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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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You absolutely can, and should.
Law is supposed to be a mechanism to provide justice. If the outcome of a law is injustice, it fails fundamentally at what law is supposed to do and should be discarded. That doesn't mean a just version of the law couldn't be crafted, but if we, as a society, let unjust laws stand, then just laws will never be crafted. So yes, get rid of unjust laws.
Unjust laws can and should be eliminated, but people using laws unjustly cannot. Speeding is a crime, but it is not perfectly enforced. Cops let family members go more often, good looking people, people they identify with, etc. Speeding is a just law that is not always enforced in a just way. This is always the case.
Your example ignores the consequences to those accused and convicted which negates the value of using it as your argument.
The worst someone will suffer from indiscriminate speed ticket enforcement will be a sub $500 fee.
The worst someone will suffer from indiscriminate "illegal miscarriage" enforcement is prison, loss of livelihood, with the knock-on effect of death of the accused from trying to avoid being charged with the unjust law.
There's a drastic difference between those two examples, and trying to use the same brush to paint them the same is counterproductive, wouldn't you agree?
Ok how about murder? Guy murders someone by hitting them when he is drunk. Rich guy with a good lawyer and connections in the community gets community service, but the poor, black man with a pot possession misdemeanor when he was 15 gets life in prison.
Now you're citing two laws instead of one with selective enforcement which is what we were talking about.
Murder is one law. Someone convicted of murder isn't getting community service. Someone could have murdered someone and been charged with a lesser crime for whatever reason, but then they'd be getting community service for whatever that lesser charge was, not murder. So the law for murder in your example isn't flawed.
Pot possession is a different law, and I don't know any state in the union that will give you 15 years in prison for one. A quick google search says 180 days in jail is the max for most misdemeanors and I found one reference that says that in 24 states the max is 1 year in jail (still not prison).
Your examples are getting farther from relevance not closer. I think we've reached the end of productive conversation with one another on this topic so I'll bow out. Thank you for talking with me up to now. Have a great day!
You completely missed my point, let me clarify my example. Two guys got drunk and killed someone while they were driving. One of them was a rich guy with connections, the other was a poor black guy with a criminal record. The rich guy gets a very light sentence and the black guy gets a much more serious charge. In this example the laws were selectively, subjectively, enforced.
This can happen with any law, with every law. I can come up with different examples all day. Every law, and all laws can be selectively enforced.