Not sure finance is the right field for you? Do the puppy test and find out!

You are walking by a road and hear a cute little puppy shrieking in pain, its leg caught in a spring leghold trap. What do you do?

a) You stomp the dog’s head with your foot and laugh profusely. You celebrate this chance to murder a living being with impunity.

b) You pull a chair and sit in front of the dog, cracking open a beer to enjoy the show. You begin masturbating to the scene.

c) You film the entire scene with your iPhone to upload on some gore website, hoping to make some money from the advertising that comes with it.

d) You immediately set free the puppy, nurse it back to good health with love and care, present it to your son and make sure they bond together and become good friends. The next time your son does something wrong, you force him to hang the dog to the backyard tree. That’s how you make a child become a man.

If you’ve answered this test, you were made for finance. It doesn’t matter which answer you actually picked. Yeah, this is one of these tests.

I was reading about black people being lynched this morning when I came upon this very famous picture:

Source: Time

I’m not pretending to have an unique insight on such an universally-known photo, but I would just like you to notice one thing: look at all the people on this picture. Look at how happy and how idyllically calm they are. Look at how well-dressed they are and look at how proud and mighty they stand. This man on the left is smiling like he’s having the time of his life. Another is basically leaning to make sure his face will be in the photo. None of them is trying to hide their face or seems even slightly ashamed of what they are doing. Hell, they are basically rushing to be closer to the two lynched men.

Are the men on this picture really different from the Nazis?

I mean, I’m surprised they didn’t bring their kids to the show, while they’re at it. Make sure to indoctrinate them at the earliest age. The people on those pictures could learn some lessons from the Nazis and Hitler’s Youth and they should know brainwashing works better when started young.

Look at this one:

These are powerful pictures, but I think they are work seeing. It’s pretty hard for me, who pretty much thinks voting is a waste of time, to conceive people actually died for us to get the right to vote. I mean, at this point, just don’t bother giving a reason for murdering him.

There’s one last picture I want you to see:

Isn’t that hilarious? What a funny caption! The joke here is that the sign says “please do not wake” as if the man was sleeping while in reality, he’s dead. The man who created that scene should become a humorist. Again, look at how happy they all seem.

The reason I’m talking about this today is because I recently learned about the Brown v. Mississippi case. Let me sum the case for you or, rather, repeat what Wikipedia has to say about the topic:

Raymond Stuart, a white planter, was murdered on March 30, 1934. Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown and Henry Shields, three black tenant farmers, were arrested for his murder. At the trial, the prosecution’s principal evidence was the defendants’ confessions to police officers. During the trial, however, prosecution witnesses freely admitted that the defendants confessed only after being subjected to brutal whippings by the officers.

One defendant had also been subjected to being strung up by his neck from a tree in addition to the whippings. The confessions were nevertheless admitted into evidence, and were the only evidence used in the subsequent one-day trial. The defendants were convicted by a jury and sentenced to be hanged. The convictions were affirmed by the Mississippi Supreme Court on appeal.

Now, of course, you might be thinking: “At last the case made it to the Supreme Court and the three men were finally found innocent!” Well, not at all. The case did make it to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court simply reversed the conviction. You know, sure, it could have told Mississippi courts to leave them alone, but in all honesty, the Supreme Court did not give a damn:

Upon remand from the United States Supreme Court, the three defendants pleaded nolo contendere to manslaughter rather than risk a retrial. They were however sentenced to six months, two and one-half years, and seven and one-half years in prison, respectively

Here’s a good book on the topic if you’re interested. You get a free extract here. We’ll never know who murdered Raymond Stuart. Not that it was of any interest for anyone involved in this case.

Now, you might be thinking: “But F.S., this was a long time ago! Things have changed since” Well, read this:

The prosecutor at the trial level, John Stennis, later served forty-two years as a United States senator. He ran for office in Mississippi thirteen times and never lost.

I can’t even believe to explain how disgusted I am. This piece of shit retired in 1989 after a full and very successful career. This piece of shit looked at the case, saw, “Oh, I get an easy conviction here” and just jumped straight in it. Hey, three black people were on the stand and they had confessed!

Voters in Mississippi read all about this sack of shit and what he had done, yet they overwhelmingly chose to vote for him anyway. For 42 more years. This means that if you live in Mississippi, your grand-father and perhaps even your father has voted for this man at a point or another of his life.

With that in mind, how could you possibly have any hope for the human race?

I ask the question sincerely. The three black men ended up in jail where the guards and inmates most likely beat them every day while the prosecutor ended up with a very successful life. He even had a battleship named after him. A true American hero.

The transcript of the trial indicated Stennis was fully aware that the suspects had been tortured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Stennis#Civil_rights_record

And it’s not like things have stopped since then. If you think the police has stopped beating or torturing people, I don’t know in what world you live in. Oh, sure, if you are rich and have several big law firms behind you, the police will treat you like a prince. But if you are poor and they know they can get away with beating you, then you’re done.

I always liked Bobby Fischer’s account of his stay at the Pasadena County Jail. While some signs of his mental illness are clearly visible in that account, I have no problems believing 100% of what he wrote to be the exact truth. That kind of thing happens routinely around the United States and no one bats an eye about it. I’ve read dozens and dozens of cases, up to a point where I stopped reading them because I frankly saw no point to it other than make my blood boil. It’s commonplace. In fact, most people in the US would read this and see zero problem with how this man was treated. My reactions while reading this text was: what kind of coward and psychopath act like that, especially with a man that is obviously mentally ill? But who cares, right?

A few years ago, I was really big into the Innocence Project. If you don’t know what this is, it’s basically a group of volunteers that seeks to prove the innocence of people on the death row or sentenced to jail for the rest of their lives. With the use of DNA, a relatively-new discovery in the criminal world, they seek to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted. You know, I used to really admire those people who dedicated a large portion of their lives fighting for justice and helping innocent people. Then, I understood it was all pointless. Take the case of Michael Morton, for instance:

In 2005, the Innocence Project and the law firm, Raley & Bowick, filed a motion requesting additional DNA testing on items of evidence from the crime scene. The court granted permission to test some of the items, excluding the bloody bandana found near the Mortons’ house. Once again, tests could not exclude Morton as the source of the DNA collected from the bed.

Five years later, in 2011, Morton was finally granted testing on the bandana and hair from the bandana, and a DNA testing lab reported that testing on the bandana revealed both Christine Morton’s DNA and the DNA of an unknown male.

Five years?!?!?! It took five years JUST to get permission to test the DNA of a bandana? Why? DNA tests were admitted by most courts since the 1990s, so why did it take 5 years to get permission to test an item that could prove the innocence of someone once and for all? This is something that should take a day or two maximum. Am I the only one who thinks it makes sense to test the DNA of this bloody bandanna found next to the scene of a crime? Hell, I cannot think of a single reason not to.

But for five years, the man had to fight just to get the permission to do this test. Which ended up finding the REAL criminal - you know, what the legal system ought to do from time to time. And it’s not like DNA tests are costly neither. If you dig a little bit more, you’ll find the prosecutor for this case, Ken Anderson, actively fought to deny permission to test the bandana.

Why?

For five years, the prosecutor was successful in his efforts to prevent a simple $200 test that could prove a man’s innocence. The bad part in me is thinking that this prosecutor did it simply because he knew he was done if the truth came out. But for five fucking years, while our innocent man rotted in jail, that piece of shit was successful.

The end result? The blood on the test was from another man - a  convicted killer:

The unknown male DNA profile was run through the CODIS databank (a DNA database system) and matched Mark Norwood, a convicted felon from California, who had a criminal record in Texas and who lived in Texas at the time of Christine Morton’s murder. Further investigation by Morton’s lawyers and the Travis County District Attorney revealed that a hair from Norwood was also found at the scene of the murder of Debra Masters Baker in Travis County. Baker was, like Christine Morton, bludgeoned to death in her bed; her murder occurred two years after Christine’s death, while Michael Morton was in prison.

Oh. Oh.

You know, perhaps we can’t blame the police for arresting the wrong man as DNA testing wasn’t available at the time. Perhaps we can’t fault the prosecutor for thinking Mr. Morton was the real perpetrator of the crime. Perhaps we can even forgive the prosecutor for not complying with a court order:

When defense attorneys learned that the prosecution did not plan to call Sergeant Don Woods, the chief investigator in the case, to the stand, they suspected that the prosecution might be concealing potentially exculpatory evidence. The defense raised this concern with the trial judge, who ordered the prosecution to turn over all reports by Sergeant Woods so that he could conduct a thorough review. Evidence concerning Eric’s eyewitness account, the green van, and Christine Morton’s credit card were all absent from the records given to the judge.

But to fight to keep the truth hidden? This is a clear case of prosecutor abuse. Not just misconduct, but actively taking steps to hide evidence, having the wrong man convicted and then fighting to make sure an innocent man remained in jail.

And what did the prosecutor get for his crime?

But last week he finally capitulated, pleading no contest to felony charges of criminal contempt of court. The New York Times opined that Anderson’s ten-day jail sentence was “insultingly short” in comparison to the nearly 25 years that Morton spent behind bars, but added that “because prosecutors are so rarely held accountable for their misconduct, the sentence is remarkable nonetheless.”

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/jail-time-may-be-the-least-of-ken-andersons-problems/

Oh, this man committed a crime, but because these crimes are so “rarely” prosecuted, then a 10 day sentence in jail is “remarkable.” Unbelievable. This is a man who took active steps to send an innocent man to jail and actually managed to keep it there for 25 years and the only thing that happened to him was losing his law license (he was past the age of retirement already) and serving 10 days in jail. But the article said it’s a good thing because prosecutors usually get away with it.

In other words, that kind of shit is so frequent it’s not even worth talking about, let alone prosecuting the prosecutors for it.

Oh!

Do you start to understand now?

Ken Anderson still kept his full pension as a prosecutor. After serving his full ten days in jail, he probably retired on some hot beach somewhere on Earth where he can enjoy a multi-millionaire life for the rest of his days like nothing ever happened. Is that your vision of a fair world?

Let’s go back to the test at the top of this page. Perhaps you’ve read this article so far and thought to yourself, “F.S., I see zero problems with any of the cases you presented.” If such is the case, congratulations about being another pawn in the game. Definitely go work in the financial industry. Enjoy being rich. Enjoy your BMW, your $5,000 suit and your $50,000 annual bonus. At least now, you know what you truly are.

And the worst is that you’ll probably keep winning. The world was made for you, by people like you. People like me are usually relegated under the rug.

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