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http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

http://www.thecrimereport.org/...

Moneyshot- "Ninety-seven percent of federal criminal prosecutions are resolved by plea bargain. In state courts the numbers are comparable."

And quid pro quo

Parallel construction [wikipedia.org] is an orthogonal (unrelated) problem

[citation needed]

but it has legitimate purposes too

[citation needed]

but a person innocent of substantial wrongdoing is yet to be convicted because of it

[citation needed]

I mean fair is fair, right?

I would argue two points.

1) "Random inspections of vehicle safety and driver sobriety are a reasonable way to ensure that we can use the roadways safely"

Do we have actual evidence of a decline in drunk driving through the use of checkpoints, or is it just accepted because it sounds effective? If they're not effective, then the whole argument is moot.
http://www.thecrimereport.org/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

2) Balancing tests are only appropriate when there are no other options, such as in the courthouse example you cite. Either there are checkpoints at courthouse entrances OR courthouses are insecure. There is no such mutual exclusivity with DUI checkpoints.

First of all, they are dramatically underreported, as has been shown numerous times.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "dramatically." For example, the New York Times investigated this and estimates that about half of accidental gun deaths of children may not be properly reported or classified. A USA Today report said the actual numbers were 61% higher than the CDC numbers, perhaps getting up to 100 unintentional deaths in the year studied there.

And that latter report was by an organization promoting gun safety, so I don't think they are lowballing the figure. On the other hand, that latter report doesn't define "child," so I'm not sure what age range is involved.

In any case, while these gun deaths are deplorable and may be somewhat underreported, even organizations who are desperately looking for gun deaths don't seem to agree with your statement that "It is not hard to find an accidental shooting every single day in this country that involves a child." Maybe a couple times a week on average. But hardly "every single day."

The CDC's numbers may be low. But your numbers are too high.

And your bit about the age of a child is a straw man argument. I follow the standard definition of a child being under 18.

The problem here is again a shift from possible underreporting to vastly overreporting that is characteristic of the other side of this argument.

The unfortunate reality -- as is the case with many polarized topics in U.S. politics -- is that both sides lie and mislead. Gun advocates want these numbers to appear as low as possible. People who are anti-gun want them to appear as high as possible.

And the anti-gun side has a strong tradition of including all sorts of misleading numbers involving teenagers to jack those numbers up -- trying to lump suicides, homicides, and accidents all into one category for example. Of course, most people recognize that teenagers below the age of 18 often are smart enough and competent enough to realize what they are doing, so you can't just lump all these things together.

Anyhow, clearly you have your own biased perspective and are intent on exaggerating your data. Clearly GP has his own as well. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

So you live in a world where almost every single person accused of a crime in US gets a trial by jury of their peers? What colour is sky in your world? Because here, in real world jury trial is a very rare thing - 97% prosecutions end with plea bargain ( http://www.thecrimereport.org/... ) . This is a real problem, because plea bargain has nothing to do with justice.

If they made the sentence for stealing a car, twenty years in prison, you would see almost ALL car theft stop within a few months, would you not?

Not really. Most criminals are not fully rational actors; after all, if crime were rational in spite of the costs, more people would do it. Impulse control, desperation, and an inflated sense of the ability to get away with it are major factors in the commission of crime that are completely unaffected by sentence length. Otherwise, who would kill someone in a death penalty state unless they thought their life was worth the other person being dead?

The evidence on deterrence is generally a wash. We don't have good info on what people would have crossed the line from ordinary citizen to criminal without the laws as they are. The best thing we can study is effects of prison length on recidivism rates (i.e. on people who have already demonstrated themselves to be willing to break the law in spite of the current sentences).

This meta-analysis suggests that longer prison sentences increase recidivism rates slightly. In contrast, this Italian study suggests that a threat of longer sentences upon return to prison *does* deter released inmates who have committed minor offenses but has no effect on more hardened criminals. Bringing economic rationality into the picture, a review of going rates for drug mules in markets with varying sentences shows that deterrence can be overriden by offering to pay more to compensate for the riskier service. Like I said, a wash.

I imagine the crime numbers would drop if commiting a crime was an automatic arrest, every single time.

you're right. And this is (in my opinion) a big problem.

Bullshit laws used to be dismissible. People would look at the bullshit laws and regulations and say, 'eh. yeah, 55mph on a straight highway with no on/off ramps for miles is unnecessary, but you can get away with doing 70mph most of the time.'

If increased surveillance was accompanied with an overdue overhauling of the current laws, it wouldn't be nearly so bad. I'm afraid that I don't even know what laws I'm in violation of on a day-to-day basis. And this is just regarding black/white matters. Determining how the courts will interpret something is a completely different matter. Fair Use? Maybe. depending on who is presiding

How many laws did you break today?

"In the end, lawyers are held responsible for their--and even their clients'--actions all the time. We get fined, suspended, disbarred, held liable, and otherwise disciplined on a regular basis. Does it happen often enough? Sometimes I doubt that."

For criminal prosecutors, as I understand it, not remotely often enough. Need some more of that:

"Significantly, of the 4,741 public disciplinary actions reported in the California State Bar Journal from January 1997 to September 2009, only ten involved prosecutors, and only six of these were for conduct in the handling of a criminal case. That means that the State Bar publicly disciplined only one percent of the prosecutors in the 600 cases in which the courts found prosecutorial misconduct and NCIP researchers identified the prosecutor."

http://thecrimereport.org/2010/10/04/justice-on-trial/