Jack Thompson Tossed Out Of Court

dmouritsendk writes "According to a story at IGN, Jack Thompson has been removed from the lawsuit filed by the families of two murdered police officers vs. Rockstar, Sony and game retailers. While previously he stated that he had withdrawn, details have now come out that the judge actually pulled his temporary license to practice law in Alabama. The reason for all this? Thompson's behavior." From the article: "The removal of Thompson from the case does not necessarily represent the end of the trial as his long-time associate Ray Reiser will assume the role of lead counsel for the case's plaintiffs. Not one to take such things lying down, Thompson fired back at Judge Moore by claiming the the judge has 'has violated... The Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics by his unfortunate, improper, and prejudicial acts in this case, at the expense of three bereaved Alabama families.'"

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[pat_trick]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_thompson [wikipedia.org]

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[Jerry Coffin]

Can anyone explain who this guy is?

The short version is that he's a guy on a crusade against video games. One longer version can be found Here. [wikipedia.org]

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[merlin_jim]

An asshole Christian fundemental lawyer who acts as if he believes that violence in videogames is solely responsible for violence in America. Because he states these facts so loudly, he is commonly interviewed on sunday morning talk shows and the like whenever some violent act occurs.

The funny part being that the things he claims happens in these games, many times is false; whether lie by ignorance or intent I'll leave an excercise to the reader.

He also appears to believe that his internal thought process is the one most likely for the US government to follow, and displays genuine surprise (and shock) when this is not the case, as in recently when he tried to get Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade locked up. Because they posted a blog indicating what a dick he was being to them and their loyal readers took affront to this mistreatment and wrote to tell him so; some of them not so politely, as I understand it.

One may also speculate that the massive traffic from Penny Arcade shut down his web server. But you can hardly blame that on PA can you? ;)

The funny part is, it was all because Jack promised $10,000 to the charity of choice of the first game development team that made a video game with a certain (particularly twisted) plotline, I guess to prove some sort of point (its my understanding that Jack is given to hyperbole)... when someone came through and made a (pretty extensive) mod to GTA putting Jack in the gunman's shoes raiding and shooting the employees of game stores, he refused to pay up.

So Penny Arcade went ahead and paid up. That, apparently, is what started all of this.

I recommend going through Penny Arcade's recent news archive for more details...

Oh and thinkgeek DOES sell an "I hate Jack Thompson" T-shirt if you're interested...

Re:Judge Moore

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid not - This one is James Moore, and the other wacko is Roy Moore.

Re:Judge Moore

[Otter]

That was my first thought, but, no -- this is Fayette County Circuit Judge James Moore, not Supreme Court Chief justice Roy Moore.

Re:Judge Moore

[lelitsch]

No, Jack got tossed by Fayette County Circuit Judge James Moore. The Ten Commandment case centered around Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. Roy got removed from office in November 2003 Alabama's judicial ethics panel for his conduct in that case, by the way.

Re:Judge Moore

[ProZachar]

That's former Chief Justice of Alabama, thank you very much. They threw his ass out a while ago.

Re:Woah

[wk633]

Different Moore. Ten Commandments was Roy Moore, this is James Moore.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/gamepolitics/1263 59.html/ [livejournal.com]
and
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/11/13/moore.tencommand ments/ [cnn.com]

Re:In related news... what about the CSI episode?

[tomstdenis]

It was really bad. One line in it [paraphrasing from memory]

"I'm not like that type [talking about murdering others], I'm not a gamer!"

It basically played on all the latest buzzwords and press. I know it's supposed to be fictional but they're clearly playing off recent events in the news and the least they could do is not show something as ridiculous as that.

They might as well have a story line [or a thousand] where some robe wearing muslim is planning to blow up an office complex or something :-)

Tom

Re:Let that be a lesson to you

[Zordak]

even they are starting to pander to religious groups.

Funny thing, that. You are a politician in a country where the vast majority of the people at least casually believe in some kind of God, and you find that you have to pretend that you represent their views if you want them to keep electing you. It's representative government, and it's the worst form of government on Earth, except all the others.

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[hackstraw]

Humans are no more violent than hawks, or bears, or rhinoceroses, or elephants, or even dolphins.

Hawks about equal I guess, maybe we have an edge.

Bears, I would give an edge.

Rhinoceroses, I would definitely give an edge.

Elephants, maybe equal, maybe a slight edge for people.

Dolphins, we will kick their ass and put them in a tunafish salad.

What is different about humans, apparently, is our sense of shame about our violence. Humans seem to be alone among all creatures in believing they are out of place in the evolved order. Humans alone seem to regret doing what all other animals do instinctively, without remorse.

To a degree. This is covered fairly well in Genesis when we ate from the tree of knowledge and our new knowledge gave us things like shame and self awareness.

Other animals have regret and remorse. My cats don't, but I've had dogs that did.

Humans are special in that they are so good at killing stuff, that measly animals are not that tough, so to be a real hu"man" we need to kill other humans. Plus we are over populated to some degree. And we have religions that tell us to be nice to one another, but if yours tells you to be nice for a different reason, then I'm just going to kill you for that.

Besides the cool structures and things that we build, humans are not that interesting of an animal. We are slow to develop, not that bright on average, we smell bad, we are physically weak and slow, etc. Without toys, we wouldn't be much.

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[Anonymous Coward]

its from BackInTheDay(tm) when your karma was shown as an int (not only to you, but to everyone else) that's why they switched to just showing excelent when it's over the value that gives you the +1 - to try to reduce the whole competition thing.

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[slavemowgli]

No, there's no further effect - the karma bonus for comments is pretty much the only goodie you get. You might still try to get as many +5 comments as possible, for example, but that's sportiness rather than anything else. (Slashdot golf?)

Re:Who is Jack Thompson?

[compro01]

facts are not facts if they are false

Re:I think there needs to be a CSI:Miami Episode..

[pclminion]

And it was probably the most contrived, ridiculous CSI episode I've ever seen, and thats saying a bit.

To be fair, last night's episode wasn't any more contrived or ridiculous than any other episode they've made.

And the "twist" that the game designer is actually the secret "Wizard" that all the "players" turn their "points" into? Please.

No, the "Wizard" was a college kid who played himself to death. The game designer hired another goon to sell the weapons to the kids. Did you actually pay any attention to the episode?

Did you notice that the episode was NOT full of moralizing, "These kinds of games are ruining America," etc? The closest it got was one of the characters saying "This is why I stopped playing this game at home." It was just another plot device. The writers of CSI are not out to "get" the video game industry. They are doing what they always do, which is to take current events and spin them into a crappy story line.

In fact, I think the episode did a slight service to the cause, by portraying the kids as junked-out psychos who took something too far, instead of poor innocents who were corrupted by evil video games. Geez, people get so worked up.

Re:Asshattery

[ldspartan]

Aww, why you gotta go and do that? Look how many people you've confused with your DSM quoting.

Look folks, there's a reason psychologists go to school for many, many years and get to prescribe drugs and such. Reading the DSM-IV-TR (or the IV, or the III-R, or the III, etc.) doesn't equip you to make meaningful decisions about anyone's mental health, much less your own.

Remember kids, undergraduate psych exists for one reason: to give the undergrads something to talk about after class.

And yes, I have an undergraduate psychology degree :)

--
lds

DSM is not for kids

[Fex303]

Look folks, there's a reason psychologists go to school for many, many years and get to prescribe drugs and such. Reading the DSM-IV-TR (or the IV, or the III-R, or the III, etc.) doesn't equip you to make meaningful decisions about anyone's mental health, much less your own.

As another undergraduate psych major, I'd like to agree with the above post. Cut and pasting bits and pieces from DSM is a bad idea unless people understand what DSM is and how it works.

From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]: The DSM provides diagnostic categories and criteria for their diagnoses. The proper use of these requires clinical training, knowledge and skills to apply them. Their use by people without this background is likely to lead to an inappropriate application of diagnoses.

That about sums it up. It's not a layman's document.

Jack Thompson might well be completely batshit insane, but you can't make a diagnosis based on seeing him on the news and reading a couple of articles.