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Have I Befriended a Murderer?

71 points gmays 2 hours ago 34 comments

silverFork 1 hour ago | parent

It is probably was crime of passion that he had covered up. Apparently she was having affairs and he didn't. Robbers don't kill people for mere $50k. He maybe a nice guy but also a killer. It was not because of money I would guess. Anger management issues are likely and those are not visible now.

saaaaaam 1 hour ago | parent

Or it was her stepfather who she was going to report to the police for allegedly sexually abusing her.

dbt00 1 hour ago | parent

This is probably more of a reddit thread than a HN thread, but it seems unlikely that he would make up a story about a robbery in that case.

scarby2 1 hour ago | parent

Unless the step father robbed the store as a cover for the actual motive.

Also, given he opened the safe and called the police a few minutes later, what happened to the money from the safe.

MisterTea 1 hour ago | parent

Or was it the butler?

Truth is in these situations we don't know so no one outside of the case should speculate.

I feel the tendency to turn criminal cases into public spectacles does more harm and disservice to justice than anything else. The public has no business passing judgement or deciding for themselves. Leave them out of it.

BeetleB 1 hour ago | parent

> Robbers don't kill people for mere $50k.

Here in the US, people kill for a lot less.

BigTTYGothGF 1 hour ago | parent

I'm reminded of Edgar Smith and William Buckley ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Smith_(murderer) ), let's hope that however this particular story ends no one else gets killed.

saidnooneever 1 hour ago | parent

regardless of what happened truly, id say that someone isn't define by any specific thing that happened in their lives. however people do like to try and make it seem that way, because emotion and subsequent judgement cloud perception and prevent looking past things for a lot of people who cant detach themselves from their own emotions and or judgement.

people change all the time, and sitting in a small box without freedoms will surely cause deep introspection even in the most outward of people.

you can befriend anyone if theg are friendly to you, regardless of what happened in their lives historically. ofcourse be careful and learn lessons, but no need to be judgemental on things that never involved you in the first place.

for most people you can find some slice im their life and mark them as bad (maybe not wife murdering bad, but bad nonetheless). if you look critically at how you view people you will find that the people you do accept in your life simply dont have slices that you know of that trigger your emotions and cause judgement.

this is why i like some religions say judgement is only reserved for god. other then that it just causes more negativity from something that was already negative. spreading it more and more. (yes i know this last part will likely be hated on by the atheists, thats ok, judge away ;), still love ya!)

un-diletante 1 hour ago | parent

I'm finding more and more onerous the social expectation that I should be punishing transgressors of law or morality through shunning and disrespect. In my opinion punishment should be purely an affair of the state, and I don't believe that someone should be looked down upon because they treated someone who has done wrong with dignity and respect.

swatcoder 1 hour ago | parent

Social media turned the whole world into a high school cafeteria.

saghm 1 hour ago | parent

I'm pretty sure that societies have had social pressure for not interacting with people who society frowns upon as long as there have been societies. If anything, the "affairs of the state" that handle a lot of this nowadays developed because of the social pressure, not the other way around. Social media didn't somehow invent the idea of societies shunning people that are not deemed acceptable, although it did probably make it more visible.

swatcoder 51 minutes ago | parent

Yes, everything that we experience today is reflected in social patterns that wax and wane and exist in parallel throughout history and across the world. Humans and their group behavior are all just a constant whirl of remixes.

But what you embrace as historical and perennial in shunning, shame, and ostracism is in like historical and perennial company with compassion, forgiveness, mercy, etc.

But for many of us in the US, in the GenX and Millenial generations that we grew up in, we experienced the worst of the shunning culture in high school, among small town cliques, and in the midst of certain church groups; and then social media came, and we witnessed a clear turn where the dreaded "Mean Girl" dynamics that we hoped to have escaped in a liberalizing adult world of funky tattooed weirdos, long haired UNIX nerds, rainbow-flagging Unitarians somehow became the dominant voice of social media culture and it was somehow being championed loudest of all by some of those same colorful weirdos!

Maybe you're happy with that turn, but you can't really take away the disappointing and disorienting transition that many of us experienced as it took hold.

saghm 47 minutes ago | parent

You're making a pretty huge logical leap about what I "embrace" or am "happy with" based on my disagreement about whether social media is singularly responsible for what you're describing as a massive societal shift.

ertian 36 minutes ago | parent

I think that the argument is that social media amplified the effect. It obviously didn't create social pressure, but pressure was limited, and people were just free to be more diverse--or, to put it in the opposite way, there was less pressure to conform.

When something bad happens (like, say, a murder), people want to talk about it. But now, the conversations happen in view of the public--the _whole_ public. So people don't want to be on the wrong side of the conversation. In private, among friends they understand and trust, they might express doubt or complex thoughts. But out in the general public, where their opinion could be boiled down to a soundbite, they don't dare lean on nuance. So, they play it safe.

Go onto Reddit, and under some controversial story post a nuanced take. Chances are you'll get downvoted to oblivion. And that's fine--it's pseudonymous. But if it were attached to your real name, and you happened to be wrong (or some part of your statement could be taken out of context and made to look wrong), then it could always be dredged up and used against you. OTOH, there's basically no scenario where it would be dredged up to help you.

So the result is, all nuance is drained out of the conversation. We end up with junk food for public discourse: no fiber, no nutrition, just feel-good sugar: "fuck that guy, he should be locked up for life!" And seeing everybody carry that line unanimously makes anybody who doesn't look immediately suspicious.

saghm 10 minutes ago | parent

I don't find this particularly convincing as a fundamental change in how social pressure in communities works. I grew up in a suburb (around 25,000 people), and social pressure didn't need social media to cause real-world consequences; a priest at a church got reassigned and later quit being a priest altogether because of a rumor that he had an affair with a married woman, which in reality never happened and was a rumor started by the husband with no actual evidence. No one discussed any of this publicly at any point, and yet everyone knew that the priest was well-liked at first, and then everyone knew that he was reviled right after he got reassigned, and then everyone knew that everyone felt bad for him when the truth finally came out.

I'm not saying that social media can't bleed into real life, but I think the effects it has on how communities choose to ostracize people is completely exaggerated here. Your high-level theory for how it could result in a huge societal shift might be plausible, but it would also be plausible to argue that it causes people to move on much more quickly from events like this because it's so much easier for a new one to pop up for everyone to focus on, which leads to people no longer caring about the previous one faster. All of this is is just armchair philosophizing though, without any real evidence.

I think there are very real problems caused by excessive social media that are documented with compelling evidence, but I have trouble believing this is one of them.

themacguffinman 49 minutes ago | parent

This isn't some cancel culture story, the author is reflecting whether the author is themself a "bad judge of character". There are basic reasons related to self-preservation why you might want to figure out whether your friends are murderers, the article wasn't talking about how the potential murderer didn't deserve dignity and respect.

un-diletante 18 minutes ago | parent

You're right, my comment was off topic and a knee-jerk reaction from just the title, though I didn't have the phrase "cancel culture" in my mind when I wrote it. While on that topic though, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with "cancelling" someone, but more-so that second degree cancelling of someone who doesn't join in on the cancelling

forgotaccount3 46 minutes ago | parent

> In my opinion punishment should be purely an affair of the state

The issue here is that we should expect 'the state' to be fairly objective in it's determination of illegality, the correct punishment for the event, and to publish what actions are illegal in a way that is publicly consumable prior to the events it arbitrates.

Lessor transgressions should be handled directly by the peers of the transgressors. I don't want the government holding a court case about something trivial to society at large but relevant to the small community it occurs in.

idkdkdkdkd 24 minutes ago | parent

great you be friends with rapists and i can think people like you are trash

whatshisface 1 hour ago | parent

It's supposed to be proof beyond all reasonable doubt, but the system prefers the principle of one crime, one sentence.

stephenlf 1 hour ago | parent

> Ten of the 12 jurors agreed, and Robin was found guilty by a majority verdict.

God bless America. I’m glad I’m here and not there.

mkehrt 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, I was really shocked to read that.

IshKebab 33 minutes ago | parent

Why though? Let's be real, juries are human and requiring a unanimous verdict will 90% of the time just mean that people that disagree with the majority will give in so that they get to go home.

There's no fundamental difference in justice, just minor differences in thresholds.

mkehrt 28 minutes ago | parent

That's correct. We shouldn't be convicting people unless it's obvious.

willchis 48 minutes ago | parent

Really?! https://www.prisonstudies.org/world-prison-data/highest-lowe...

alistairSH 44 minutes ago | parent

Came to say something similar...

The US is first on prison population (total) and forth on rate on incarceration (behind El Salvador, Cuba, and Turkmenistan).

Veserv 8 minutes ago | parent

The odd thing is that the incarceration rate in the US is 542 per 100k, but the murderer rate is probably something like 200-350 per 100k.

5.9 homicides per 100k annually [1]. Assuming the average person who commits homicide commits 1 homicide in their lifetime (known homicide distributions support this) then that is 5.9 new murderers per 100k annually. Distributed over expected lifetime that would be 200-350 murderers per 100k.

So, if the US successfully imprisoned every murderer and only murderers, it would still be ~25th (~Nicaragua) to ~80th (~Russia). Nearly 2x the total incarceration rate of France and 3x the total incarceration rate of Germany if only murderers were incarcerated and we used the low estimate.

If we assume that homicide is relatively rare compared to severe physical violence that most nations consider worthy of incarceration, then just imprisoning all violent offenders in the US would likely require 1,000+ per 100k at the low end, over twice the actual rate in the US.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

kevinwang 46 minutes ago | parent

Similar in theme to the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes "You Can See Everything", which is also about a criminal professing their innocence, the journalist/documentarian's relationship with them, and attempting to find out if they lie. Both include a prison visit as well!

simlevesque 40 minutes ago | parent

Has there been a discussion of the movie on HN ? Seems like we're the intended audience.

teachrdan 36 minutes ago | parent

Some of us are the intended subjects.

caycep 20 minutes ago | parent

that kind of reminds me of a writeup by this exiled Chinese dissident; she ended up knowing her CCP surveillance officer so well, he was almost like a family member.

drivebyhooting 9 minutes ago | parent

I read it. It was engrossing.

But ultimately what is the point of these stories? I didn’t learn anything, no mystery was unraveled. It’s information fast food but dressed up as intellectual.

littlekey 1 minute ago | parent

It highlighted the flaws in the justice system. Regardless of his innocence or not, it seems to be the case that his appeals are not being taken seriously even when there are compelling reasons to do so. At least that's what I got from it.