The Night Of

The only thing I can think of from the show that isn't common knowledge is the guy not being able to get the taxi back unless he presses charges on his son.

Ambiturner_sl said:

The only thing I can think of from the show that isn't common knowledge is the guy not being able to get the taxi back unless he presses charges on his son.

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Or if a a family member of yours is charged with a crime, the police can walk into your house and pretty much take anything they feel like taking. Good luck getting any of it back, especially since people usually sit in jail for about a year before being brought before a jury. It can actually be up to a couple of years down here in the South, so even if the state has a weak case against you, you're going to spend quite a while in jail before given the chance to prove your innocence.

There's a difference between "thinking" the system is probably inefficient and not the greatest, and showing it in a gritty HBO mini-series. The show is doing a great job of displaying the nuance.

Does anyone think that there's any good reason to leave prisons without air conditioning in the deep South, and that it doesn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment? It's not that they can't afford them, except for the fact that it cuts into the prison-for-profit bottom line. Our law enforcement departments get paid a certain amount per day/ per inmate, so it behooves them to put as many people in prison as possible.

We had a local case down here, where the son of a cop shot an 18 year old marine on leave in the face at a party. It's kind of amazing how many strings were pulled to help the kid out, when any normal person would be facing life +5 in Louisiana. A local judge lowered the sentence to manslaughter under the radar, until the victim's family found out about it and raised hell and got it sent up to an appellate court which reinstated the charge of murder. I went to school with the shooter and the victim.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeal reinstated the second degree murder conviction of Bryce Perkins.

Perkins shot and killed Marine Daniel Gueringer at a Fourth of July party in 2009.

The jury found Perkins guilty of second degree murder, but when it came time for sentencing the trial court judge, Ron Ware, found the evidence was insufficient for a murder conviction and replaced the jury verdict with manslaughter.

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Insufficient evidence? There was a confession, the weapon, about a hundred witnesses, his accomplices testifying against him, and so forth. Then the fact that his friend got in a fight, he left the part and retrieved a handgun, came back and aimed it at someone's face, and pulled the trigger. Sounds like manslaughter, right?

My point is the system is rigged both ways. Affluenza is a great example. Certain people are nearly untouchable, while other's (the undesirables) are treated beyond terrible. At least people up North don't get to wake up in the Louisiana summer with temperatures over a hundred degrees.

More than 70% of Texas prisons don't have AC, and why that won't change anytime soon | Dallas Morning News
Federal judge frustrated with Louisiana's opposition to air conditioning for Angola's death row | NOLA.com

Woolygimp_sl said:

Or if a a family member of yours is charged with a crime, the police can walk into your house and pretty much take anything they feel like taking. Good luck getting any of it back, especially since people usually sit in jail for about a year before being brought before a jury. It can actually be up to a couple of years down here in the South, so even if the state has a weak case against you, you're going to spend quite a while in jail before given the chance to prove your innocence.

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That's definitely not true and while the rest of your post pointed out ways the system is flawed, I don't see what it has to do with the show.

Anyways, the show being about a critique of the entire justice system would be a pretty big bait and switch from the show that was advertised and what we got from the first episode.

With the evidence being what it is, it would be pretty hard for him to get screwed over by a shitty system.

Armadon_sl said:

Wrong place wrong time jail system is the best for privatized jails. I'm surprised more people just don't go on a shooting rampage after getting out of jail. As soon as you get arrested you turn into a number to everyone involved in the system. Nobody gives two shits about you so why should someone in jail for something like weed give two shits about anyone else when they get out.

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I never understand how we, as Americans, are completely comfortable with the fact that we lock up something like 20x+ more people per capita than the rest of the world. 1/3 people in certain states are incarcerated. It's absurd, because a lot of these people are non-violent offenders who's only offense was that they were caught with marijuana or with a piece of Xanax.

These people could be out in the world, forming a huge portion of our workforce but instead we pay a couple hundred per day, per inmate, to keep them in a concrete prison. It's fucking ridiculous when you account for the massive amount of resources and manpower wasted in this entire fuckup, from excess law enforcement, to hundreds of thousands in jail that don't really belong there, to all these mini-cities, and the massive amount of staffing it costs to run them.

Ancient Greeks and Romans had a much better justice system than we do. If someone did something terrible, they were thrown from a cliff or crucified. If someone did something like committed theft, they were punished accordingly, but not incarcerated. Incarceration is a waste of resources, and time of both the people in prison and the guards assigned to guard them.. The vast majority of the population wasn't fucked with.

This show is really fucking good. Those of you hating on it have the attention span of an ADD ridden mouse.

If we don't get a decent episode tonight I'm done with this shit

This show is so good. Awesome episode. Omar bouta fuck that other dude up.

Ambiturner_sl said:

The only thing I can think of from the show that isn't common knowledge is the guy not being able to get the taxi back unless he presses charges on his son.

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How about the fact that while innocent until proven guilty, if you can't bankrupt your life you won't be able to front the legal fees to get a proper defense.

That scen with stone telling the parents to sell their house or their son is going to get a shit lawyer who doesn't even care was a hard hitter to me.

Making a murderer really shined that light for me. Looking at the difference between Steves hundreds of thousands vs Brandon's public defense was night and day.

Before you can even go to trial, your finances can decide your ability to defend yourself in front of a jury of your peers.

Ambiturner_sl said:

I also don't see how you get that that's what the show's REALLY all about

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That's clearly what the show is about. I don't see how you'd get otherwise.

Ambiturner_sl said:

The only thing I can think of from the show that isn't common knowledge is the guy not being able to get the taxi back unless he presses charges on his son.

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People in this thread couldn't even figure out if the dude was at Rikers or at the court jail for arraignment in the second episode. Tons of people were questioning why he was at Rikers later when he was moved there.

Really wanted to like this show but I don't even know what hell is going on. I'd actually rather watch True Detective s2 again. However, if you have a strange foot fetish I could see the allure.

Too much foot stuff, otherwise a perfectly cromulent show.

This show isn't just about the case and who did it. It is about all the fallout from that one night and the struggle of a naive, innocent kid in the face of the justice system. It looks like they will start digging into what really happened next week.

Another terribly boring episode. I have no idea where they are trying to go with this show and Turturro's character is all over the place. I don't get what they're trying to tell us about him? He's easily defeated? We met him at the end of his rope? Hopefully they answer that soon.

So were episodes 3 and 4 worth a damn? I watched the first two and was happy enough, but I haven't touched the 3rd yet because I got sidetracked by Stranger Things.