General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAre Trump, Giuliani, etc., deliberately BSing to protect themselves under "mens rea?"
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that, unfortunately, there's a giant loophole in the law called "mens rea" that supports claims of innocence if it can't be proven you intended to commit a crime. That gives cover to Trump, Sidney Powell, Giuliani, Pillow Guy, etc., and they know it.
Trump and large number of his fellow "legal system hackers" exploit the "mens rea" loophole via the public media. They appear on it constantly, feed it press releases, etc. The more foolish, arrogant, evidence-free, and crazed they sound, the better for them. The public media exposure lets them "make a show" that they "believe" what they're doing has a legitimate intent.
They're not concealing it. They're saying it everywhere. That lets them do and instigate wrong at will. Their media appearances are designed to make it appear they don't know what they're doing is wrong. In effect, they use the media to build a strong insanity defense for themselves by constantly, openly, deliberately acting insane.
We and the legitimate media sometimes snort and say, "Ha, they're crazy!" But the Trumpie hackers say, "Glad you think so, because that lets me skate and get away with literally anything."
One could argue that much of Trumpism is about "mens rea" in a sense, brazenly pretending to believe something you know isn't true to give a pretext for mugging the country and culture.
mopinko
(69,806 posts)all the way to replacing leadership w toadies.
the notes from some of the phone calls to sos's are damning.
no_hypocrisy
(45,774 posts)The only way a factfinder (judge or jury) cannot hold you not accountable for a crime committed is for your counsel/attorney to prove that you were so mentally incapacitated that you could not have known what you were doing was illegal. An example would be that you believed you were squeezing lemons, but in fact you were strangulating a victim. You need more than a few expert witnesses like psychiatrists to prove that you lacked the mental or moral capacity to tell right from wrong. Plus, if the factfinder finds you not guilty by reason of insanity, you don't skip away scotch free. You are institutionalized against your will, sometimes indefinitely.
I have a HS friend who is institutionalized b/c he was charged with downloading child pornography on a college computer (when he wasn't a student) and he was found to be "sufficiently" schizophrenic that he wasn't found guilty. When confronted, he ingenuously didn't believe he was doing anything wrong.