{"id":649,"date":"2010-12-09T13:30:23","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T18:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richardhornsby.com\/?p=649"},"modified":"2010-12-09T13:30:23","modified_gmt":"2010-12-09T18:30:23","slug":"the-criminal-mentality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/the-criminal-mentality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Criminal Mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"

When people ask me what I believe is the biggest problem with the United States Criminal Justice System, I always state that our society is to quick to want to charge someone with a crime and that most people charged with a crime are over-charged.<\/p>\n

An example of this excess can be found in the fact that the State of Florida alone has managed to criminalize over 7,000 individual activities. And this number does not include municipal violations criminalized by individual municipalities. <\/p>\n

Which brings me to the most recent news story that caused me to post my concern. While reading CNN, I came across the story: 16-year-old catcher collapses, dies after pitch hits chest protector<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While a tragic story, the headline pretty much told the story. A 16 year old was catching for a pitcher and was struck in the catcher’s protector plate by a pitch. Unfortunately this resulted in a freak accident which caused the child to die. The first thing that came to my mind was sympathy for the child’s parents, for the loss they suffered, for the sorrow of the child’s teammates.<\/p>\n

But what was one of the first thing authorities considered? That a crime had occurred. For some reason, Police Capt. Heriberto Rodriguez felt it necessary to dispel concerns that the freak accident was actually a criminal assault by the pitcher when he said “We don’t see anything remotely illegal on this.”<\/p>\n

My question is who thought something illegal occurred? Why did the news even think to inquire if a crime were possible. Why the first quarter of the article, which should have just been about the boy’s life and the strange nature of his passing, dealt with the possibility of a criminal act is beyond me.<\/p>\n

And that goes to the root of our problem as a society, we have become a society that looks to prosecute someone regardless of intent or culpability, a society who must have someone to blame, even if there is no one to blame. <\/p>\n

That is our society’s mentality, The Criminal Mentality. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When people ask me what I believe is the biggest problem with the United States Criminal Justice System, I always state that our society is to quick to want to charge someone with a crime and that most people charged with a crime are over-charged. An example of this excess can be found in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hornsby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}