Ding! Ding! The One Percent Defense at Trial and It's a Winner.

[kairos12]

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/08/crybabies_of_the_1_percent_spoiled_rich_kids_tom_perkins_and_the_real_affluenza
snip:

More than half a century ago, “West Side Story” satirized the idea that what was then known as juvenile delinquency was a product of poverty and the psychological maladjustments it produced, and that therefore “this boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care.

Since then, America has been busy transforming itself into an unabashed plutocracy: while median household income has barely budged since the mid-1960s, the annual income of the top 1 percent has increased by an average of approximately 200 percent in real terms.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that the belief that economic deprivation leads to psychological hardship, which in turn inspires youthful crimes, has not merely been discarded but, in some cases, actually inverted.

Later in the article the author says the defense team said the defendant was "depraved because he wasn't deprived." Given this defense, I expect to see precious trust fund kids outfitted shortly with uncharged IPODS, canceled credit cards, and last years BMWs, in order to install in them some form of a conscience.

[monmouth3]

1. I find it strange we only see a side-view of his face, no head on photos. n/t

[Igel]

2. The judge that rendered the verdict was soundly criticized.

It's not like it's a standard defense. It's a hapax, a one-off.


At the same time, it's something that's sort of sunk into the mental landscape of a lot of people. While the OP criticizes the use of wealth as a defense, some use wealth as an offense in pretty much precisely the same terms.

The wealthy are spoiled, indifferent, feel privileged, are less compassionate. Wealth is an index of selfishness and borderline psychopathology, bad upbringing. You don't really need to look at the person--just their stock market portfolio and house value to know the "real" person and, consequently, their low worth as a human being. Now, psychopathology is a kind of mental illness, so the real difference in a lot of this argument is whether it's a defense that allows for rehabilitation in lieu of incarceration or a disease that should involve immediate government psychological intervention and re-education.

In this their laywer was echoing a lot of people I've seen post on various forums. The argument goes both ways, and while it's one I find fairly anodyne and off point the contrapositive also surfaces (I think I use that term right).

The flip side is to say that the poor must be blessed by virtue of having no wealth (if you're of a Matthew-based Xian bent) or blessed because they're more likely to be humble and meek (if you're of more of a Lucan bent) or virtuous because, well, they're proletarian and therefore only oppressed and can never be oppressors (if you're of a dialectal materialist bent). Again, these consider wealth to be indexical to character, and just as flawlessly indexical as wealth is. Meh. That thinking strikes me as a mild psychopathology.

What's amusing (since I consider wealth neither indexical of psychopathology nor indicative of virtue) is the double-standard by many. If a prominent (D)--or, even better, a progressive icon--has a substantial hoard of wealth they're accepted as "virtuous." I don't know sometimes if that (D) stands for "dispensation" or "Democrat(ic)".

[woo22]

3. Holder?

Why is DOJ not all over this?

[sendero]

4. Seems to me ..

... that if we can excuse criminal behavior because of the way someone was raised as in this instance, no person who grew up poor should ever be convicted of a crime again.