It's a long article, so I put the most relevant excerpts below, but the whole article is interesting and infuriating. There is a lot more details about the case and lack of evidence.

Richardson and Claiborne's plight is as unique as it is complex. Since they were accused in April 1998 of shooting and killing Officer Allen Gibson, they've faced charges in both the state and federal court systems, and seen their cases go up and down on appeal while seeming to skirt some of the judicial system's most basic rules regarding double jeopardy and the disclosure of exculpatory evidence.

Despite state prosecutors initially charging them with capital murder, the charges were drastically reduced thanks to what court records say was a lack of physical evidence. The two men ultimately pled guilty in 1999 to manslaughter and accessory after the fact, and served little to no time in prison.

Federal prosecutors, however, went on to try them again for the same killing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 2001. In the federal trial, jurors found Richardson and Claiborne not guilty of the murder, but did convict them on drug possession and distribution charges.

Even though they were cleared of the murder, the federal judge overseeing the case sentenced both men to life in prison under U.S. Supreme Court precedent that allows judges to consider conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted to impose a longer sentence. And in making the call to put both men behind bars for life, the judge pointed to their guilty pleas in state court.

"The court is just leaning on the guilty plea instead of trying to find out what happened that day," Adams said. "And the reason, I believe, is they are not looking to find out what happened, because they already know. And what they know is that it ain't Terence and Ferrone."

The Guilty Plea

Nearly a year after the killing, prosecutors reduced the charges against the two defendants from capital murder to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for their guilty pleas. According to the report that attorney general Herring prepared years later in response to Richardson's innocence petition, a state prosecutor had admitted to the press that the case was weak and that "the risks in going to trial with a jury were just astronomical."

"My family ran out of money," Claiborne said. "They were talking about giving us the death penalty. When our attorney came to us and said that this was the best deal, what else was I supposed to do in order to stay alive?"

Richardson said his lawyer told him that, "even though they know that it may not have been y'all that did it, they're going to make somebody wear this case. And it's going to be y'all. You're going to get the death penalty."

"I said, 'Man that's crazy. You're trying to tell me I got to go to prison for something I didn't do?" Richardson said.

The Federal Case

Richardson and Claiborne took the plea deal in December 1999, with Richardson admitting to involuntary manslaughter and Claiborne agreeing he had served as an accessory after the fact.

Richardson was sentenced to 10 years with five suspended based on good behavior, while Claiborne was sentenced to time served.

Adams said there was public outrage at the outcome.

"If you're in D.C. and you're reading that, out of Waverly, Virginia, a cop was killed by two Black guys and they plead guilty, but [one is] given time served, you're going to be like, 'What the hell man?'" Adams said. "You've never seen such concessions made for Black men accused of killing a white guy. It just doesn't happen."

So in December 2000, amid pressure from Gibson's family and others, federal prosecutors indicted Richardson and Claiborne under the RICO Act for one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, one count of use of a firearm to commit murder during drug trafficking, and one count of murder of a law enforcement officer during drug trafficking.

"These drug charges came out of nowhere. It was a loophole," Adams said. "They couldn't just say, 'We're trying to get to the murder of this officer.' There would have been some sovereignty issues with that. But this way they could do it and say, 'I'm charging you with a RICO case where your drug dealing resulted in the death of an officer.'"

As with the state case, the federal case included no physical evidence in support of the charges.

I found someone had uploaded them all to YT, so I ripped them and uploaded a zip file with mp3s. If you have trouble with the link, let me know and I can upload them somewhere else.

Obviously, support them if you can afford it.

Guy unloads a truly impressive string of verbal abuse on a cop. Predictably cops don't let that go unpunished

Excellent video about the real reason ADHD drugs are in short supply. Spoiler: it's about profits

The National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) has cited the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which stated that enslaved people weren’t citizens, to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to run for president according to the Constitution.

The group also challenged the right of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to appear on Republican primary ballots.

The Republican group’s platform and policy document noted that “The Constitutional qualifications of Presidential eligibility” states that “No person except a natural born Citizen, shall be eligible, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President

“An originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the Scalia and Thomas tradition, as well as precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases ... have found that a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ is defined as a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth,” the document states.

The group then cites six cases including Dred Scott v Sandford. The 1857 ruling came a few years before the 1861 outbreak of the US Civil War over the issue of slavery, stating that enslaved people could not be citizens, meaning that they couldn’t expect to receive any protection from the courts or the federal government. The ruling also said that Congress did not have the power to ban slavery from a federal territory.

I thought this was some kind of op, like someone making a fake Republican org and putting out an unhinged policy paper. Citing Dred Scott is crazy, especially since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the argument that she's not a citizen.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fus-politics%2Fkamala-harris-president-supreme-court-b2601364.html

New Hampshire's school funding system is the worst that exists in the US.

This image is pretty self-explanatory, but I want to add that this is not a cherry-picked example. There are other communities that could be compared that would show significantly larger disparities, but this example was chosen because they are 30 miles apart.

This disparity exists because most of the school funding comes from local property taxes. Property rich towns have plenty to spend on schools, while property poor communities must raise their tax rates. This causes businesses to leave, which lowers tax revenues, which forces them to raise tax rates even more. This also eliminates local jobs, which causes people to leave, which drives down property values, which drives down tax revenue. It's a vicious cycle that destroys communities.

One of the aspects of this that enrages me the most is that the NH constitution requires the state to fully fund an adequate education. There was a series of lawsuits starting in 1998, where the NH Supreme Court ruled that the state must fund a study to determine the costs and fund that amount. As a result, the state legislature created SWEPT, a statewide education property tax. The funds would be passed to the state, and the state would be required to divide it out based on an equalization formula. This satisfied the court, despite the fact that the amount would not satisfy the cost of an adequate education established at trial.

Just 2 years later, the legislature passed a law allowing communities to retain the SWEPT funds, as long as they spent them on education. Property rich towns reduced their local property taxes to 0% and tried to spend as much as possible even though their schools were already well funded. Despite their best efforts, equalization funds still flowed to the poor communities, they just couldn't spend it all. Then the rich towns discovered they could set a negative local property tax rate. Most of the richest towns did it, bringing their contributions to the SWEPT fund to 0.

Over the years since there have been other lawsuits, most targeted at aid for students with disabilities. Some of those resulted in some targeted funding and adequacy aid, but today the funding looks like this(SWEPT in this chart is the amount kept locally, so it's a local tax as well):

This whole situation also makes the entire NH tax system regressive, meaning poor folks a larger share of their income in taxes than the rich. There's no personal income or sales tax and the interest and dividend tax was recently eliminated:

This is a system designed to keep poor people poor. Give them a terrible education, eliminate any chance of jobs in their communities, and tax them more than everyone that has a higher income.

There is currently another lawsuit going that the state has lost, but judgement is delayed until after the next legislative cycle. Despite the fact that the state lost, and didn't even contest that they aren't properly funding an adequate education, I'm not hopeful. The current chief justice is a big proponent of private education and represented the state in a previous school funding lawsuit. They also have the roadmap of how to allow the state to continue to violate the constitution. Let them delay, pass small reforms and then undo them, forcing another 5 years of funding studies and litigation.

People talk about social media algorithms as if they're something disconnected from the decisions of the companies that make and control them. "The Algorithm" is not making YT push shitty content on your home page, YouTube is making that happen. It's a combination of ignoring certain trends and actively promoting others.

For starters, these companies made the algorithms, they tweak them constantly. When Elsagate happened, YT made changes the reduced the amount of that very specific type of garbage that was shown. When advertisers stop advertising, they suddenly have great influence over the recommendations. That to me proves they have to ability to control with pretty fine detail what is recommended by their sites.

It's been revealed that TikTok has a manual "heater" function that allows them to force certain videos to appear in recommendations. They use this to set the tone of the site, lure influencers, and make brand deals. That exposure causes heated channels to gain subscribers, further amplifying the effects.

YT trending is manually chosen as well, 10 main videos, 10 gaming videos and 10 shorts, updated every 15 minutes. When videos end up on the trending page, they get more views, which makes them get recommended even more. This gives them a constant source of influence over the recommendations.

One mistake I see people make is to assume that recommendation algorithms are simply a reflection of the audience; "The algorithm is bad because we are bad". My counterpoint to that is that when the recommendations hurt the bottom line of the business, these companies change them. At the very least it's social media companies choosing not to fix bad recommendations and at worst intentional manipulation. Sure, people choose to watch a lot of gross stuff, but let's not act like YouTube couldn't get rid of, for example, misogyny for children content(Andrew Tate etc) quickly if they wanted to.

The other is to treat it as a sentient creation that nobody has control over, "We're just chasing what the algorithm wants". It's one of the things tech bros dream of with regard to AI. They want to be able to put an algorithm in charge of the orphan crushing machine and say, "Sorry, I don't know why the algorithm keeps choosing to crush the orphans".

Tldr: The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm doing my part