spin wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:39 pm Golb Jnr's problem was that he chose to break the law in his efforts... Raphael Golb chose desperate methods that landed him in jail.
The law had to be turned upside down, however, and a good chunk of the upside down law by which he was convicted was stricken as unconstitutional.
I remember when Golb did some sock-puppetry on a forum. Nothing illegal in that. And trivially easy for moderators to control.
And I went to one of the legal things at the NY Court of Appeals and saw a bit how the game is played.
He put out that comic caricature of Lawrence Schiffman from the library, using a spoof email. No harm caused, and if there was danger of any harm, a simple fifty-word statement saying something like "that email was not me, my email is ___" would have sufficed.
They had to stretch all sorts of concepts like some ethereal "benefit" and "gain" which can be simply scoring a debating point. The whole thing was more a stain on his accusers (one of whom now is big-wig in SBL) than anywhere else, and has allowed the potential for much heavier intrusions of criminal law by those who are well-connected (like Schiffman with the NY DA) against satire and internet speech.
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Raphael Golb Is Facing Jail Time — For Parodying a Dead Sea Scrolls Scholar
Arthur S. Hayes - Oct 12, 2017
http://forward.com/opinion/385050/rapha ... s-scholar/
"... Accordingly, Golb never should have had to face criminal charges. Civil court was the proper venue. There, he would have been allowed to argue that his emails did not make false accusations — the strongest argument a libel defendant can make — something the criminal law trial judge did not allow him to do.
Here in the U.S., particularly in New York, no critic should serve prison time because he intended to, or in fact did, disparage others, even if he does so by posing as someone else. That is a reasonable principle to draw from more than fifty years of First Amendment jurisprudence. Yet, partially exonerated Raphael Golb still fights to stay out of prison."
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Comment - David Schiff
"Anyway the DA seems a lot more interested in spending millions of tax dollars going after a prankster blogger trying to tell truth to power than in prosecuting Weinstein, Strauss-Kahn, or the Trumps."
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Steven Avery
https://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/ ... /#comments
"Yes, it does appear quite clear that the pushers of this whole prosecution entered the whole enterprise with unclean hands, that personal positioning .. or governmental (authoritarian) motives .. were manipulating the judicial process (“good” cases making bad law). Something has been fishy"
And then some 2013 conversation with Raphael Golb. There are a number of spots on the net that have excellent analysis.
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The whole prosecution was slick and sick. We should be supporting Raphael Golb's freedom.
Cargill, Schiffman and others should simply write letters to the sentencing judges saying "es suficiente". Cargill, however, clearly smellled some potential $ at the end of the rainbow.
Steven