Charged with WHAT?!
Irradiated by Stingray
Via blog-buddy Peter’s Doofus of the Day category, today we learn of a rather irritated woman. The post at Peter’s is brief if you want to go read the whole thing, but the jist of the matter is that a woman angry with her ex-boyfriend made a valiant effort to run said ex over, missing thoroughly, and hitting instead roughly half the town.
All right, that’s pretty dumb. If the ex goes to the left, turn the wheel left. Not that tricky, but apparently beyond our dim-witted heroine’s grasp. Mayhaps it would be wise to throw some charges at her, and take her somewhere far away from her ex, and more importantly, the car keys. I certainly agree with that notion, but ironically that’s the part that made my blood boil hard enough to warrant a post here instead of a comment at Peter’s. I may not be on board with the whole Heaven & Hell package, but I’m still pretty sure it’s cosmic bad form in some book or other to use the language forthcoming on a preacher-man’s blog. Let’s take a look at the list of charges and get the party started, shall we?
Gail Pollock is charged with aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, aggravated assault against a police officer, terroristic threats, criminal damage to property, drunken driving and reckless driving, among other charges.
And now is the time where we sing what I like to call The What The Fucking Fuck Chorus. Let’s all sing, shall we?
Yes folks, you read that right (and here’s the original article if you’d like to go double check – I know I had to). Some fucking dipshit clownshoe cockswipe has opted to charge the protagonist in some glorified trailer park drama with terroristic fucking threats. Apparently taking your buddy Jack Daniels for a quick low budget (and for that matter, lower property damage) re-enactment of the chase scene from “Back to the Future” is the same fucking thing as promising to send millions of innocent men, women, and children to their death for their temerity of not turning away from Mecca when they fart. Let’s just take a little look-see at this term, shall we?
“Terroristic,” the adjective form of terrorism, defined as “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.”
“Threat” defined as “an expression of intention to inflict evil, injury, or damage.”
Ok, I’ll grant that there was probably a fair degree of terror involved, especially on the part of the ex-boyfriend being chased. But systematic? If this lady was regularly and systematically taking advice from Jim Beam on how best to run over half the fucking town, there is something significantly larger at play here than one liquored up dumbass. And really, I don’t think there was much in the way of “threat” going on here. Once you hit second gear, you’re pretty solidly into the “attempt” category. Sure, there may have been some threats earlier, but I still doubt that they were systematic, and given the common (common outside the fucktards at the Houston County, GA Sherrif’s Department) use of “terrorist” to mean the use of terror as a means of coercion against entire societies, I have a few questions about the scale of the arguments this woman was involved in.
Congratulations, pants-shitting hysteria mongers! Thanks to your retarded fucking attempts to wrap the whole world in Nerf by giving government, a group amazingly even stupider, all sorts of gee-whiz nifty powers to use against REAL terrorists- and for clarity’s sake THEY’RE THE ONES TRYING TO FUCKING MURDER EVERYONE AT ONCE, NOT SOME DRUNK IDIOT WITH A DOMESTIC PROBLEM- you’ve helped to make sure that apparently just about anything now qualifies on the same scale as flying a fucking airplane full of innocent people into a sky scraper.
Fuck it. “Slavery” means “something inconvenient,” Hitler is just a punchline now, and The Holocaust is something happening to chickens, why the fuck shouldn’t Cleetus & Lurleen’s big fight be terrorism? Somebody call me when it’s socially acceptable to beat the stupid out of people. We can even play along with their games and call it “child abuse.” If nothing else, it’s a little more fitting since so many of the fucktards that need the beatings never advanced mentally beyond the age of ten seconds after the sperm found the egg.
Minor Update: If you normally skip comments, read them on this post to find out why LabRat’s next Cooking Noob post will be a hearty dish of garlic-marinated crow smoked over mesquite for me, as it turns out this bullshit charge does predate 9/11 rather tidily. For once, amazingly enough, the pants-shitting hysteria mongers are not directly to blame, or at least the Johnny-come-lately flavor isn’t. I still believe this is a damn retarded charge (See Kristopher’s comment for the concise version that doesn’t involve the terrorist/Terrorist aspect), and that applying “terroristic” to such low-level threats is idiotic, but I was wrong about when that tool was added to the shed.
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I like a good rant as much as anyone.
However, please be aware that “terrorist threats” was a term of art for, well, threats since well before 9/11.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:28 pm
It may well be I simply wasn’t paying as much attention before 9/11, but somehow I suspect domestic violence that got carried way wasn’t considered terrorist action back then. I’ll gladly eat the crow, however, if there’s a nice stack of references to fights with addresses at ________ Trailer Park including charges for terrorist threats.
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Try Googling, for instance, +”terrorist threats” +”california penal code”. In California, like several other jurisdictions, the plain-vanilla threat statute used to refer to “terrorist threats.”
example from 1999
I recommend marinating the crow in olive oil, fresh rosemary springs, lemon juice, and garlic before cooking over mesquite wood.
July 4th, 2009 at 3:55 am
Once I stopped expecting people to make any sense at all, I also stopped getting headaches. I think there is a correlation.
July 4th, 2009 at 7:52 am
And that, boys and girls, is the proper way to rant. Class dismissed.
July 4th, 2009 at 9:36 am
“Terroristic threats” doesn’t really refer to terrorism, or at least to political terrorism. I have a friend who went to juvie for the “terroristic threat” that he would beat up another kid. (Obviously, many years pre-9/11.)
July 4th, 2009 at 10:36 am
In many jurisdictions terrorizing and criminal threatening go hand in hand and stem from the same statute
Terrorize (verb)
1. to fill or overcome with terror.
2. to dominate or coerce by intimidation.
Terrorism (noun)
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
Example: A threat such as “I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” is a terroristic act.
July 4th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Bullshit law.
Making a threat simply means you may have cause to act in self-defense.
Does not require a law.
Turd says “I’m going to kill you!”
Turd gets shot and killed by person yelled at, or by person’s relatives or friends.
Self-defense. No one gets charged.
If turd makes death threat against city, SWAT gets involved, but result is similar.
End of problem … no law required.
July 4th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
“Brought to you by the folks who define a hand grenade as a weapon of mass destruction.” (Seriously- look it up.)
John
July 4th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Seems to me that she could have been charged with attempted murder, which no doubt is a much more serious charge, so she’s actually quite lucky.
July 4th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I agree with you on the terrorism-at-society level point. Lay attempted vehicular homicide on the woman, settle for attempted aggravated A&B, couple years in the bin, rehab, get on with life.
Jim
July 5th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Yo dawg, Ken is right. “Terroristic Threat” is a legal term of art that actually has nothing to do with the political usage of the term “terrorism”, and everything to do with the verb “to terrorize”. I found the Texas penal code definition of “terroristic threat” as an example:
The reason I skipped the other definitions is that they were amended to the law in 2003 (in Texas) to bring the legal definition of “terroristic threat” more in line with the public understanding of the word. However, the crime of “terroristic threats” has been on the books long before 9/11 and other major terror attacks, and is quite often seen on charge sheets in domestic violence cases. A good example of a “classic” terroristic threat would be if an abusive husband told his wife that “if you ever leave me I’ll fucking kill you and our children”; a statement made to induce terror in the victim.
In some jurisdictions, the crime of “terroristic threats” is known as “criminal threatening”, which is a less confusing terms.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:31 am
In some jurisdictions, the crime of “terroristic threats” is known as “criminal threatening”, which is a less confusing terms.
Changing to that term would go a long way towards clarifying these wrongs, as in most people’s minds “terroristic threats” are an outgrowth of “terrorism” which involves some sort of wholesale action and malice directed against people on a non-individualized, non-personalized basis.
We really don’t need holocaust denial and Global warming denial to become the making of “terroristic threats”.
No wonder society can’t get a good handle on what are run-of-the-mill criminal acts directed against individuals or security measures to prevent terroristic acts, and real terrorism.