Civilized Society

by digby

Via TChris at Talk Left we get the news that a police officer has actually been charged in a taser death. Apparently the cop shot the prisoner full of electricity nine times and then failed to get medical attention to him when it was clearly needed.

TChris points out that the judge actually said something you would think should be obvious:

"In a civilized society, abuse by those who are given great authority cannot be tolerated," Nevils said in a statement.
It's pretty to think so, but it's also pretty hard to make the case that we are a civilized society these days:

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.


Or this:

The military jurors who gave Osama bin Laden’s driver a light sentence want him freed from Guantanamo once he completes it in December and were frustrated to learn that the military can hold him indefinitely, one of the panelists said Wednesday.

In a telephone interview, the juror said the panel of six U.S. military officers did not learn until the trial ended Thursday that the Pentagon retains the right to hold Salim Hamdan as an "enemy combatant" even after he completes his sentence.

"After all the effort that we put in to get somebody a fair trial . . . and then to say no matter what we did it didn’t matter — I don’t see that as a positive step," the juror said.

We care a great deal about the sexual foibles of politicians and whether or not a fourteen year old girl does the "moral correct" thing and has a child against her will. Things like this, not so much.

At this point I'm surprised there are as many people like that judge or those jurors around. There's certainly not much outcry in our society against such behaviors. As long as it's being done to a despised class --- police suspects, foreigners or alleged terrorists -- there's virtually no social or official disapprobation. It's actually quite rebellious to stand up for the right of human beings not to be capriciously killed or detained indefinitely by the authorities. I salute those who manage to do it.


H/T to BB
.