It’s a landmark decision. This Wednesday, September 18, the Court of Cassation rejected Nicolas Sarkozy’s appeal in the wiretapping case, thus making definitive sentence of one year in prison under electronic bracelet for corruption and influence peddlingan unprecedented sanction for a former head of state.
If, today, Nicolas Sarkozy can serve his sentence under an electronic bracelet, it is partly thanks to Spider-Man. Back in 1983. That year, New Mexico judge Jack Love faces penitentiary overcrowding problem of his county. He then has some reluctance to incarcerate people who have committed minor offenses. So he thinks of a way to monitor the prisoners without having to put them behind bars.
This solution is while reading a Spider-Man comic book, published in 1977, he found it. In this Spider-Man adventure, the Kingpin manages to capture him and put an electronic bracelet on him that is impossible to remove. This bracelet allows him, at any time, to locate Spider-Man and send him an electric shock from a distance.
A first draft in the 1960s
Jack Love has just found his idea. It is an electronic bracelet he needs to monitor prisoners in the wild and require them to respect travel authorized by the court.
Problem: the judge is neither a computer scientist nor a handyman. But he ends up meeting Michael Goss, an engineer, who is working on his idea. He then discovers that an experiment on this type of bracelet was developed in the 1960s at Harvard. But, due to lack of funding and still too limited technology, the project was buried.
25 years later, Michael Goss was inspired to make a small box that attaches around the ankle. A tracker emits, every minute, a signal sent to a computerwhich also detects if the wearer attempts to remove it. The engineer calls his invention electronic handcuffs.
An ecological condemnation
The first to benefit is Judge Jack Love himself. Because he is the one testing the product for three weeks. Convinced, he sentences three people to wear it for 30 days. They are required to stay at home at night and on weekends. And it is a success. They respect the judge’s orders to the letter. This will not, however, prevent two of them from doing it again.
But the electronic bracelet will appeal to the rest of the United States, for reasons other than purely legal ones: it costs the American administration six times less than sending a convicted person to prison.
Better: it is even became a business. In Washington state, where the cost of using an electronic bracelet is $5, anyone who wears it is fined $140 per week. That’s a profit of 300%.
Today, some 150,000 Americans wear an electronic bracelet. In France, 15,591 people wore one on November 1, 2024according to figures from the Chancellery. From now on, Nicolas Sarkozy is one of them.
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