Talk:Renae Lawrence/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Thehistorian10 (talk · contribs) 15:43, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Not up to "Good Article" standards, in my view
I took a look at the article and don't think it qualifies to be rated as "good." It is certainly well written enough. My difficulty is that it appears that some of the citations do not support the text, so I have some belief that the article is not sufficiently reliable. For example, the text surrounding footnote 9 "graphic footage of the arrests and subsequent police questioning" is not supported by the footnote. Likewise, the claim that Lawrence was "cooperative" with the police is not supported by footnote 37, which simply says that Lawrence and her lawyers "showed deference to the system" likely as part of a strategy for sympathy. Cooperation typically means that an individual turns state's evidence against the coconspirators, but Lawrence went to trial and according to other sources, the court of appeals said that her behavior while on trial was no different from some other defendants. Likewise, in the "trial" section, it states that Chan alleged that Lawrence was the ringleader, but this can't be the case because Chan did not testify. I have not looked at every source of the article, but my sampling suggests that the article is not reliable.

Additionally, it would be useful to note somewhere that Lawrence's claim of duress was incomplete as a matter of law. Duress only works where there is no way out of avoiding the duress, but here there were multiple trips, and the use of aliases. Lawrence could have avoided the duress by reporting the conduct to the police. So as a matter of law in most jurisdictions, a duress claim would not have worked. Some other issues, from my view, make be think that the article is not quite as balanced as it could be.

Lastly, I would note that requests for GA status for articles about the coconspirators was rejected, and the articles share much of the same text regarding the trials.

Wiki33139 (talk) 12:39, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree with Wiki33139. I believe the articles on the other co-conspirators were rejected on the basis that Wikipedia does not consider an article notable if it is about people notable for only one event. MathewTownsend (talk) 21:27, 16 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Agree with above. Combine that with the fact that many of the same issues in this article appear in the other failed ones tells me there's enough to be fixed, so for now the article fails. Wizardman  Operation Big Bear 00:08, 18 December 2011 (UTC)