Steve Bannon's hopes of avoiding prison suffer blow

CantaloupeLifestyle@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 262 points –
Steve Bannon's hopes of avoiding prison suffer blow
newsweek.com
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"It is a very dangerous proposition to hold someone criminally culpable and send them to prison without a finding that he or she ever acted in any way that he or she believed was against the law or wrong. That is what happened here," Schoen said.

What utter and complete garbage. Ignorance doesn't make you immune to punishment.

"It was illegal to murder the victim, but the defendant didn't believe it was illegal, therefore no crime was committed."

—This logical fallacy brought to you by the best lawyers MAGA could muster.

As soon as this defense works, a manifesto should appear that says something along the lines of "Extermination of MAGA traitors is a righteous cause, just like the elimination of NAZIs."

Then see how they react when a MAGA rally gets bombed. Surely they'll understand the bomber just thought they were doing what is right?

I mean I fell you 100% and your logic is not flawed unless you're the Supreme Court which has found police can enforce laws that don't exist if the officer "thinks" it exists. So what I gather is that the backwards logic will work for govt actors. It is not awesome.

Willful ignorance. It appears that doesn’t make one immune either.

Pretty sure islamic terrorist believe they've got a holy duty to murder innocent people.

So... They're off the hook too I guess.

The defense isn't simply arguing that Bannon was ignorant. I think they're arguing that (1) the law is unclear and (2) Bannon's reasonable interpretation of the law was that he was legally obligated to act the way that he did. I'm not saying that's what actually happened, but it's a much more reasonable argument than simply saying "ignorance of the law is an excuse" would be.

Ones interpretation doesn’t matter, if I believed murder was ok because I was justified and my interpretation of the law was that it didn’t apply to me or was not applicable to what I did, that doesn’t give me a free pass. Obviously intent alters the charge, but it does not remove culpability.

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