Now that I've heard more details . . .
Feb. 1st, 2007 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasI've got a lot more sympathy for the Boston Police Department.
Okay, so they find the Lite-Brite, send folks in to deal with it, and realize it's a Lite-Brite.
That, really, ought to have been it.
Except that, at 1 pm, someone ACTUALLY left a REAL bomb at one of the medical centers -- I'm forgetting which one -- Tufts or BU, I think. Probably Tufts, because I think it was in the Longwood Medical Area.
Once you've got someone ACTUALLY leaving bombs, okay, it's maybe a little more understandable to go back to your original false alarm and revisit the situation.
So I have more sympathy for the police.
I still think it was a shame to arraign the artists who put the things up.
I don't expect it will go to indictment, though. I mean, arresting them, I could see -- they were still trying to figure out what was going on. I guess I can understand the arraignment, although I think that, by the time the arraignment came around, they probably could have figured out that the artists had nothing to do with the ACTUAL bomb, which was an entirely separate and unrelated event.
I don't think the DA's stupid enough to try to proceed to an indictment, and I'd hope that even a grand jury would laugh at this.
(Quick rundown on the American justice system, at least the way it's supposed to work: first, you arrest someone. You can hold them for a short period of time, like a day, before you charge them with a crime. Only a short period, though -- that's what "habeas corpus" means -- you have to be charged with some sort of crime before very long has passed. You are charged with a crime at an arraignment, which just basically gets the paperwork started. At that point, however, bail, or bond, is set -- an amount of money that is put up that is forfeit if the parties charged do not show up for further court things. Bail is intended to keep people from running away, and it does reasonably well at it. In certain cases, people may be denied bail after arraignment, but it's rare. After you are arraigned, the District Attorney, acting for the state, gets together a preliminary case. They eventually take this preliminary case to a "grand jury", which is a jury of ordinary citizens who determine if there's enough evidence to make it plausible that a crime has been committed, and the accused could potentially have done it. If there's a remote possibility that the folks are charged of something that it's reasonable to charge them for, they are "indicted". After that, things go forward, and you eventually get to a "trial", in which actual guilt or innocence is decided. In general, it is not difficult to get an indictment -- the grand jury process is there to simply screen out the most blatant and overbearing abuses of power, not to determine actual guilt. There is a saying that a competent DA ought to be able to get an indictment against a ham sandwich -- and a DA won't proceed to attempt to get an indictment if there's a reasonable chance that they'd fail. Let's face it -- an attorney who fails to get a suspect indicted would be a genuine laughingstock -- it would either mean that they were truly incompetent, or that they tried to indict someone who was patently innocent. Which would also be a mark of incompetence, actually.)
Okay, so they find the Lite-Brite, send folks in to deal with it, and realize it's a Lite-Brite.
That, really, ought to have been it.
Except that, at 1 pm, someone ACTUALLY left a REAL bomb at one of the medical centers -- I'm forgetting which one -- Tufts or BU, I think. Probably Tufts, because I think it was in the Longwood Medical Area.
Once you've got someone ACTUALLY leaving bombs, okay, it's maybe a little more understandable to go back to your original false alarm and revisit the situation.
So I have more sympathy for the police.
I still think it was a shame to arraign the artists who put the things up.
I don't expect it will go to indictment, though. I mean, arresting them, I could see -- they were still trying to figure out what was going on. I guess I can understand the arraignment, although I think that, by the time the arraignment came around, they probably could have figured out that the artists had nothing to do with the ACTUAL bomb, which was an entirely separate and unrelated event.
I don't think the DA's stupid enough to try to proceed to an indictment, and I'd hope that even a grand jury would laugh at this.
(Quick rundown on the American justice system, at least the way it's supposed to work: first, you arrest someone. You can hold them for a short period of time, like a day, before you charge them with a crime. Only a short period, though -- that's what "habeas corpus" means -- you have to be charged with some sort of crime before very long has passed. You are charged with a crime at an arraignment, which just basically gets the paperwork started. At that point, however, bail, or bond, is set -- an amount of money that is put up that is forfeit if the parties charged do not show up for further court things. Bail is intended to keep people from running away, and it does reasonably well at it. In certain cases, people may be denied bail after arraignment, but it's rare. After you are arraigned, the District Attorney, acting for the state, gets together a preliminary case. They eventually take this preliminary case to a "grand jury", which is a jury of ordinary citizens who determine if there's enough evidence to make it plausible that a crime has been committed, and the accused could potentially have done it. If there's a remote possibility that the folks are charged of something that it's reasonable to charge them for, they are "indicted". After that, things go forward, and you eventually get to a "trial", in which actual guilt or innocence is decided. In general, it is not difficult to get an indictment -- the grand jury process is there to simply screen out the most blatant and overbearing abuses of power, not to determine actual guilt. There is a saying that a competent DA ought to be able to get an indictment against a ham sandwich -- and a DA won't proceed to attempt to get an indictment if there's a reasonable chance that they'd fail. Let's face it -- an attorney who fails to get a suspect indicted would be a genuine laughingstock -- it would either mean that they were truly incompetent, or that they tried to indict someone who was patently innocent. Which would also be a mark of incompetence, actually.)