We read about the number of criminals that are being set free on a catch and release basis. This is happening in the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor looks at the person being charged and decides on what charges to bring. PoC in blue city, low charges, white cis, higher charges. The prosecutor looks at what the cops say they are charging the person with. He then decides what the actual charges will be.

Example, a white female, 85 years of age, no criminal history, walking in the people’s house taking pictures. Charged by the special investigator with unlawful entry and interfering with an official proceeding. The prosecutor, looking at the totality of the person, the person’s history, the charges brought to them by the special investigator, decides to charge her with all of the above as well as incitement. He tells the court that she is a flight risk.

Counter example, a black male, 19 years of age, two felony convictions, a long history of gang involvement, multiple charges of violence against person. The cops picked him up for stabbing a pregnant white woman, at the scene, with the bloody knife in his pocket. He has previously attempted to evade arrest when warrants were issued. Including out of state flight. The prosecutor charges him with illegal possession of a weapon recommends that he be released with no bail.

This is “prosecutorial discretion”. It means that when the suspect gets to court, the court will try him for illegal possession of a weapon. That’s it. The attempted murder will never be heard by the court.

This is not what this article is about.

This article is about what happens after the suspect is found guilty.

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I finished moving a new client onto our servers yesterday. They had been cracked and abused. Thank you to Miguel for that client.

On different fronts, I’m fighting with PyQt6. For whatever reason, the QMediaPlayer will not reliably play an MP3 or WAV. Lord help me if I want to change the start position. This is very frustrating for me because I’m at the 80% mark in a transcription program with a GUI.

You tell it to fetch a recording of a hearing before a court. It figures out how many speakers are recorded, when they are speaking and the duration of their segment. It then uses external guidance to do a voice ID of the different speakers before finally generating a transcription of the audio.

The issue? There is a part of the interface where you connect different speakers to named people. It allows you to listen to a segment of the audio and make comparisons.

For example, I have two cases where there was only one judge in common. That means that there should only be one match between the two cases, and that match should be the judge. There were two matches.

It turns out that both cases had the same court manager. So my software picked out the fact that there were actually two people speaking in both cases, which is cool.

Regardless, I’ll make it work. It is what I do.

There are numerous things happening in different cases right now, but I’m looking at Dayonta McClinton v. UNITED STATES which was recently denied certiorari. Not because the case has anything to do with the Second Amendment, but because Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Barrett are in agreement.

The case is about a man who was charged with murder and robbery. The jury found him guilty of the robbery charge and not guilty of the murder charge. Under the sentencing guidelines, McClinton should have been looking at 5 to 6 years.

At the sentencing hearing, the state told the court that McClinton had been charged with murder. The court used the accusation, of which McClinton had been found not guilty, to increase the sentence to 20 years.

If you are interested, please let me know in the comments.

The comments are open, go for it.