Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Seed Discussion Forum
Jason Dirk Walton
Antigen:
--- Quote ---On 2003-07-09 04:39:00, Anonymous wrote:
"The Justices are correct, you cannot look back at a case and pick it apart with what you know now, but only with what was available then.
...
As for Antigen, thank God we live in America where we are all free to believe and think as we want. Wouldn't it be a shame if we all had the same political leanings and thought processes. But for the grace of God go all of us! "
--- End quote ---
Then how is it that people convicted of rape and murder years ago are so frequently being freed on the basis of DNA evidence these days?
And why do you seem so hell bent on seeing this guy fry? Granted, I didn't go out and kill anyone after the program. I did, however, slip right into the kind of romantic relationship described by this atty. No matter what the guy did to me, I worshiped him. No matter what he asked, I'd do. If he'd have been the type to want to off an ex-wife, I might well have helped him. As a matter of fact, he did once try to strangle a friend of mine on the livingroom floor. I just stood there, frozen, unable to move or think.
I'm glad you were able to shake it all off like nothing ever happened. I did too, it just took me awhile to regain my balance. Though I have just about everything I ever wanted now, including the lack of just enough to keep me interested in the game, I do often wonder what might have been had I been. But that's not my entire interest in this case.
I know, to a dead certainty, that the Program does effect a LOT of people in profound and long-term ways. The way I see it, it's like witch dunking. Right now, everyone believes it's valid, proper and necessary. I and a few other people disagree. If we've found a case where the courts acknowledge that the Program might not be entirely benign, that might help us to make people generally understand that so they won't put their kids in the Program or allow public funding to go to the Program in any form.
Life is like a bird, at any given moment it is droping a load. It is only a matter of time before one eventually find you.
--- Quote ---That newspaper has always tended to be a little on the pink side and hasn't always published all the facts or truth, but their version of the facts or truth, but then again isn't that what liberal newspapers do?
--- End quote ---
Depends on what you mean by 'liberal', I suppose. A conservative publication; i.e. one that is careful, scrupulous and not prone to jump to confusions would tend not to do that. However, left wing AND right wing news outfits (as in Faux News) do it all the time.
SysAdmin
--- End quote ---
GregFL:
Great post Ginger. Whether Jason deserves to die by state execution is open to debate, but the fact that thirty years later the court describes to a tee the program experience and acknowledges it mentally scarred this man is very compelling. In fact, it may lead to his sentence being commuted to life. I hope it does, and this in no way endorses or justifys the murder of those people.
The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest possible limits. ... and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.
-- St. George Tucker, Judge of the Virginia Supreme Court 1803
--- End quote ---
Anonymous:
Antigen, the answer to your question is in your question - DNA evidence. I don't disagree that that is how and why people are released today for old rapes and murders. In this case though, Jason and his accomplices have confessed to their involvement with this murder. What would DNA evidence prove? He confessed to his involvement in the crime. There have been no allegations that he wasn't at the scene of the crime, just the level of his actual involvement in the murder of several innocent people.
The Justices asked Jason's attorney for medical evidence to prove that there was something wrong with his brain? She did not have the medical evidence, psychiatric or neurologic, to support her contention. Sure, she could pay a hack to come in and testify that there obviously has to be something wrong with his brain because he was in the Seed 30 years ago, thereby causing him to be emotionally traumatized, which then caused him to commit the crime.
Her conclusion necessarily means then that each of us that was in the Seed is emotionally traumatized and therefore prone to commit a crime of such heinous nature, simply because we were in the Seed. Further, her conclusion means that all of us that were in the Seed necessarily have to have something wrong with our brains simply because we were there. The medical facts in this case don't support her conclusion.
On a personal level, I don't appreciate being brought into the fray and accused of necessarily being unstable and emotionally deranged, based on the fact that I was in the Seed 30 years ago. By her conclusion, she judges all of us to be an emotional void.
She is merely attempting to justify Jason's actions and deflect attention from the real issue, the murder of innocent people.
Antigen:
You said earlier that, under no circumstances, does new evidence ever enter into an appeal. Well, in most of these murder and rape cases, the tech to produce DNA evidence wasn't broadly available at the time of the trial. It's new evidence that didn't exist, but IS relavent. Also, in many, many of these cases, the defendants plead guilty. Many people have a hard time understanding why anyone would ever plead guilty to a crime they didn't commit. And prosecutors exploit this naïveté shamelessly.
But most Program vets understand very well, because we were pretty easily coerced into confessing all sorts of things we'd never done.
I, myself, signed myself into Straight because Miller Newton told me he'd get a judge to court order me for 2 years if I didn't. I knew I hadn't committed any crime, was not a danger to myself or anyone else and was not an addict. But I knew just as well that the Program could get a judge to sign an death warrant on the Pope in those days if they'd wanted to.
A confession under duress means nothing, and I you know that damned well!
At the time of his conviction, he had not been in the Seed 30 years prior. He was just out of the place for a couple of years and he was aparently up to his nads in just exactly the kind of controling, obsessive relationship that so many program vets had sought out after the Program. You should take a little time and read through some of these forums. Lots of us, most of us, had a rough time emotionally and psychologically for awhile after the Program. Not that we all went out and murdered people. But a good many of us were so used to being controled by others that we were apt to hook up with an abusive, domineering romantic interest.
Walton's sister described him as acting like a robot after the Program. Are you going to try and tell me that you've never heard of Seedlings being described that way before? Does that pass the giggle test? No, I don't think that it does. So the more sensible conclusion seems to be that there WAS (is) something about the Program that effects a lot of people, rather than that this one person was just primally flawed and would have done everything just as he did had he not spent some months, with his little brother and parents, in that highly violent and abusive cult.
Finally, I agree that we should all be skeptical of any attorney trying to make a case. I understand why this atty is trying to make the case that she is for her client. But what's you gig?
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
--John Quincy Adams, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives [July 4, 1821]
--- End quote ---
Anonymous:
No gig, just 25 years working in the legal system. I know the police lie. I know the attorneys lie. I know the plaintiffs and the defendants lie. I know their friends and family lie. I know their witnesses and experts lie. I know the attorneys are representing people they know and believe to be as guilty as the day is long, but yet they are duty bound to provide them with the best legal help available, which again means more lying. I've spent 25 years knowing that there is no place for emotion in the legal field, even though it is an emotionally charged environment. I've spent 25 years picking apart words and sentences. And I've spent 25 years watching people lie, all the while knowing they were, while they were trying to convince me they weren't. I've spent 25 years in the legal profession knowing that all sides lie to advocate their position.
I've spent 25 years knowing that the legal field is a professional blame game. I know that someone or something can or has to be blamed for every real or perceived wrong, because no one is accountable for his or her own actions, not when there is blame to be placed elsewhere, again more lying.
I spent too many years working in the criminal system, to honestly believe most criminals who deny their invovlement in a crime. I've worked on murder cases where the defendants were caught in the act and yet they denied their very involvement. They were quick to blame someone, something, anything to avoid paying the price for their crime. And when that tactic didn't work, they attempted to shift the focus, including finding religion, as if finding religion after the fact somehow made it all better and somehow less wrong to have committed that crime.
After this many years, I am disinclined to believe much of what a criminal defendant has to say, but I will give them more credence if they have the proof and the evidence to back up what they are alleging. But an allegation of a wrongdoing, is just that an allegation. It is not proof or evidence and standing alone it cannot be supported.
So for me it's very straight forward, proof and evidence, with my emotions checked at the door. As I read it, this guy is guilty as charged, regardless of the crap his attorney has thrown out for us to trip on. She didn't come up with the proof or the evidence to support her allegations and change my mind, nor apparently the minds of the Justices.
As an aside I was in the Seed in St. Pete in l974, making me a "Program Vet". Our differences are striking and obvious. This ocean of waves we call life is truly wonderous, with each wave being so different, some easy to ride and some not, and others that are just breathtaking. I wonder what the next group of waves will be like and where they are going?
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