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How To Crash the US Justice System: Demand a Trial
Hugh Pickens writes "The U.S. Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including a fair and speedy jury trial, but in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation's prison population has quintupled in a few decades — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury, in part because the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. 'The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,' says Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. Now Susan Burton, head of 'A New Way of Life' (PDF), is helping to start a movement to demand restoration of Americans' basic civil and human rights by asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. 'Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?' Burton says if everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation."
and my attorney advised that a trial would be more expensive, so i should just settle
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
A plea bargain ensures that justice is not done.
Either a guilty person gets less punishment than they deserve or an innocent person gets punished when they deserve no punishment. It's a lose-lose situation.
Of course a bigger problem with the law is that ignorance of the law is no excuse but it's impossible for me to know every law and precedent that applies to me.
...there is no sig...
Not only demands for Jury Trials -
Occupy should start the Nullify movement - E.G. if you are on a jury refuse to return a guilty verdict for victimless BS charges.
It is your right and DUTY to judge not only guilt or innocence but also the merit of the law itself.
Fully Informed Jury Association -
http://fija.org/
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
The problem is we are talking about people's lives here. You want to forfeit your life for a prank or to make a point? OK, thought not. Well, neither do most of the folks currently being given an opportunity to plead to a lesser charge today.
The justice system for the most part sees the scum of the earth and very rarely are these people even technically innocent. They know it and are just interested in doing as little time as they possibly can. They already know the system is broken because they have gotten away with many, many crimes for years before being caught. If it wasn't so badly broken, they would have been caught already.
You see, there is a really simple truth at work here. People know they might get caught but they seriously underestimate the likelyhood of it because based on anecdotal evidence it looks like most people do not get caught. The reality is only about 20% of individual crimes do end up with someone receiving some kind of punishment. But, these are individual crimes - at some point the law of averages catches up with you so on your 40th crime or so it is almost a dead certainity that you are going down for it. The people in the criminal justice system - on the receiving end - do not think this through all they way and see only the few of their friends that are getting caught.
Sure, every once in a while a truely innocent person is hauled into court. At that point they have maybe only a 50/50 chance of escaping undeserved punishment because of the way things work. Would it be nice to fix that? Sure. But to fix it we are going to have to start training children to be more like Beaver and less like Eddie - right now, Eddie is winning out because it looks like he has a lot more fun. Problem is, the Eddies of the world do indeed have more fun but we would really like to live in a world populated with as few Eddies as possible - while it may be fun for Eddie it isn't so much fun for the people around him. We are talking about trying to undo 40 or 50 years of pop culture conditioning and 40 or 50 years of real live experiences in the inner cities of the US.
See, today when you end up in court the guy before you is really guilty and the guy after you is really guilty. The overwhelming number of people are really guilty, so much so that it shades everyone's expectations. Everyone is assumed at one level or another to be guilty because ... for the most part they are. If even 1 in 10 was truely innocent there might be a chance of the system being able to recognize an innocent person but they are so incredibly rare as to make it impossible for the people running the system to recognize them. There may be varying shades of guilt, but even with that the number of people in the system that are in fact guilty, know they are guilty and just wanting to get the smallest pain in their life possible makes the plea bargining system work the way it does.
some times you lose more by getting on a jury.
Some places have fired people for going on one http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=d92cc1df-79be-4c30-849d-988ccf1bba6d
Why do we want to crash the government? It's our tool to serve the public good. It's not perfect, but we're better off with it than against it.
In many cases, the government makes matters worse, not better. And nobody proposed "crashing the government." They said crash the "longer sentence for exercising your rights" system. Typical of anti-Libertarians, equate them to anarchists.
The libertarian hostility to civilisation is very sad.
The liberal obsession with statist solutions is very scary.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"The Prisoner's Dilemma" for nothing.
Jury nullification would be another benefit. While the justice system tries to hide this consitutional doctrine and demand that juries be nothing more than "finders of facts", it exists primarily to protect citizens from unjust laws that have been forced upon them. The war on drugs would be a good example of this. If most citizens don't believe that a person should spend 5 years in jail for smoking weed, start acquitting the "guilty" using jury nullification.
All they need is one case where a child pedo is released due to the systems inability to provide a speedy trial, and we will see another one of our rights taken from us
Such cases aren't rare at all. It doesn't really happen to bonafide terrorists, but people accused of "child pedo" (which could mean a whole lot of different things with varying degrees of severity) often are released without even a trial.
Criminals are released on technicalities or rights violated by the police all the time. And innocents are imprisoned because they were tricked by the police, didn't understand the situation or couldn't afford a decent lawyer all the time too.
What is the public good? Is it in the public's interest to imprison people who want to smoke weed? 18 year-olds who are sexually attracted to 17 year-olds? I don't think people are arguing that no government is better than any government, but when you turn the screws too hard against people/group/race/religion and try to restrict their rights, they need/will find a way to push back.
When you see the number of African Americans who have contact with the penal system you have to wonder if the American people count black men as being part of 'the public.'
Don't worry, after a few months of litigation you too can be indigent.
That's a joke. The reality is that, yes, a jury trial is MUCH more expensive than taking your lawyer's plea agreement -- unless you calculate in your time in prison, etc.
The real issue is that you actually CAN be punished for demanding a jury trial -- the sentence will be heavier -- this is tailored as "lack of remorse" essentially -- you're still claiming innocence!? You aren't facing up to your criminal liability. Add time.
-GiH
Government is terrorism against its citizens.
Take a look at the headlines of today, and tell me, which ones does not follow the logic that if it is possible, someone will deem it necessary and government should require it? The logic used in most political discussions is: "We must do something, this is something, therefore it must be done!" Nobody ever stops to ask "WHY must something be done?"
Government is tyranny, whether by do-gooders on the right or left edge of the political spectrum.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My local municipalities all started sending cops out on fishing expeditions to supplement their income during the recession. One lawyer I talked to said the ticket rates for one city in one month exceeded that for the whole year. They started sweeps for buckled drivers and even drivers license checkpoints. I would've loved to see these drivers making all these cops go to court to defend their tickets.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So in the case of rape we should just find the accused guilty without a 'pointless' trial rather than permit them the right to have their crimes proven? We're not talking about accused that are going to plead guilty on their own free will, we're talking about accused that are being strong armed into a guilty plea, innocent or not, because it's cheaper.
Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.
The post I replied specifically referred to society losing out if the accused is either innocent or victim. You're the one that's only talking about the one situation.
If a guilty person pleads guilty, everyone involved in the case, the victims, the courts and the criminal himself benefits. Yes plea deals go wrong when innocent people wrongly take them but try as you might, you cannot pretend that plea deals have no benefits.
Gee, an officer replied to a DV call of a man beating his wife, comes in and sees a woman with a black eye and a dude that smells of whiskey* -- do we really need a jury to decide that one? Or grand theft auto where the perp is caught in the stolen car
Yes, we do. We have a right to a trial by a jury. Every one of us. That includes stupid criminals. The alternative, where an officer or a lawyer or anyone else that decides a persons fate without due process is ripe for abuse. Really nasty and bad abuse.
Occupy should start the Nullify movement - E.G. if you are on a jury refuse to return a guilty verdict for victimless BS charges.
BS charges like for a white man killing a black man in the Deep South? In all those old movies where a bad guy says "No jury will convict me.", jury nullification is exactly what they're talking about. That leads to break down of rule of law, and from there it goes back to lynching and vigilante justice because of lack of trust in the legal system. It works both ways. Sure there are some things I wouldn't mind jury nulification being used on, but there are lots of other things that people will use it for if it becomes an accepted practice.
Plea deals have no benefit. A remorseful criminal that pleads guilty have a lot of benefit. A guilty person who pleas into a lighter sentence and has no remorse does not lead to justice being served. An innocent person who fears they might lose despite their innocence and takes a plea deal into any sentence feels let down by the system and does not lead to justice being served. A guilty person who feels remorse and pleads guilty and takes their just sentence is what you're looking for, and those rarely come out of one side using threats and bargains to get them.
Said that of all his clients, there was only one who he wasn't 100% sure was guilty. That isn't to say some of them didn't get off. One was a kid arrested with Sharpies on his person that the police claimed he used for tagging. He admitted to my friend he had in fact done so. However the search had been illegal, so the case was tossed. Saw the same kid back about 6 months later. This time the police had waited until they'd seen him tagging something, no getting out of that.
This wasn't my friend being an asshole on his assumptions or anything. The one case he was unsure about was the only one where there wasn't direct physical evidence, or an admission, of guilt.
In general, this is what you'd hope. You'd hope that cases would only be brought forward if the prosecution felt there was a good chance the person was guilty. The idea with the justice system isn't to just toss everyone in court and see what sticks. While a high plea rate can be indicative of other problems and we do need to monitor courts for abuses carefully, it can also simply mean that the state is doing its homework. They only press charges when they've got good evidence. The defense gets to see this evidence and tells their client "take the deal."
That is what happened with the kid the second time around. He was initially smug and said "You can get me off again, right?" My friend explained no, this was iron clad open and shut. Take the deal offered because there was no way he was walking away free.
It may be a 'flawed process' but it's a hell of a lot better than the outcomes of cases being decided on the whim of somebody who ignores all the facts presented to him in a court in favour of his own views.
The point of the jury isn't to pass judgement on the person or the law. It's to pass judgement on the case through the facts brought up in court. Justice should be blind, not just when it comes to your views of the defendant but when it comes to all views and predjudices you may hold.
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I guess it all boils down to it still being possible - not to suggest justice is inherently flawed, just imperfect - to be convicted of a crime one did not commit.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Who decides if it's a victimless crime if not the jury? Perhaps someone in the jury sees a klan member killing a black man as being victimless BS.
Jury Nullification still looking noble to you?
Sadly? Rightly.
You're not to there to hold the justice system to account, you're there to apply it, imperfect as it is. If it was illegal to whistle on a Sunday, the stupidity of the law in question is not, legally (morally is an entirely separate issue), enough for you to find not guilty.
Now, if there was such a law, then I'd be all for using that tactic to bring an end to it - but I also wouldn't expect or ask the court to start deciding who's in contempt and who isn't based on stupidity of law, because that's a slippery slope in and of itself. You would be guilty of jury poisoning, and should expect to be punished.
Runaway Jury was a pretty good movie though.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Better that ten guilty men walk free than one innocent man be imprisoned.
Everybody is still innocent until proven guilty, but what they do to innocent people these days is hard to fathom.
If the rape victim does not want to recount the crime, they can refuse to do so. Of course, if their testimony is the only evidence, the accused goes free - but there's no right to put people in jail without giving them due process, and that kind of thing is a part of it. You can't just say "oh, he did it, but I don't want to talk about it".
By that logic we shouldn't have police either - after all a racist cop is quite capable of destroying and/or planting evidence in order to achieve a bogus ruling too. Being human, any system we come up with will be imperfect. But that is not a reason to eliminate a part of our legal system that has been there from the very beginning.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But that is exaxtly what most governments are doing - creating an environment of fear by constantly reminding us of how vulnerable we are. External terrorism is less common now than it was 30 years ago, and yet we have grandmothers geting grope-frisked going through domestic airports, whole terminals evacuated when someone accidentally leaves their suitcase unattended, and pretty much every muslim on the planet put on notice.
They do this to achieve a political objective of control of the populace, and to help their buddies profit from all of the "preventative" measures.
How does that not satisfy the definition of "using terror to achieve a political objective"
Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.
I am a law-abiding citizen. I am also much, much more likely to be harmed in some way or another by my government or someone in their employment that ANY foreign terrorist. At least the government would try to look like they're going after any foreign terrorist who strikes American soil. By contrast, a government agent who harms me in some way (legally or not) is unlikely to ever face a penalty of any kind. Without doing a Google search, when's the last time you recall hearing about a police officer who was prosecuted and put in prison for abusing his power? Do you think they never abuse their power?
You're right, they are not terrorists. Terrorists couldn't do that much damage for that long to that many millions of people in their wildest wet dreams. They are worse than terrorists. They've been that way ever since the statesman was replaced by the career politician.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
But a prosecutor has never spoken those words in the history of mankind.
"Self-represented defendants are not bound by lawyers' ethical codes. This means that a defendant who represents himself can delay proceedings and sometimes wreak havoc on an already overloaded system by repeatedly filing motions."
You can ask a judge to make some reasonable allowances for your ignorance of proper procedure.
But don't for one minute think that you can play him for a fool.
I honestly hate to go into this because you're right for the most part but most cases in the average metropolitan area have overwhelming evidence. The problem is is that the DA, the courts, and the Public Defender's office all have limited resources. So even if you have ten security cameras, three eye witnesses, prints on the weapon, and an arm's length rap sheet it could still take days into weeks to present it to a jury. So instead the DA gives a semi-lenient sentence to avoid having to waste valuable resources on a low-level crime (drugs, GTA, GTL, or a non-violent crime) while spending on the violent ones.
The hands full of people who get charged with criminal offenses who can afford real legal defenses are usually the ones that the DA does want to go after because they tend to be the more violent and society-threatening (business owner/pillar of community murders his wife). The source material reinforces what we've known about the system for years. The dramatic increase actually occurred with the rise of CCTV and security cameras. Ironically the police didn't get better so much as technology made it more feasible to catch even the most mundane crime that would have been unsolvable 30 years ago. Then again a large portion of our prison population should be in rehab centers and mental institutions not prisons but that's an argument for another day.
Which just goes to show that the court system in America is not accessible to everyone. It's tailored to the rich, those that have already been convicted of something, and people who are already lawyers. It's a damn travesty.
Oh, we can all afford. Never mind the part that will leave you bankrupt with a ruined credit rating. Though I'm sure at the time that will be the least of your worries should you get convicted. But still.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's just fallout from a blind belief that abstinence programs actually work, that "my child is a good child and nothing bad will happen to them" belief that haunts so many parents, a horrified thought whenever Planned Parenthood wants to give a talk at the schools
Which is in turn spawned (pun intended) by the aberrant idea that sex is bad, dirty, and only acceptable between consenting heterosexual married couples. Do you think there would be a problem giving kids sexual education if there wasn't a deranged stigma about sex in western society?
Sexual behavior is normal and healthy in teens and young adults. Just educate them about birth control and safe sex, and everything will be fine. They will figure out which holes to stuff things into, regardless of your puritanical controlling attempts to influence them into being sexless jeebus zombies.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
ten thousand, one hundred thousand?
Life is a long process of slowly shedding the absolutism one has as a child through the course of learning some unpleasant realities. One of them is, "Justice can never be perfect, but imperfect justice is far better than no justice."
Lies. It happens all the time.
Scenario: You blew a .04% on the breathalyzer and showed a .03% on the blood test, but you swerved. We have it on video. You also stumbled when we asked you to walk the straight line during the field sobriety test, never mind that it was twenty degrees out and we didn't let you put your jacket on and we drew the line right beside a busy interstate. We have this on video too. We can make a deal where you lose your license for a year, pay ten grand, take some classes, and are on probation for a year...or you can take it to trial and go to jail for a year. During that time, your girlfriend will see other men, you'll lose your pets, most of your possessions, and come out pretty much bankrupt from all the bills you weren't able to pay. Your move.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Actually there IS a magic bullet, its called "get rid of sin crimes" and treat adults like adults. The late William F Buckley said a perfect explanation once, sorry if i don't get the quote exact but it went like this: "If I put a bottle on a table that says poison and has a skull and crossbones on it and i tell you 'this is poison, it will destroy your health, destroy your family, before it finally destroys you' and you push me out of the way and gulp the bottle straight down? Well stupid you frankly are too ignorant to live! why should I spend billions to build cages to put you in and armed guards around the bottle because you are too dumb not to drink it?"
Gambling, prostitution and drugs should ALL be legal and regulated, no different than booze is now. Personal responsibility means being able to choose stupidly as well as smartly and if you removed non violent offenders out of the system you wouldn't have this problem...
But here is the REAL truth, ugly and sick such as it is, the elite have figured out how to make money off those poor by locking them up, both by privatizing the prison system and with prison labor, not to mention all the traditionally mafia style rackets like concessions Prisons and the prison system are billion dollar businesses and they give the elite the added bonus of stripping the rights away from a large section of the minorities so it is a win/win for them.
Well right up until we have an Arab spring, which i figure we will have in the next decade, right around when unemployment hits 50% and the crime shoots through the roof because all these millions of uneducated poor can't feed themselves because all the factories were sent to Asia and all the manual labor given to illegals. Somehow I doubt power will be transferred as nicely as it was in the old USSR, it'll probably be more like Libya which with the amount of firepower the USA has spread out all over the country should give anyone nightmares. But hopefully when the final round has been fired we will go back to a more strict constitutional government where people are treated like adults again and the corps aren't allowed to become destructive monsters like they are now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There are exactly two parts in every law book that have no touch with reality: Sex and drugs.
And it's only two because nobody ever bothered with rock'n roll.
Quite seriously, these are the two parts of every civil law book that plain out don't make any sense. I can see the point in everything else, since it usually involves two parties, a culprit and a victim. In these two parts, they're usually rolled into one. Kinda like the law trying to protect you from yourself.
And IMO that's now the law's prerogative. I should have the right to ruin my life in the way I prefer. Once you let me vote and enter other contracts perfectly able to ruin my life forever, I should also have the right to ruin it in a more pleasurable way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I generally agree with the legalization argument, but you're oversimplifying things. Many things are illegal only partially for the damage they allow you to do to yourself. The abuse of many substances could/would also have a widespread negative effect on society. Just as we restrict "liberty" by forcing all children to go to school in order to promote an educated society, we should also restrict liberty by preventing people from using highly addictive drugs like opiates.
An interesting take, straight out of "Hugs not Drugs!" But also utter bullshit.
Legalization leads to less abuse by youths, and less abuse overall, lower rates of addiction, and less overall harm.
If you're really trying to "protect" people from dangerous drugs and their ill effects on society, you should be working to legalize or decriminalize just about everything, since the Netherlands experiment shows pretty conclusively that young people have less access to drugs in a legalized marketplace (because black marketeers don't check ID) there's less experimentation among youth, less addiction among youth, and less addiction overall in society. Overall, fewer people take drugs in the Netherlands now that they're de facto legal.
Who did what now?