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Topic: Parisian Follies (Read 662 times) |
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Blunderov
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Parisian Follies
« on: 2007-06-14 09:25:57 » |
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[Blunderov] The argument goes that Paris ought not to be punished for who she is instead of what she has done but I do not see how this is axiomatic. 'Who' Paris is has a direct bearing on what she, Paris, does and does not consider to be a punishment. One man's poison is another man's meat to coin a phrase. I once knew a very wealthy woman who would sometimes, when late for a hairdressing appointment, simply leave her car double-parked in a busy Saturday morning main road causing a great deal of consternation and inconvenience to the public. Of course the vehicle would be festooned with pink tickets when she returned but she simply handed them over to her husband who had a budget to take care of the fines. In my view, any magistrate would have been perfectly justified in jailing her without the option of a fine. Clearly the fines were not an effective punishment and therefore no deterrent at all. No court worth its salt would ever permit this.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-paris14jun14,0,404958.story
Complains that "Hilton will do more time than most, analysis finds".
Of course she will. Her punishment threshold is higher.
Majikthise has a piece which thoroughly debunks the whole Paris Hilton hoo ha.
Hitch: Getting tough on drunk driving akin to getting off on child porn
14 June 2007, 05:21:06 | Lindsay Beyerstein
The sexually magnetic Christopher Hitchens feels sorry for poor Paris Hilton:
So now, a young woman knows that, everywhere she goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about. She hasn't a rag of privacy to her name. But this turns out to be only a prelude. Purportedly unaware that her license was still suspended, a result of being found with a whiff of alcohol on her breath, she also discovers that the majesty of the law will not give her a break. Evidently as bewildered and aimless as she ever was, she is arbitrarily condemned to prison, released on an equally slight pretext and—here comes the beautiful bit—subjected to a cat-and-mouse routine that sends her back again. At this point, she cries aloud for her mother and exclaims that it "isn't right." And then the real pelting begins. In Toronto, where I happened to be on the relevant day, the Sun* filled its whole front page with a photograph of her tear-swollen face, under the stern headline "CRYBABY." I didn't at all want to see this, but what choice did I have? It was typical of a universal, inescapable coverage. Not content with seeing her undressed and variously penetrated, it seems to be assumed that we need to watch her being punished and humiliated as well. The supposedly "broad-minded" culture turns out to be as prurient and salacious as the elders in The Scarlet Letter. Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks—indeed it reeks—of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse. [Slate]
Jill has a good response to Hitch.
Unaccountably, tide of public opinion seems to be shifting back in Paris Hilton's favor. Even James Wolcott wants to cut Paris some slack.
The latest meme is that Paris has been unfairly treated, that she's a scapegoat for all the other rich people who break the law with impunity. I'm sure her publicists worked overtime to spread the myth that a mean celeb-hating judge sentenced her to 45 days for a DUI. That's not really what happened, of course.
Sheriff Lee Baca, who engineered Paris's short-lived release to house arrest also claims that she was treated more harshly by the courts because of her celebrity status.
Baca's opinion on this point is totally irrelevant to the propriety his decision to defy the judge's explicit order that Hilton serve her time in jail. The police don't get to sentence criminals. The official story is that Hilton was shifted to house arrest because she was suffering from an unspecified medical condition, not because the sheriff thought her initial sentence was unjust.
Without knowing the medical details, it's difficult to say whether Hilton got special treatment when the sheriff let her serve her sentence at home. I've certainly never heard of anyone getting house arrest because they were distraught about being locked up. Jails deal with distraught and unstable inmates all the time.
Maybe Paris is sick, but if she's so ill, she needs to be in a prison hospital rather than at home with an ankle bracelet.
Getting back to the original point, Paris isn't being sent to jail for a mere DUI. She's going to jail for violating the probation she got for alcohol-related reckless driving, a crime for which she was sentenced to three years' probation.
In exchange for the privilege of serving her sentence in the community, Hilton was ordered obey the all laws and court orders, enroll in an alcohol treatment program; she was also forbidden to drive without a valid license in her possession.
The whole point of probation is that you're allowed to stay out of jail, provided you follow the rules.
Prior to this judicial leniency, Hilton's license had already been suspended for an earlier DUI offense. The DMV notified her and her lawyer of the suspension in writing.
On January 15, Hilton got pulled over again, at which point she was again notified verbally and in writing that her license was suspended. She even signed an acknowledgment of the fact that her license was suspended and got a copy to take home. The officers made Hilton's passenger drive away from the scene.
Then she got stopped again on February 27. This time she was going 75 miles per hour in a 30 zone in the dark with her headlights off.
She never enrolled in the court-mandated alcohol treatment program.
Showing up 18 minutes late for court probably didn't endear her to the judge.
Hilton has also had other recent brushes with the law.
I'm tired of hearing that wanting to see Paris Hilton spend a few weeks in jail is sexist or draconian. She deserves jail time for violating the privilege of parole in multiple ways, disrespecting the court, and putting others at risk with chronically reckless and impaired driving. She flat-out lied to the judge when she claimed she didn't know her license was suspended.
Anyone else in her situation would have been behind bars a long time ago. If she's genuinely ill, the prison hospital is the right place for her.
Of course Hilton's parents jumped the line to visit their daughter in prison while the families of other inmates waited up to 4 hours.
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Hermit
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Re:Parisian Follies
« Reply #1 on: 2007-06-14 11:22:05 » |
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Dear Blunderov,
Like incest, fairness is always relative. As I perceive it, the trouble here is that the entire idea of "justice systems" is inherently unfair and inequitable, but attempts to portray itself as otherwise, due, in this country at least, perhaps to the silly idea that the otherwise long abandoned constitution demands it. Certainly the USA is much more systematic about attempting to categorize and regulate sentences and achieve norms in sentencing, ignoring the fact that the entire system, from suspicion to verdict, is so dramatically skewed that the results are always massively biased, and all that regulation has accomplished is to make the suituation far worse for the person who is unfortunate enough to be one of those to receive a ride on the well greased rails into the penal system.
The question to ask yourself is, when it is all over, will any of this actually change Miss Hilton's behaviour, or perhaps that of other people with suspended licenses, or otherwise help society in any way whatsoever? Even if you think this answer is in the affirmative, and I might mention I don't, then ask yourself if all this hullabaloo is the most cost effective and humane way to accomplish behaviour modification? And if it isn't, what was the really expensive point? Given that this is a media fuelled circus, I suggest you ask what the international reporting of what is effectively local news - and what would, until fairly recently, have been local news, has done to improve the lives of anyone other than media stock holders. If you can't think of any benefit, then ask yourself if penalising Miss Hilton for this cause is really what the injustice system is all about.
I'm pretty ambivalent about the furor myself. I don't like drunk drivers, but consider that to be a medical/social issue, not one that penology is particularly effective in addressing and am completely certain that there are far more effective and generally cheaper answers to most problems, including this one, than wasting money incarcerating people. Still this is a separate issue, Miss Hilton was driving while revoked, not while under the influence. Something that might have been prevented by requiring her to receive Vivitrol injections and therapy, rather than a license revocation, when she was sentenced for DUI (which is another mare's nest).
I do find the fact that society considers that a bimbo with too much money and not enough sense should get to spend more time in jail for driving while suspended than does an idiot who breaks both of his wife's arms (or even one arm of each wife), irrespective of the disparity in wealth, troubling. The fact that Miss Hilton has now "found Jesus" (who may not actually have been lost, because I'm sure I read somewhere that he was behind somebodies couch all the time) will probably garner her more sympathy, though possibly not enough to make up the loss of her recording company and agent - not to mention that her original arrest would prevent her from being able to cross the border to annoy the Canadians - only they seem to make exceptions for celebrities. Certainly I don't recall anybody suggesting that GW Bush wasn't welcome there due to his DUIs. More inequity if you like. Perhaps the fact that modern record keeping, computer cross references and the infinite memory of the Internet means that nobody can ever leave their past - including public or private lapses of judgement - behind, is the most troubling aspect of the system we have established and which is currently employed in grinding upon Miss Hilton to the great benefit of the sleazier media.
I'm also sure that as a consequence of the expose's surrounding this, some idiots will push for more funding for what is America's fastest growing market (no I don't mean the coffin suppliers supporting the US military's surge in deaths), the jail industry. Interestingly there seems to be no news that can reduce this fatuous waste of money or persuade the population of the US that there might be alternatives to the ever increasing proportion of our population behind bars. But then I've been told that the great unwashed deserve the politicians they have - who never-ever do anything unless at least 60% of the public demands it from them repeatedly and directly. Unless of course, it brings in campaign contributions. Which might explain why America lurches from inanity to insanity and back again with such monotonous regularity that it is sometimes difficult to decide into which bin to place things. In this case, the inanity of Miss Hilton's complicated morality tale being front page news while the estimated 16 Americans, 2 Nato force members, 20 Sudanese, 40 Afghans and 400 Iraqi dead in the same four days in unnecessary and unhelpful wars of aggression paid for by politicians voted into office by people who trusted them to prevent it, isn't even reported, ought to be an indicator. Unfortunately, judging by column inches, this does not seem to be true. Sad, isn't it.
Kindest Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Parisian Follies
« Reply #2 on: 2007-06-15 03:09:21 » |
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Dear Hermit,
I much prefer the Roman Dutch legal tradition which conspires to keep persons OUT of courts as much as possible. In this tradition, as you know, as much opportunity as possible is afforded to people to come to their own private accomodations with each other. Long wisdom has shown that every time a court is forced to make a decision it creates a precedent which stores up trouble for the future. It seems reasonable to infer that this legal culture would tend to keep persons out of jails too. The opposite appears to be the case in America.
The litigious American tradition has, I suppose, the advantage of rapidly establishing clarity in a frantic business environment. Another example of how a culture of ultra-capitalism favours the fictitious corporate 'person' over the living, breathing and mortal human.
Interesting that that other celeb heading for the slammer, Scooter Libby, does not seem to be attracting the same headlines as Paris Hilton. Possibly he would do better if he were a bit curvier rather than just slippery.
And as for Paris? Another heartrending MSM story of a white woman in peril. Then along came John...
Works everytime.
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