None of that even registers on my 'Give a Shit Meter'. Just doesn't. I think our criminal justice system is better served by her comments.

Looks like Lou Anna Simon's going to do just fine in this (forced) retirement gig she's entered:

"Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, who submitted a resignation letter late Wednesday amid fallout over the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal, could continue earning most of her salary if she returns to the faculty and will have access to free football game and other event tickets for life.

An employment agreement Simon signed in late 2012 guarantees a host of post-presidency benefits that kicked in with her resignation. The university on Thursday provided the agreement to The Detroit News.

Simon was earning a $750,000 base salary and a $100,000 annual retention bonus under a 2014 amendment approved by the Board of Trustees. According to the agreement, her resignation is not official for at least 60 days, a period during which she must continue to fulfill her duties and cooperate in the transition to a new president.

If she chooses to return to the faculty after her presidency, Simon could again earn her full $750,000 salary during a one-year research leave. She could earn the full salary for another year as a faculty member, and then 75 percent of that in subsequent years, or $562,500 annually."

Yeah, I get that your "give a shit" meter is pretty loosely calibrated. Regardless of what you give a shit about, our Justice system is entirely based on the concept that every citizen gets a fair and impartial treatment as they move through the process. We fail in that ideal an awful lot. We probably don't need judges contributing to those failures.

Victims of crimes are better served by having judges and court officers ensure a fair trial that results in an honest verdict, than they are by trite statements from judges who are either looking to comfort or looking to grandstand.

That is crazy money for a faculty member.

At sentencing, I think the judge isn't totally out of place in expressing their feelings on the case as to why they are handing down a particular sentence. You can be fairly and impartially outraged at the crimes the guilty party has been convicted of.

I think it's appropriate for the judge to comment on the heinous nature of the crime, of course. They should justify why they hand down a more or less severe sentence.

The judge shouldn't, in my opinion, be claiming that it's her "privilege" to lay down the sentence, or that she's singing the convicted person's "death sentence." She shouldn't be grandstanding, like this judge was, with things like spelling out how many individual months her sentence amounts to. The judge sure as shit shouldn't be telling the convicted person that she wishes she could allow a person or many people to do to the criminal what he did to others.

The sentence for a crime is supposed to be based on the law and the severity of the crime committed, not the emotional response of a judge.

Yeah, I agree with this. I felt that the judge in this case went way overboard with her comments, and called into question her impartiality.

eesh. two things can exist at once here i think:

Nassar is human slime

profoundly mentally ill individual.

I think you're over-stating that. Nassar was not diagnosed with any mental illness, and it's very clear that he knew that what he was doing was very, very wrong. I'm fine going after the collaborators as equals-or-worse. But let's not gloss over Nassar.

I think you're over-stating that. Nassar was not diagnosed with any mental illness, and it's very clear that he knew that what he was doing was very, very wrong. I'm fine going after the collaborators as equals-or-worse. But let's not gloss over Nassar.

At some point, cruelty and inhumanity looks like a significant defect— to call it an illness doesn’t gloss over it. We know what he did was gross. Nasser enjoyed something as a result of his gross mistreatment of vulnerable people. He did what he did for a clearly fucked up reason.

What did the collaborators and enablers enjoy? Why did they do what they did? That’s a harder question— it makes me think of the unethical psychology experiments where grossly unkind behavior is normalized and people do what they normally wouldn’t do.

That, ma'am, is the million dollar question.

Kind of like why regular germans turned the other way when they knew their countrymen and women and govt were exterminating innocent people by the millions. But the germans had a good reason to turn away: if they made a fuss, they would have been executed. As many germans were.

But enablers in the University of Michigan, USA Gymnastics, the Boy Scouts of America, the Catholic Church, et al., none of those enablers would have been executed if they spoke up. But they still chose the path of clear evil.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men/women to do nothing”

As much as it pains me to correct you, it was Michigan State University. Given that, UM has an equally disturbing sexual abuse scandal that hasn't gotten nearly the publicity. Better PR people I guess.

I'm not any kind of knife fighting expert but give me 10 opportunities at you and I'm pretty sure you're dead before the guards get to you or very shortly thereafter.

Perhaps following his convalescence, the bureau of prisons can room him up with the guy that crushed Dahmer's head with the dumbell.