(CW: CSA) Josh & Anna 51: An Unappealing Appeal

[Zebedee]

2 hours ago, Smee said:

Woah I just finished reading them all and the Timothy Burress one is really… something.

And Nicole Burress's is even more bizarre. As the kids say on reddit: "and then everyone stood up and clapped".

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Zebedee
spoilers

[formergothardite]

So I guess Josh is trying to go the prison ministry route. His stories seem a wee bit exaggerated, though. The “swept crackers” story to me just made him look worse. Anna seems to have been desperately trying to find something useful he did and only could think of that time he swept up crackers. 

[Zebedee]

4 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

His stories seem a wee bit exaggerated, though

And the totally reformed man conveniently died of covid. Not that I am skeptical of his sudden conversion, obviously. /s
 

[Knight of Ni]

I find the Timothy Buress letter particularly interesting. 

He states that Josh didn't choose this life in the public eye. Yes, he did. The show began when he was a teen, but he chose to stay on the show as an adult with a young family. He chose to stay in the public eye with his social media accounts. He chose to use his children as props at prolife events. He chose it when he accepted the job with the FRC. He wanted every bit of the fame. 

I also find it disgusting that his letter hints that Josh is innocent. In order to actually still believe that Josh is innocent takes a willful ignorance of the evidence. 

[Cam]

41 minutes ago, Knight of Ni said:

I find the Timothy Buress letter particularly interesting. 

He states that Josh didn't choose this life in the public eye. Yes, he did. The show began when he was a teen, but he chose to stay on the show as an adult with a young family. He chose to stay in the public eye with his social media accounts. He chose to use his children as props at prolife events. He chose it when he accepted the job with the FRC. He wanted every bit of the fame. 

Not only that, but after the molestations were revealed, the Ashley Madison scandal and the cancellation of 19KAC—that whole epic fall from grace—wasn’t there a concerted effort to try to somehow rehabilitate Josh’s image so he could eventually be integrated and accepted back into the Counting On series? 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Cam

[Alisamer]

36 minutes ago, Knight of Ni said:

I find the Timothy Buress letter particularly interesting. 

He states that Josh didn't choose this life in the public eye. Yes, he did. The show began when he was a teen, but he chose to stay on the show as an adult with a young family. He chose to stay in the public eye with his social media accounts. He chose to use his children as props at prolife events. He chose it when he accepted the job with the FRC. He wanted every bit of the fame. 

I also find it disgusting that his letter hints that Josh is innocent. In order to actually still believe that Josh is innocent takes a willful ignorance of the evidence. 

It still sounds like friends and family are all sticking their fingers in their ears and singing LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU whenever any evidence is shown or any description of exactly what he was looking for comes out. 

My reading of just the first pages - Defense: "We're going to appeal of course, but please give him only 5 years!" and Prosecution: "He's vile and deserves 30 - life, but since the cap is 20 years we're requesting that because we have to."

Defense: "He's a nice Christian guy who has a wife and kids! Won't someone think of the children?!?!"

Prosecution: "He had hundreds of graphic images of children being tortured that he had to actively seek out and download. We are thinking of THOSE children."

So... if he gets 5 years, Madison will be about 5 when he's released. Not good, IMO. If he gets 20, all the kids will be adults (and likely most will even be married and out of the house by then). Josh will probably have young grandchildren at that point, however, so I hope his kids somewhere along the line realize what he did and take steps to protect their own children. 

I hope he gets the full 20 years, personally. Five is far too short, IMO, not the least because he will have young kids still at home then.

I can't understand how anyone can see the evidence and not understand how terrible his actions were. He was downloading graphic sexual torture of infants through young children by adults. Hundreds of images and video clips of this. Yet here they are, "oh, he's innocent, he's a good Christian, he's a good father, blah blah..."

I do think our prison system is messed up, but still I'll be relieved if he's locked up doing hard time for a good long while. I don't want a man able to enjoy watching what he was watching to be in the same house as a young child. Even his own child. 

[Marshmallow World]

FYI:  Pages 8-11 and 18-19 of the government's document goes into horrifying details of the CSAM files that he downloaded. There's new details that I didn't know and can't get out of my head. Pages 13 and 14 details his molestations of his sisters. 

Please don't be like me. I see some terrible stuff in my job, but this was too much to read. Learn from me and skip those pages. The legal arguments are solid and interesting to read. Just skip the other stuff. 

[lumpentheologie]

9 hours ago, Antimony said:

Are Josh's children safer without living with him? Probably, but we can't actually know that without the kind of speculation that makes one taste bile on the back of the tongue. In general, though, I fundamentally do believe the prison system serves to destroy communities, punish families, and we know that the experience of having a parent incarcerated is especially painful to children, not just "hard on" but like, a trauma in it's own right. 

It's also worth noting here that prison, as it exists, doesn't mean just "not living with Daddy" for the kids anymore. This is also what I'm considering. It means restricted access to communicating with their father, it means facing something really scary to get to see him. Because of mail rules, it means Daddy can never get your drawings made with Crayola's in the mail, because the mail room trashes everything that isn't written in blue or black ink because you could hide drugs in the wax. It means Daddy can't get cards unless you make *sure* there are no bits of glitter on them and nothing that is objectionable the rules. It means Daddy cannot correspond with you freely. Too many pages in the letters? Trash.  You can't send Daddy origami or crafts from school because its all prohibited. Daddy might not be allowed to own children's books to read over the phone because the cardboard covers count as "hardcovers" so they're not allowed. It isn't just that a parent no longer lives there, it's all of these little dehumanizing things that children bear the brunt of that are absolutely unnecessary and inhumane. It's one thing to imagine a stranger going to prison, but to know somebody in prison is to enter a world of Kafkaesque horrors. 

I get how prison destroys families; I'm an abolitionist too. I just think in Josh's particular case he could care less about doing any of these things with his kids, prison or no prison. He's never indicated that he cared about his children at all, and was pretty clear he didn't want most of them. 

I do think the kids are unsafe around Josh and while it's almost always traumatic for kids to be separated from their parents in this case it's the lesser of two evils. Given Josh's history of molestation and CSAM I wouldn't want him having unsupervised access to kids even in a world without prisons. 

[Cat Damon]

@Marshmallow WorldI was just coming to post a similar warning. I didn't read much of it, but the prosecution's documents are just terrible to read. I hope he gets the full 20 years, or at least 18 so their youngest daughter will never have to live under the same roof as her father.

The defense's letters and documents are just as sickening but in different ways- the fact that his parents and others are defending him is disgusting. I do find it interesting that there don't seem to be any statements submitted by his siblings.

[libgirl2]

1 minute ago, lumpentheologie said:

I get how prison destroys families; I'm an abolitionist too. I just think in Josh's particular case he could care less about doing any of these things with his kids, prison or no prison. He's never indicated that he cared about his children at all, and was pretty clear he didn't want most of them. 

I do think the kids are unsafe around Josh and while it's almost always traumatic for kids to be separated from their parents in this case it's the lesser of two evils. Given Josh's history of molestation and CSAM I wouldn't want him having unsupervised access to kids even in a world without prisons. 

I don't feel that those kids are safe either. And Anna isn't going to do shit to protect them, never has, never will. I keep thinking maybe deep down she knows it is true and some how she has kept him away from them, but then I think of that diapering comment and I feel sick. 

[SassyPants]

11 hours ago, Bad Wolf said:

So, 3 -20 years. I was thinking he'd get 5, but after reading some of that, I'm hoping for more. How could he watch those children being tortured and not think about his own kids. The longer he stays away from them the better. One day they're going to find out what daddy did. Poor little Ms.

Or worse and far more horrifying, maybe he just regards children, all children, as less than human. What the hell went on in chez Duggar when Josh was in important developmental stages in life? 

[libgirl2]

6 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

Or worse and far more horrifying, maybe he just regards children, all children, as less than human. What the hell went on in chez Duggar when Josh was in important developmental stages in life? 

Two idiots in the throws of religious fervor? Some adult in their circle did something to him? Or just born sick? 

[lumpentheologie]

9 hours ago, mango_fandango said:

I still don’t think that “well, most rapists don’t get caught/what are we doing about paedophiles now?” is much of a response. That’s not a solution to what we do with them. So say a rapist IS caught. What should happen? I really would not be happy knowing that a known/identified rapist or serial killer is walking the streets. 

I really don't want to be a spokesperson for abolition on this forum but there are many ways to deal with people who harm our communities that aren't prisons as we know them and also aren't just letting them do whatever they want. Prison/police abolition is not about no consequences for bad behavior, it's about imagining new consequences that work better to achieve the goals we want. 

I've read that criminal punishment as we know it fundamentally has four goals: 1) to force the perpetrator to suffer for their wrongdoing; 2) to give satisfaction to those harmed by the wrongdoing; 3) to immediately stop any additional harm from happening (usually nowadays through separation from the general population); and 4) to reform and rehabilitate the perpetrator as much as possible so that they don't reoffend and can rejoin society. 

Some of the main problems with prisons is they do a really horrible terrible counterproductive job of goal 4 (putting criminals together usually just makes them more committed criminals, and better at it) and they usually overachieve goal 1 (making prisoners suffer far, far more than is called for). They also don't do a great job at goal 2, depending on the offense, or at goal 3 (since prisoners often harm each other quite a bit in prison). On top of that there's a huge amount of additional collateral damage to families, communities, the economy, democracy, etc. And in the US at least, all of this is done (by design) through a very racist lens. I do believe we, as a society, can do better. 

As @Antimony has said, what we know as prisons are a very specific, historically constructed form of punishment that really took off in the western world in the 19th century. Basically at that time they seemed more humane and useful than corporal punishment, which was the previous go-to punishment. I'm not convinced that that's always true but in any case corporal punishment and prisons are just two possible responses to destructive behavior. 

I can't recommend strongly enough that everyone watch Ava DuVernay's The 13th on Netflix. And for those interested in the history and who don't mind struggling through dense writing Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is the classic text. I was lucky to be able to teach it to undergrads for a few years and it's important enough that the university made all of them read it, no matter their course of study. 

[Antimony]

I'll say this, and I'm done, because I absolutely cannot take being treated that I'm some kind of goddamn pedo-loving psychopath over being a prison abolitionist, nor can I handle the idea of being told that I must have never experienced abuse because I feel this way. That one in particular...well. No sleep. 

I am not a full time prison abolitionist, nor a scholar, but I've linked to many that address, discuss, and debate all the issues that cases like Josh bring up. If people don't want to actually engage with these things, I cannot make you. For the record, common starting books are We Do This 'Til We Free Us and Are Prisons Obsolete?

I've said it before, I'll say it again - Prison abolition is not primarily about tearing prisons down but about building up communities. It is not only about moving away from punitive systems but removing the factors that make people hurt others *and* removing the factors that make it easy to victimize others. It means breaking cycles of abuse. Advocating for Universal Basic Income can be prison abolition. Creating comprehensive and developmentally appropriate and consent-centered sexual education for children can be prison abolition. Stocking a prison library can be the work of a prison abolitionist, but advocating for actual real funding for CPS can be prison abolition to. Creating community safety plans can be prison abolition. Carry Narcan and knowing how to ask for medical emergency help without police can be prison abolition. Providing free education about almost anything can be prison abolition. There are a million little things that can be part of it.

It is only a *technicality* that I "don't believe that Josh should be in prison" because I don't believe that any of his crimes should have ever happened. In a world a prison abolitionist would want to build, there wouldn't be enough economically or educationally vulnerable for Gothard to become a small God-King to a group of people. In a world a prison abolitionist would have built, communities would be too strong to isolate a cult of children. In a world a prison abolitionist built, a call from Oprah would have been effective intervention. In a world a prison abolitionist built, police wouldn't be corrupted and Jim Bob wouldn't have also grabbed another pedophile to help his son. In a world a prison abolitionist built, actual therapy would have been required and the fear of the criminal justice system wouldn't keep people afraid of seeking out resources. And finally, because @lumpentheologie mentions it, yes, there are prison abolitionists who believe that if all else fails, it is acceptable to separate somebody from their family and community and incarcerate them but this is distinct from subjecting them, and their family by proxy, to new traumas of the American prison system. I don't believe Josh should be in prison because I don't believe any of this should have happened at all and it is a massive Rube Goldberg system of failures that make our children, or anybody, vulnerable enough for this to happen. (Though, the points of failure in the Duggar saga are particularly easy to spot.)

Do I get some schadenfreude glee at the idea of Josh in prison? Yes. I don't think that is a particularly kind part of myself, or the best part of myself, but yes. I would have been both upset and floored (surprised) to see a not-guilty verdict. 

Do I think Josh should not live with his children? Yes. But I don't think that "prison" as we currently define it, and all the human rights atrocities that come along with it, have to be the answer. If Josh wants to become an absent father like he's probably always dreamed of, that's his business, but I have no interest in helping him by subjecting his children to the little tiny terrible rules of prison mail, nor do I have any interest in them suffering the shame we've built around the prison system. 

Is this all a pipe dream? Maybe. Very possibly. A lot of things are, but they're guiding principles. They're beliefs with a million architectural draft plans because I fundamentally don't believe we're doing a good thing right now and because I believe it would be wrong to not try to do better. You gotta have some belief, or else the ghosts of Camus and Sartre will float up from hell and start haunting you with the kind existentialism that makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning. 

If any aspects of this as a philosophy, as a movement, as a small bit of activism, sound appealing to you, as I've mentioned before there are people who explain it better than me and there are entire libraries of this content. It is a common misconception that prison abolitionists haven't "thought about the [whatever criminal we want to call the worst]" but we have, other people write about it better than I do. Prison abolition isn't about removing justice, it's about improving and redefining justice. 

For Josh, maybe a stopped clock is right twice a day but if that clock is a prison system, it did one thing right on two seconds out of twenty four hours and then for every other second of the day the clock started ruining people's lives and traumatizing them and punishing innocents people and torturing children in the juvenile justice system, so what I'm saying is, we need a different damn clock. And then, because murdering a metaphor is my personal crime, a bunch of prison abolitionists opened that clock and looked at a million little tiny delicate gears and said, "I'm starting to get an idea of how this works...I think we could build a better clock." 

But I will be reading these goofy letters of support because...you know, I'm nosy and at this point I need a good laugh really badly. 

 

[duggerme]

I’m confused by a few things in the support letters.

LaCount indicates that Josh was careful to set the alarm clock so that he was going to work during the allowed time slot. Going where? Didn’t the car lot close? 

Timothy Burress (I think) states that Josh is leading two-a-day Bible studies, and evening prayers.  How, if he has been in solitary?  Or was that not correct, or changed?

and how did he have $2,000 a month to support another family, unless they were rolling in it, in which case Anna and kids should be financially fine with him away. Since we know he was a diligent saver? 🙄

I was not normally a reader of the Duggar threads, and once we know his fate, probably won’t read much, but this has been an interesting, though disgusting, scene.  

[Cam]

In my younger, idolized view of the world, one reason I was taught prisons existed was to deter people from committing crimes in the first place! This requires critical thinking skills, of course:

“Gee, should I rob that bank? I know all its vulnerabilities and I’d love all that money without having to work the daily grind to get it. But wow, what if I got caught? It wouldn’t mess up just my life but my wife/husband/kids/parents etc. lives, who would have to deal with the fall out. Because they mean so much to me, I’m going to exercise self-control, put my selfish desires aside and get a real job. I have too much to lose otherwise.”

I mean, insert any other crime there.

Once the crime is committed and the perp is legally found guilty, only then do we seem to start hearing, “My family and loved ones mean so much to me, please don’t take me from them with extended prison time.” But prior to being apprehended, the criminal has no such thoughts that being incarcerated might separate them from others?

[Mama Mia]

15 hours ago, Antimony said:

Sometimes, I feel like the person writing these is having a little bit of fun in how easy it is to dunk on Josh here, because there's just so much, "Like, are you fucking kidding me dude?" energy in these legalese sentences;

Also the antecedent isn't clear here but if Josh is using Tor to search legal, adult pornography, he's not only a goddamn pedo but a goddamn inefficient weirdo because Tor is notably slower than other browsers because of the nature of the layers. They might just mean " using his iPhone" and not "using Tor" but it's unclear. If it means Tor, he strikes me as the kind of guy who will use more expensive or obscure technology for no reason other than to show off even thought it achieves the exact same result. Not really relevant, but kind of a trait that lines up with his overall smug persona. 

Nah. I think he was purposefully  using Tor on his iPhone to view adult, legal porn because he could attempt to use that as a defense if caught by Ana or Praying Eyes or his Daddy or the Government with his actual interest - extremely violent CSAM of extremely young children. He wanted to be able to say he accidentally came across it without realizing what it was. That he used Tor all the time for legal porn because he knows he’s not supposed to watch porn at all. 
Personally I think that could have been his reason for asking the Fed about CSAM as the reason for the search — so he could attempt an “I didn’t realize it was bad illegal children stuff until after I downloaded it, but didn’t know what to do” . But his lawyers probably advised the wasn’t me strategy  based on the amount and type.

( my other theory about his disclosure to the fed is the opposite - that he was wanting consequences, just like when he told JB about the initial molestations, told the Holt lady about the extent of his abuse that was unknown at the time, etc )

Anyway, I don’t think he was accidentally or smugly bumbling along with his disclosures or tech choices. 

[Antimony]

Of all the things that never happened, this one never happened the most. 

Hold on, there's an image for this...

[mango_fandango]

OK @Antimony, your post makes sense. I get that you’re frustrated, but thanks for explaining. 

And yeah, prison isn’t really a deterrent. Criminals don’t think like normal, law-abiding people. They have a goal (eg killing a current/former partner) and then don’t care what happens once they’ve achieved it, because they have achieved that goal.
In many cases people become repeat offenders because prison offers them a roof over their head and regular meals. That is pretty messed up. If prison (which is designed to be a punishment) is preferable to their life outside, something definitely needs to be done so that those people are supported in their lives rather than just abandoned. 

[lumpentheologie]

12 minutes ago, Cam said:

In my younger, idolized view of the world, one reason I was taught prisons existed was to deter people from committing crimes in the first place! This requires critical thinking skills, of course:

“Gee, should I rob that bank? I know all its vulnerabilities and I’d love all that money without having to work the daily grind to get it. But wow, what if I got caught? It wouldn’t mess up just my life but my wife/husband/kids/parents etc. lives, who would have to deal with the fall out. Because they mean so much to me, I’m going to exercise self-control, put my selfish desires aside and get a real job. I have too much to lose otherwise.”

I mean, insert any other crime there.

Once the crime is committed and the perp is legally found guilty, only then do we seem to start hearing, “My family and loved ones mean so much to me, please don’t take me from them with extended prison time.” But prior to being apprehended, the criminal has no such thoughts that being incarcerated might separate them from others?

The main problem with this line of argument is that while it sounds good it hasn't proven to be true at a population level. Mostly because people as whole (and especially traumatized, mentally ill people with little opportunity in life, who make up the majority of the prison population) aren't all that rational. Or they're too desperate to care. 

I mean, I'm sure there are some people who don't commit crimes because they don't want to go to prison. (And that's not unique to prisons -- those people would probably be deterred by most punishments.) But if seeing that people who committed crime did go to prison really reduced crime, we would expect the number of people in prison to either be stable or decreasing, as people learned this lesson. Instead we have seen the prison population increase exponentially. 

It turns out the number of people currently in prison is a terrible predictor of future crime -- societal factors like economic opportunity, child abuse/neglect, and generational trauma are much better at it. And addressing those issues would be a lot more effective at preventing crime. For example the US is seeing a surge in crime right now because of fallout from the pandemic and accompanying economic devastation. The fact that prisons exist doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But other countries, like Germany where I live, aren't seeing a similar surge in crime because they have much better economic and mental health protections for their populations. 

[libgirl2]

41 minutes ago, lumpentheologie said:

It turns out the number of people currently in prison is a terrible predictor of future crime -- societal factors like economic opportunity, child abuse/neglect, and generational trauma are much better at it. And addressing those issues would be a lot more effective at preventing crime. For example the US is seeing a surge in crime right now because of fallout from the pandemic and accompanying economic devastation. The fact that prisons exist doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But other countries, like Germany where I live, aren't seeing a similar surge in crime because they have much better economic and mental health protections for their populations. 

I had to chime in when I saw that last line. Two days ago, there was an incident at a bank not more than 3 miles from my house. Incident because it wasn't a robbery. A man went into the bank and took  hostages. He told them they weren't going to be hurt and he wasn't there to rob the bank. Speaking to one of the women, he said he was tired, alone and done with life. He tried everything and nothing helped. He could have easily have shot up the entire room of people, but he let them go. Swat team took his life when he was exiting the bank. It tells you a lot about the mental health crisis in this country, the US. 

There are bad people in jails that deserve to be there and there are people who are mentally ill. Not all of those should be out but maybe with the right help, they might not be in jail. 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by libgirl2

[Antimony]

34 minutes ago, lumpentheologie said:

Mostly because people as whole (and especially traumatized, mentally ill people with little opportunity in life, who make up the majority of the prison population) aren't all that rational.

I'm genuinely done, but for a laugh, I am reminded of all economics classes, ever, which often start with the phrase, "Assuming a rational consumer and rational actors..." and I'm always like, "Whoa, whoa, back up, seems to be a flaw in the model here, my guy my dude, Mr. Krugman, author of my undergraduate economics text book."

[formergothardite]

1 hour ago, Antimony said:

Of all the things that never happened, this one never happened the most. 

Hold on, there's an image for this...

I bet they would love to believe that Josh is sitting around being so pure and holy that fellow prisoners just look at him and know he did no wrong. 

[libgirl2]

9 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I bet they would love to believe that Josh is sitting around being so pure and holy that fellow prisoners just look at him and know he did no wrong. 

His holy presence awes them all. I am sure many are being saved just looking at him. Isn't he in solitary? 

Edited May 12, 2022 by libgirl2

[fundiewatch]

The heart absolutely killed me. Goddamn Michelle. She is so brain dead.