Blaming the victim: Ponerized New York judge says assault victims were 'no angels'; violence part of their culture

David Ferguson
Raw Story
Tue, 29 Sep 2015 10:34 UTC

Judge Frederic Block (Official portrait)

A Brooklyn judge defended the behavior of an ex-convict who attacked two women while out on supervised release by saying the assault victims here "no angels" themselves.

According to the New York Daily News, controversial federal Judge Frederic Block then went on to mock the U.S. Attorney's Office for taking the case so seriously.

Defendant David Carter was out of prison on supervised release after serving a 51-month sentence for opening fire on NYPD officers on top of a prior weapons offense.

Two women say that Carter attacked them during verbal disputes that turned violent. Federal prosecutors arrived at a Sep. 17 hearing on the matter with photos of the women's injuries and detailed accounts of Carters' offenses, hoping to see Carter returned to prison for two years.

"You prepared this exhibit as if it were a murder case," Block said, according to a transcript. "There must not be a lot of things that the office has to preoccupy yourself...It's good to see (the U.S. Attorney's office) is not so busy that you have to do this."

"It's a little bit of an overkill," said Block. "Realistically speaking, it's sort of disproportionate to what we're doing."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Girish Srinivasan assured the judge, "We take it seriously."

The two women, Christina Sanchez and Carter's former partner Kenya Fuller, were not credible witnesses, said Brock.

Repeatedly Brock referred to the women as the "so-called victims" and said that they are "no angels themselves."

Block ruled that Fuller's injuries amounted to little more than harassment, in spite of the fact that both she and her toddler child suffered abrasions and bruises when Carter struck her in the mouth and knocked them both to the ground.

The Daily News said that Block called the violence part of these people's "culture."

"There's a certain dynamic here that is regrettable," said Block. "That's the culture they have. They hit each other. Who knows what they do out there in that world. What to do requires the wisdom of Solomon. Maybe I should make my determination on Yom Kippur."

"There may be all sorts of provocations back and forth and we have men here who are in the situation, but the women are sometimes complicit also,' he went on.

"He (Carter) may not realize how fortunate he is that this matter is before Judge Block," Block wrote — referring to himself in the third person.

Carter was sentenced to time served (three weeks in jail), a 7 p.m. to 8 a.m. curfew and anger management classes.

Comment: This 'blame the victim' mentality has become our official culture due to the impact of psychopaths on society.

The conclusion is that the American way of life has optimized the survival of psychopaths with the consequence that it is an adaptive "life strategy" that is extremely successful in American society, and thus has increased in the population in strictly genetic terms. What is more, as a consequence of a society that is adaptive for psychopathy, many individuals who are NOT genetic psychopaths have similarly adapted, becoming "effective" psychopaths, or "secondary sociopaths."

(Many experts differentiate between primary and secondary sociopaths. The first is a sociopath because they have the "genes" and the second is more or less "created" by their environment of victimization. Other experts refer to these two categories as "psychopaths" for the genetic variety and "sociopaths" for the reactive variety. We prefer this latter distinction.)

Of course, because they are not intellectually handicapped, these individuals [psychopaths] will progress normally in terms of cognitive development and will acquire a theory of mind.� Their theories, however, will be formulated purely in instrumental terms [what can claiming this or that GET for me?], without access to the empathic understanding that most of us rely on so much of the time.

They may become excellent predictors of others' behavior, unhandicapped by the "intrusiveness" of emotion, acting, as do professional gamblers, solely on nomothetic laws and actuarial data rather than on hunches and feelings.

In determining how to "play" in the social encounters of everyday life, they will use a pure cost-benefit approach based on immediate personal outcomes, with no "accounting" for the emotional reactions of the others with whom they are dealing.

Without any real love to "commit" them to cooperation, without any anxiety to prevent fear of "defection," without guilt to inspire repentance, they are free to continually play for the short-term benefit.

At the same time, because changes in gene frequencies in the population would not be able to keep pace with the fast-changing parameters of social interactions, an additional fluctuating proportion of sociopathy should result because, in a society of [psychopathy], the environmental circumstances make an antisocial strategy of life more profitable than a pro-social one. [Mealey]

In other words, in a world of psychopaths, those who are not genetic psychopaths, are induced to behave like psychopaths simply to survive. When the rules are set up to make a society "adaptive" to psychopathy, it makes psychopaths of everyone.

Official Culture in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy?