Discussion Main / DisProportionateRetribution

Berserk Button, Can't Take Criticism and other tropes can cover that.

Fair enough.

FD is:

1. Treated as a actual rule/law as opposed to personal retribution.
2. Is almost always played for laughs while DR is as or merely likely to be treated seriously.

Example: Eugene was bullied endlessly in high school. Ten years later, Eugene goes on a massacre, killing all the people who bullied him in high school.

Troper 1: I think this was a Disproportionate Retribution. Seriously, killing someone just because they bullied you? Come on.

Troper 2: Nuh-uh! I think that Eugene's actions were justified. The bullying caused lots of emotional trauma to poor Eugene, and he was practically insane ten years later.

i agree with troper 2

No, bullying does not justify massacring people. This isn't YMMV. It's about the scale of the offense vs. the scale of the response. Those things can be measured.

Reading the OP, if i understood the opinion of the OP, i guess that this can be expressed of a different form comparing the reactions to a person killing someone that tortured them out of pure sadism:

Troper 1: I think this was a Disproportionate Retribution. The guy tortured him, not killed him neither tried kill him but they killed him.

Troper 2: Nuh-uh! I think that his actions were justified. The torture caused lots of scars and left him in the brink of the insanity.

It's gone now.

its a shame that it is gone some people find that interesting

Syndrome from The Incredibles murdered dozens of superheroes and was willing to kill children to show up Mr Incredible. I'm pretty sure that counts.

That's nice.

Your fault for sending him out in battle. Now give me that napkin back, I've got to get it to the Pokemon Center!

I second removing this section. It completely fails to consider the consequences for adults who unwittingly come upon the materials produced. Law enforcement is, shall we say, less than forgiving of circumstances, to the point where the FBI recommends that you turn yourself in and simply accept your fate should you happen to stumble upon it by accident. For example, if one of those teens drops their cellphone and an adult turns it in as a lost item, or if their parents sell or give away their old computer without - at the very least - overwriting the hard drive with random data multiple times and it gets searched after somebody taps into the new owner's unsecured wireless network to do something illegal, that person's life will then be completely and utterly destroyed due to the actions of those minors. It isn't disproportionate at all for the real perpetrators to be punished for placing adults at serious risk of such dire consequences.

Your argument fails basic logic and wouldn't stand up in court. A person has only one mind, and thus is one single legal entity, a fact that is so obvious that it normally goes without saying; clearly you cannot split a person into multiple "persons" and charge one of these hypothetical "persons" with stealing the property of another of them. Now, onto the issue of consent. If a person takes a photograph of somebody, then the act requires consent on the part of the subject. However, if they are the subject of their own photograph, you can't consider that consent independently of the act of taking the photograph, since that would be effectively changing one person into two; so, the act of taking the photograph and consenting to it being taken become one and the same. This is where your argument breaks down completely: asserting that a child was responsible for X but not Y, when X and Y are the same action is equivalent to saying "X is not X", which is a logically meaningless statement and falls foul of the Doctrine of Absurdity. Since the law states that a child cannot consent to being photographed, the only valid conclusion to draw is that the child cannot be held responsible for the act of photographing themselves, because if they were, that would imply they had given consent (which they cannot do). Since the entire basis of the law, and its exclusion from the First Amendment, revolves around this inability of children to give consent, chances of a court finding that the child had given consent, but was still guilty of a crime, are next to zero, and would open the floodgates to a whole slew of potential defenses.

HOWEVER, I still second the removal of this section, for a completely different reason; it's an Urban Legend. Despite the media outcry over the past two years about this, I've yet to see a single case anywhere near as bad as described. One case was falsely reported by several news outlets as teenagers in PA being placed on the sex offenders registry for sexting, when in actual fact nothing had happened yet and the article was only referring to the theoretical worst case scenario (as it happens, the prosecutor was blocked from even filing charges by a federal court). The only times jail time and/or SO registration have been given as sentence for sexting have been in cases involving adults. As far as children are concerned, every case I've seen has been tried in juvenile/family court, and/or ended with a plea bargain or charges dropped altogether. Most prosecutors seem to be filing charges of harassment, distribution of harmful material, or misuse of electronic communications; charges of child pornography, if filed, are typically just used to push a plea bargain or educational program. Sentences given vary, but are nothing like the kinds of sentences given to adults committing sexual offenses, and involve curfews, probation, and counseling rather than prison and registration. Even the most controversial and widely criticized cases are nowhere near as bad as the media seems to suggest; one young adult who was placed on the SO registry was only placed there because his victim's father pressed the district attorney into withdrawing a plea bargain that would have avoided it - and he was an adult; the underage girl who had sent him pictures of herself in the first place was not charged. Which brings me to another important point, which is that most cases that end up in court at all are cases involving malicious intent; usually where a third party is either using a photo to harass someone or mass-distributing it. There's a good reason for that: many prosecutors won't even look at a case unless there's some level of malice involved. Also contrary to what some news articles seem to imply, very few children are charged with producing images of only themselves (there are exceptions, but they're a minority), and nobody has been convicted solely on that ground (in A.H. v. State, the defendants were found delinquent on charges of possessing images of each other, not themselves, after having each filed a complaint against the other). The vast majority of sexting cases don't even make it to court, let alone sentencing.

The typically sensationalistic media is blowing things out of all proportion by talking about what *could technically* happen (and even that's debatable, since there are several unresolved constitutional problems involved), rather than what usually does. To put this approach in perspective, consider that the average person breaks a number of laws every day, often without even realizing it, and could *technically* be subjected to some relatively severe punishment, but they aren't. Regardless of the theoretical penalties, in practice sexting by teenagers is treated not unlike underage drinking.

That's not likely to change either, because parents make up a significant proportion of voters, and inflicting disproportionate sentences for minor juvenile mistakes made by their children is not going to go down well. It's already happened: one district attorney who caused a nationwide controversy by being foolish enough to actually try persuing child pornography charges against girls who's photographed themselves (and not the people spreading the pictures and harrassing them) lost his job the same year - and he'd been DA for 20 years, so I think it's safe to assume the corellation does imply causation in this case.

The next one in the index bar: Disproportionate Reward.

Take it to YKTTW. That's what it's for.