Simpson

[Number19]

Isn't sentencing someone to 9-33 years in prison kidnapping as well and isn't that beyond an "eye for an eye" as the victims were kidnapped for only 5 minutes and forgave OJ during the trial?

The IRS does armed robbery on a grand scale on a daily basis as well as state and local tax agencies.

As a result, OJ should have been found not guilty.

What you seem to be asking, expanding on what you actually asked, is that, if society has laws, and if someone then breaks the law, is it morally correct for society to punish the law breaker.

Individuals are responsible for their action. If OJ chose to act outside the law, then he should expect to pay the consequences for his actions. When you "break the law" you have forfeited your rights under the law. This is the moral base allowing punishment of wrong doers.

So, imprisonment for OJ is not equivalent to "kidnapping".

Now, if you are questioning the severity of the punishment in relation to the harm which was actually committed by his action, then this is a different discussion. Justice is not always "fair" and legal systems are often, itself, corrupt.

 

[pacelli]

We're not talking about laws. We are talking about morals. Isn't the government just as immoral or more immoral than OJ because isn't the act of arresting someone morally kidnapping?

Yes, the government is engaged in immoral punishments for those people that have not volunteered into their political jurisdiction. But for people that DO volunteer into the state and/or federal government's political jurisdiction, they have made a moral decision which carries moral consequences. OJ volunteered into the political jurisdiction of the artificial entity called the state of Nevada, which does not exist in nature. He did this by allowing the court to proceed with the case without attempting to resolve the issue of political jurisdiction. This is a moral argument and has nothing to do with the law.

On a similar moral line of argument, I would have had no problem if the people who were supposedly kidnapped by OJ came into the room and shot his head off with a 12 gauge. Morally it would have been a form of personal justice, and I as an individual man have no authority to tell them what they can and cannot do.

 

[gaazn]

Maybe a more interesting question is why crack dealers get more time than cocaine dealers. Why white collar criminals who steal millions of dollars get less or no time vs. a guy who holds up a grocery store for $100 and gets 25 years.

 

[KenInMontiMN]

What you seem to be asking, expanding on what you actually asked, is that, if society has laws, and if someone then breaks the law, is it morally correct for society to punish the law breaker.

Individuals are responsible for their action. If OJ chose to act outside the law, then he should expect to pay the consequences for his actions. When you "break the law" you have forfeited your rights under the law. This is the moral base allowing punishment of wrong doers.

So, imprisonment for OJ is not equivalent to "kidnapping".

Now, if you are questioning the severity of the punishment in relation to the harm which was actually committed by his action, then this is a different discussion. Justice is not always "fair" and legal systems are often, itself, corrupt.

But that is the sort of moral turpitude that leads to mass incarceration as justifiable as a 'public good.' There is no escaping the fact that groups of people, entire societies even, are just as culpable for their actions in the moral sense as one individual. Similarly if something is alright for a group of people to choose to do, then its alright for the individual to choose to do. That's individual responsibility defined. What you support as part of a larger group you are directly and completely responsible for, the fact that 100 others felt the same way notwithstanding. There is no escape from moral responsibility in numbers.

So the answer is yes, we chose to kidnap and incarcerate OJ as a societal group, as a necessary evil by those in support of that action. It's absolutely crucial that we not lose sight of the concept of necessary evil in such actions, otherwise we sink into the moral pitfall of imagining it to be good. Once we begin down that path, all sorts of 'good' can be accomplished with evil, and we soon find ourselves kidnapping and incarcerating each other for anything and everything.

Those who are completely allergic to the notion of collectivism will feel a revulsion toward this, but this notion of individual responsibility for collective misdeeds is exactly what's at the central core of Christianity and the Passion. Christ died for our sins because he recognized them as his sins- that there was no place where he ended and we began, our sins were his own sins in his judgment, and he was personally responsible for all of them without exception. He saw himself as containing each and every one of us, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. More recently Dostoevsky gave this theme wonderful treatment at the beginning of chapter 25 in The Brothers Karamazov in a deathbed conversation from an elder monk to his fellow priests and his young acolyte.

So many will reject this core tenet of Christianity (and other religions) for exactly such blurring of the borders of individualism, and that is very much to be expected and tolerated as part of the reason for having a universe in the first place. You create a universe to create and separate a flow of one moment into the next, creating in turn the illusions of cause and effect and free will, along with the illusion of physical separation from one another made possible by viewing each moment as a separate cross-sectional slice of reality. In fact, of course, any point of view involving the recompression of time through disattachment to matter immediately reveals the structural simultaneity of all moments and along with that the structural unity of the human vine and branches.

But back to OJ and crime in general- should we choose to accept the yoke of Christianity (or other religion) with full knowledge of its meaning, then we are embracing his crimes as our own along with all crimes of mankind, and recognize such a kidnapping and incarceration as the failure that it is, not a victory- and an evil chosen, debatable as necessary or not I suppose. From such a stance it follows that we will always seriously question the necessity of applying such evil in each and every instance. Only through rejection of those core tenets and an embracing of the illusion of individual separation the universe provides can we imagine any separation from our crimes due to momentary individual disconnection. But that again goes straight to the heart and soul of the purpose behind a universal free will construct, which is to allow the choice between connection or separation with humanity to be made in an atmosphere that is fully capable of providing logical support for either choice, in order to leave judgment in regard to such choices a self-imposed decision. Such judgments in the end can't be blamed on any other, judgments we make ourselves remain our own regardless of the will to separate and be as small as possible.

For OJ, if he viewed his possessions as in his own hands regardless of whose hands actually held them, such an incident involving threat and gunplay may have instead played out quite differently.

 

[dude58677]

Thomas Riccio and Alfred Beardsley FORGAVE Simpson and no one was killed but the State of course never lets things go.

It is no one's business what happens in a personal dispute. If you want to prevent problems then you buy a gun. When you rely on the State to protect you, they do not and when you don't want them to intervene they do.

 

[SeanEdwards]

O.J. got this extremely harsh sentence as payback for beating the earlier murder rap. That is all.

 

[dude58677]

O.J. got this extremely harsh sentence as payback for beating the earlier murder rap. That is all.

This is just as evil as committing the murders, only the State is the bad guy this time around.

This is starting a very bad precedence. A person could accuse anyone of any crime or set anyone up because they don't like them.

 

[John of Des Moines]

.... Why white collar criminals who steal millions of dollars get less or no time vs. a guy who holds up a grocery store for $100 and gets 25 years.

Probably because having a gun put to your head is a wee bit more scary to the average person then having someone dig a tunnel from the building next door or passing a phony check.

 

[dude58677]

___

 

[dude58677]

I don't like Jon Benet Ramsey's father because he is rich. I know what I will do, I'll set him up for robbery and declare that he shouldn't get away with murder of his daughter.



Get my point?

 

[nate895]

I don't like Jon Benet Ramsey's father because he is rich. I know what I will do, I'll set him up for robbery and declare that he shouldn't get away with murder of his daughter.



Get my point?

The evidence was overwhelming that Mr. Simpson committed this crime, and it wasn't that the person who obtained the evidence asked Simpson about it, he was asked to setup the meeting, and he told the authorities about the plan and they bugged him.

 

[tremendoustie]

I do not believe there is such a thing as necessary evil.

I believe it is not immoral to act in self defense by holding a person who is initiating violence, or to do so in the administration of justice against someone who has initiated violence.

It is the initiation of violence against a person or property that is immoral, rather than violence in every case.

 

[BeFranklin]

Isn't sentencing someone to 9-33 years in prison kidnapping as well and isn't that beyond an "eye for an eye" as the victims were kidnapped for only 5 minutes and forgave OJ during the trial?

The IRS does armed robbery on a grand scale on a daily basis as well as state and local tax agencies.

As a result, OJ should have been found not guilty.

No one has asked about the so called victims forgiving OJ. If there is no victim seeking redress, "the state" shouldn't either.

Under a real justice system, if there is no one calling for punishment (real victims) there should be no punishment. There shouldn't be crimes against the state. This is the difference between private prosecution and prosecution "against the State" which is a legal fiction that has caused the growth of crimes, the entire office of the DA, and a police force as opposed to sheriffs and deputies and a posse when needed. The justice system doesn't look at all like it did a hundred and so years ago. That is why.

Private Prosecution used to be common in this country. And victims should be allowed to forgive and the matter dropped.

Here's one book on private prosection. May not be the best, just showed up first on the search.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762(199104)96:2<608:TTOCJP>2.0.CO;2-8
Review.

Please read the above review it. It states the difference well, but I can't past from it since its a PDF file.


See also:
http://books.google.com/books?id=JR...f+criminal+justice&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

Amazon
Review
Product Description
Allen Steinberg brings to life the court-centered criminal justice system of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, chronicles its eclipse, and contrasts it to the system—dominated by the police and public prosecutor—that replaced it. He offers a major reinterpretation of criminal justice in nineteenth-century America by examining this transformation from private to state prosecution and analyzing the discontinuity between the two systems.

 

[dude58677]

The evidence was overwhelming that Mr. Simpson committed this crime, and it wasn't that the person who obtained the evidence asked Simpson about it, he was asked to setup the meeting, and he told the authorities about the plan and they bugged him.

Was it overwhelming?

http://www.dopejam.com/bop/RUMBLING/SOCIAL/oj.html

Many people are saying that OJ Simpson is guilty. But according to the law, a person is guilty if prooven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. May he did it, who knows. But according to the evidence there are too many pieces left open, which creates reasonable doubt, such as:


Ron Goldman was in the peak of his prime physically. OJ is old and has arthritis. Ron Goldman has alot of bruises and cuts. This indicates that there was a long struggle. If there was a long struggle, then OJ would have had bruises as well. OJ had ****** 0 ****** bruises. None. Zilch. Also how could an old OJ hold off a young well built guy with ONE HAND (OJ would have had to be holding the knife in the other). In fact OJ had to hold of Ron Goldman *AND* his X-WIFE with one hand AND not get bruised, and some how miraculously not get any of the truckload of blood on himself so that no blood gets on/inside his Bronco AND get home and within 6minutes shower,

FUNAMENTAL LAW: You are innocent until prooven guilty.

PROOVEN GUILTY: Must be done w/o any doubt. If there is reasonable doubt in the case, then there cannot be a guilty verdict.

The police took a blood sample from OJ Simpson, and the LAW states that the sample must be turned into the lab immediately. But there was a 3 HOUR delay.

The blood on the gate was taken 3 WEEKS late/after, when it should have been taken with the other blood samples.

There was 5 cc's of blood missing from OJ's blood sample.

The blood found on the gate was 0.7 of a drop of blood, and it contained XFD (I think is the name), which is a blood preservative used for BLOOD samples.

Mark Fhurman on his second time on the stand when asked the yes or no question "did you plant evidence?" stated "I wish to assert my 5th ammendment right ".

OJ had a cut on his hand. The bloody glove found did not have a cut to match. Nor did the glove fit.

The Limo driver stated he saw a black figure walk into the house 6 minutes before he picked up Simpson. That gives Simpson 6mins to shower, destroy remaining evidence, pack, and get ready for the airport? Impossible. The Limo driver also stated that he saw the figure from the back. Yet, the prosecution says that Simpsons went in through the front (because there was blood at the front gate).
There is too much doubt to be able to say without a doubt that he did. There is NO DOUBT that the police planted evidence. As to why did he drive in his Bronco? There are tonnes of people who go to jail from crimes they didn't do. Who was that Canaidna who lost 18 YEARS of his life to being in jail to be later found not guilty in a retrial. I personally would probably run if caught by surprise, just by pure instinct. I'd be scared. I don't want to go to jail for something I didn't do.

OJ is not guilty in two ways:

because of the police planted evidence, he did not get a free trial which is a RIGHT.

There's too much doubt. Too many pieces of the puzzle missing.
You can't tell me the above stuff I stated doesn't make you wonder.

 

[dude58677]

No one has asked about the so called victims forgiving OJ. If there is no victim seeking redress, "the state" shouldn't either.

Under a real justice system, if there is no one calling for punishment (real victims) there should be no punishment. There shouldn't be crimes against the state. This is the difference between private prosecution and prosecution "against the State" which is a legal fiction that has caused the growth of crimes, the entire office of the DA, and a police force as opposed to sheriffs and deputies and a posse when needed. The justice system doesn't look at all like it did a hundred and so years ago. That is why.

Private Prosecution used to be common in this country. And victims should be allowed to forgive and the matter dropped.

Here's one book on private prosection. May not be the best, just showed up first on the search.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762(199104)96:2<608:TTOCJP>2.0.CO;2-8
Review.

Please read the above review it. It states the difference well, but I can't past from it since its a PDF file.


See also:
http://books.google.com/books?id=JR...f+criminal+justice&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

Amazon
Review
Product Description
Allen Steinberg brings to life the court-centered criminal justice system of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, chronicles its eclipse, and contrasts it to the system—dominated by the police and public prosecutor—that replaced it. He offers a major reinterpretation of criminal justice in nineteenth-century America by examining this transformation from private to state prosecution and analyzing the discontinuity between the two systems.

Finally someone who understands my point.

 

[Grandson of Liberty]

Mark Fhurman on his second time on the stand when asked the yes or no question "did you plant evidence?" stated "I wish to assert my 5th ammendment right ".

<snip>

because of the police planted evidence, he did not get a free trial which is a RIGHT.

I guess only criminals (or alleged criminals) get the benefit of the doubt? Since when is invoking the 5th Amendment considered an admission of guilt in a court of law?

 

[dude58677]

I guess only criminals (or alleged criminals) get the benefit of the doubt? Since when is invoking the 5th Amendment considered an admission of guilt in a court of law?

It is not. I was just copy and pasting and forgot to delete that part.

 

[Grandson of Liberty]

It is not. I was just copy and pasting and forgot to delete that part.

Fair enough.