As a veteran with PTSD, I can say without a doubt this was probably helpful to the guy who got the DUI. Every veteran knows the "hole" story, and it is absolutely true. When I was in a dark hole myself after my last tour, I came home and just laid on the floor in my living room drunk. I couldn't do anything. Couldn't leave the house. Couldn't do anything but just lay there on the living room floor and drink, staring at the ceiling. My best friend in the universe (a legit BFF, if you will), he came and laid next to me on my living room floor. It's hard to describe what that means to someone that's never experienced it. But I will tell you without a doubt that both of those guys got something worthwhile out of sitting in jail together. We spend years sitting in holes in the army (or some other kind of shitty situation), and it becomes natural to draw strength from the unity of having a buddy in the shitty situation with you ("We are experiencing this shitty thing together"). It is pretty important I think to have the same opportunity as veterans after leaving the service. I've since done very similar things for friends of mine, and I encourage any veterans reading this to do the same for anyone you know going through similar trouble.
"I came home and just laid on the floor in my living room drunk. I couldn't do anything. Couldn't leave the house. Couldn't do anything but just lay there on the living room floor and drink, staring at the ceiling. My best friend in the universe (a legit BFF, if you will), he came and laid next to me on my living room floor."
For those who don't understand the dynamics described here, Sebastian Junger has made a film, "Coming Home" that explores why for Vets coming home, it's harder than their last tour. [0]
The judge is also a veteran. The shared background and experience is what allowed the judge to experience empathy and see the perpetrator's humanity, while still rendering the (most likely) necessary judgement.
That's why it's so important that the judges and officers charged with keeping order are part of the communities they serve.
There has to be trust and empathy between the people and the police.
I think we have lots of cities and neighborhoods where the police are from a different culture, imposed from outside. Too often the relationship breaks down and the people start seeing them as adversaries, rather than as guardians. Conversely, the cops also lose empathy for the people.
Ferguson is the clearest case, but this is happening in lots of cities. (In the extreme, it describes an occupation, where the role of police is taken by a foreign military.)
Props to the judge, thats a really beautiful example of humane justice, where the person breaking the law and the one enforcing it can still have some love for each other.
I think we need a political movement to make sure sheriffs, judges and offices represent their communities. As much as possible, cops should be trusted citizens of the neighborhoods they patrol and part of the local culture.
Local election turnout is often low, so a little organization goes a long way.
US mass incarceration is terrible problem, it's well known that the US has more prisoners than any other country and one of the highest per capita rates of imprisonment in the world.
The war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, brutal probation regimes that throw ex-prisoners back into prison for minor offenses all play a part.
This is systematic problem, media-driven attacks on criminals are a reliable "dog-whistle" issue for politicians and so-forth.
It is encouraging to me when folks involved in this system put forward a critique and try to stop the overall downward trend here.
It is "nice" when someone engages in this sort of act of pure human kindness but this seem like exactly the sort of things that doesn't scale, that doesn't recognize larger problems and basically puts things down as a simple problem for veterans rather than a problem our whole society faces.
Anyone who's spent a bit of time watching courts knows that a given judges sees dozens of people per day who get essentially assembly line justice with 90% of them being sad people who made sad choices with the courts meting out one more level penalties likely to continue these people's downward spiral. It's nice when a judge does one semi-good thing - but I can only see nice, not encouraging, here.
The judge can't help all of those other millions, but he can help the one right in front of him. Are you saying that if he can't help everyone then it's better that he help nobody?
Or to give it the common phrase, "Think globally, act locally."
I didn't know there were veteran courts, but it's an interesting system that accounts for the unique challenges facing veterans and can seriously help them reassimilate into society.
No, it's not. It's sympathy. Empathy involves a bit of imagination that most people lack.
edit:
"Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position."
Our argument is with your specific views on the meaning of words.
Other sources[1] define empathy as "feeling what another person feels" and sympathy as "having compassion for a person without necessarily feeling what they feel". In that case, the judge is clearly empathizing with the defendant, and not merely sympathizing.
I think it's empathy only because of the shared background; I don't think you can truly empathize with somebody who has PTSD unless you've had it as well.
That's not empathy, that's memory. Poor kids growing up in crime-ridden neighborhoods have PTSD; does this judge sit with them, or bury them under the jail?
edit: To be even a bit more contrarian here, sympathy in judges is something that I actively dislike, and why I'm a progressive in support of mandatory minimums, which is pretty much blasphemy. Sympathy in judges is why an affluenza defense can work, and why rapists sometimes get sentenced to probation.
What am I supposed to be proving again? I don't know this judge, or his career, and never claimed to. What I said is that it was disappointing that a story that, to me, seemed like it was about someone finding compassion for someone in a vastly different circumstance was a vet relating to another vet.
The distinction you're trying to make does not exist. Memory of a similar experience is a potential part of empathy. It, in no way, invalidates or precludes an empathetic response.
And empathy in one situation does not automatically mean empathy in all situations. Humans are funny like that.
It's a pointless signalling thread where people are falling all over themselves to say "Awww, that's nice. Oh, it gives me hope for the world." It's akin to a story about a cop who adopts an abused dog that they found at a crime scene and nurses it back to health. Hence, people are falling all over themselves to disapprove of my disapproval as if it were a competition. It's the kind of thread that "attracts low quality responses" as dang would say - but HN is more tolerant towards low quality threads that don't devolve into ideological wars.
Here's my stance: I don't believe in cruel or unusual punishment. I believe that defendants who "remind me of my son" or "remind me of me, when I was a kid" or "me, if I had made one wrong choice" get better treatment than the heartless superpredators that don't look like the judges son.
The difference between empathy and sympathy is that the former requires putting yourself in the other person's shoes. That requires some sort of shared background.
Serna had been charged with driving while intoxicated.
Will the judge serve life with him when he kills someone because judges keep letting him off the hook?
Because I've had two different friends in two different decades killed by drunk drivers who got only a few years for taking people in their prime off the planet.
Drunk driving when you kill someone should be life. Parole eventually is fine but it should be a life sentence initially.
I think there are two separate things here - the DUI charge which presumably still exists, and a separate probation violation charge (triggered by the DUI arrest) which is what got him in front of this judge.
Whether the judge's actions here will have a long-term impact on Serna is something only time will tell, but I suspect that the knowledge that "hey, someone out there actually cares" can only help.
