man sentenced to 12 years for buying poison, "planning" to murder wife - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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A Missouri man who tried to purchase poison online, and whom police suspect wanted to use it to kill his wife, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The man's name was Jason William Siesser and lived in the city of Columbia. (Missouri, US)

Apparently the prosecutor decided the best way to secure a conviction was to charge him with "buying a chemical weapon", a highly questionable interpretation of this law to turn something that may not actually have been clearly illegal into something illegal.

I have a huge problem with this. Maybe not so much because this man was punished, but the type of logic used. This is another example of "intent" laws, laws that turn something that may otherwise not be covered by the law into something illegal if "intent" was there, which basically in some ways can be like a "thought crime".
Authorities are trying to prevent a crime before it happens. But there's a lot of potential problems with that concept, especially moral ones. (The 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report dealt with this issue)

The man tried to buy it on the dark web, using the cryptocurrency bitcoin, but unknown to him it was probably a sting operation and the seller was law enforcement. The undercover officers delivered a package that contained a fake sample of the substance.

He wrote to the would-be seller "I plan to use it soon".
Writings found in the man's home during a search "articulated Siesser's heartache, anger and resentment over a breakup, and a desire for the person who caused the heartache to die", according to authorities, in a release from the federal Justice Department.

In August 2020 he pled guilty to attempting to acquire the "weapon" and to "aggravated identity theft" (apparently because he gave a shipping address different from his own and and used the name of another juvenile).

The authorities also found two separate and seemingly unopened shipping boxes next to where the fake poison had been placed inside the house, which contained approximately 10 grams of cadmium arsenide, a poisonous substance used in old-style painting, approximately 100 grams of cadmium metal, and about 500 mL of hydrochloric acid. (With the implication that the man may have been planning to use these to poison or make a poison to kill his wife)

On July 4, 2020, Siesser tried to order two 10-milliliter units of the poison, but they did not arrive. A month later, he ordered three 10-milliliter units of the poison, paying for the order in bitcoin which was then valued at $150. Authorities claimed that amount of the chemical could kill 300 people. Of course, so can a container of ordinary rat poison or lots of other things that some people keep in their houses or businesses. Maybe this particular substance was just more poisonous in smaller amounts.

During the court hearing, the prosecutor and witnesses paraded around the term "chemical weapon" to describe the poison.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/06/missour ... tcoin.html


Some of you might not be able to clearly see what's wrong here. But imagine this. What if really strict gun control laws existed, or even knife control laws, and this man had tried to buy a gun or knife. Then law enforcement conducted a search of his home, all else being the same, and they treated that the same as they did here. Wouldn't that be ridiculous?
I think things like this can set a very slippery slope for the future.

For all we know, this man wasn't going to kill his wife with the poison and didn't have any immediate plans to kill anyone. Some of you may not be able to understand this, but I see a huge problem with automatically using a man trying to buy poison as evidence that he is planning to kill/murder someone.

Oh by the way, I don't expect any of you on this forum to feel sympathy for this man or be able to see how the authorities reaction to this was wrong, since you're all a bunch of totalitarians, but I am placing it here at least as a record, so at least you are informed of the types of things that go on and have the ability (if you were to so choose to) to see how it is wrong, or at least very troubling in terms of legal logic.
(I know many of you are in Britain where there are all-encompassing laws totally criminalizing stuff like this and that type of mentality is pervasive, but this is not the way things are supposed to go in America)

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