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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.
Precisely. This is government sponsored terrorism against its citizens.
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...
Let me just point this out The Bill of Rights for Busy People. Don't worry kids, you don't need those pesky "rights" things anyway.
So, essentially he argues for a real life denial of service attack. Bombard the system with traffic until it breaks under the load.
I only wonder how the government would push back in such a situation. We've already seen the US government trample over Constitutional in the name of security, terrorism, child pornography, etc. 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.
In the name of the children ... won't you please think of the children?
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
I feel like calling the united states' bluff on how many citizens it's willing to imprison, despite overcrowding, is a bad idea.
The new courthouses are high-architecture palaces in the best parts of town built with taxpayer money, and judges get life tenure with substantial six figure salaries. Think about that... six figure income with no possibility of being fired or laid off, ever! DAs and prosecutors get defined-benefit pensions (another all-set-for-life deal) while the rest of us get (at best) 401k's.
Let's not give them an excuse to to jack up employment on the public trough.
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!
Only the indigent get appointed counsel, not people who don't want to spend the extra money.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
They'd just raise our taxes to pay for all those new public defenders, judges and courtrooms.
My dad loudly demanded a trial by jury when he got a parking ticket. The judge just got rid of the ticket.
answer that, and you'll understand a little better how the world works.
Is someone advocating for MORE lawyers?
. .
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
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/
Now this is perhaps the best possible solution that I have heard! The solution is unlikely but it would work miraculously. Rendering not guilty verdicts for certain vice and victimless crimes will really put the system to a test. If everyone agreed to do this, not even voir dire would weed out jurors sympathetic to the prosecution. In fact, the policing system in America would be upended and we would see rights return to the people. Police won't enforce crimes where their actions will result in a not guilty verdict. Much of the crimes code would, in effect, be decriminalized.
... if you're facing serious charges, but I sure don't want to be the one who gets to test it. Plea bargains usually save the court and prosecution some effort and the defendant some time, but if you're likely to get convicted, pleading down is usually a win/win. Now if you're innocent, plead so and go to trial- jury or judge.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
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.
can't tell if you are trolling or naive, and apparently some of the moderators cannot either.
History has shown us that all governments exist for the sole purpose of enriching themselves by exercising control of others through violence or threats thereof. Any benefit to the governed is merely an unintended consequence of government fulfilling it's primary directive.
to end the war on drugs. because this would significantly reduce the work-load of the courts and allow them to have more jury trials.
Among the prisoners, drug offenders made up the same percentage of State prisoners in both 1997 and 2004 (21%). The percentage of Federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses declined from 63% in 1997 to 55% in 2004.[8] In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
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.
That's a bit misleading no. A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it. The only reason that to take his threat seriously is because you predict that it's likely that he will prevail at trial. If you think you'll prevail, the threat is totally meaningless -- it's not like the prosecutor can put you in jail of his own accord.
Look, I'm all for better trials (especially in the sense of getting better representation for defendants at the trial level where public defenders are really atrocious) but the idea that plea-bargaining is part of the problem is absurd. Plea bargains are often the most socially effective way of dealing with the most obvious cases. 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.
Those cases abound because the criminals in the justice system are, by selection, the stupider ones: the ones that got caught. It stands to reason that, on average, more of them would be open-and-shut cases that your average crime. Just watch COPS** once to see how blindingly guilty some of these idiots are. The smart criminals are the ones that you don't see and never find and aren't taking plea bargains because of the overwhelming amount of evidence stacked against them.
* This is not a made up anecdote, one of my neighbors served in a rather ho-him middle class suburb and he said that he responded to at least one such case per week, often more and very often with repeat offenders. It depressed him to no end that there was not a "get drunk and hit your wife 20 times in a lifetime and we get to take you out behind the woodshed and knock some sense into you" rule, but that's a different matter.
** Or, as my crim pro prof called it "A 30 minute class on the actual procedure of criminal law that you can watch for free every Saturday".
Our systems could end up like the huge backlog of cases in India
From the article:
A backlog of 29.2 million cases pending across hundreds of subordinate state-level courts, 21 high courts and the Supreme Court. According to figures released recently [2008] by the Indian Supreme Court - the country's highest judicial authority - out of this mind-boggling number, over 25.4 million cases are pending in subordinate courts, 3.7 million cases in various high courts while the Supreme Court is stuck with 45,887 cases awaiting justice. According to the Supreme Court's findings, among the states, Uttar Pradesh - India's most populous state with a population of 180 million - leads the pack with 4.8 million cases awaiting trial followed by Maharashtra and Gujarat with 4 million and 3.4 million cases, respectively.
This huge backlog of unresolved cases, experts claim, is directly proportional to a lack of judges. So, while Uttar Pradesh has a vacancy of 521 judges against a required roster of 2,172, Maharashtra suffers from a shortfall of 376 against the current strength of 1,897 posts.
Although cases are resolved at an undeniably high speed, India has roughly 11 judges for every million people compared with roughly 110 per million in the United States.
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.'
It's lose lose if you only look at the person on trial, not anyone else affected by the crime.
There's a lot to be said about a rape victim not being made to describe in detail, in front of 200 people in court and a variety of press, how she was raped. Then of course there's the cross examination where she's accused of being a liar or a slut...
Likewise subject families of murder victims to spending weeks hearing about their loved one's horrible final moments.
The plea bargain system has it's flaws but there's a lot of good that can come of ensuring guilty people with nothing to lose don't force a pointless trial.
The problem with the accused DoSing the justice system, is that they are the very ones who need access to the system. The government doesn't need to push back, they will just allow the dockets to be backed up further and further, and the majority of the accused will sit in jail for years awaiting a trial. The supreme court has already ruled on cases where people were held for over 5 years before getting a trial, and it was deemed that it didn't violate their right to a speedy trial since the delay wasn't due to maliciousness on behalf of the prosecutor.
You can represent yourself.
"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."
lol, how applicable.
in the first trial we found the guy guilty (he was totally guilty of beating up and robbing the victim).
And this relates to the OPs comments about juries overseeing cases involving victimless crime how?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In New Hampshire, we've been working on spreading knowledge about this fact for some time now. See http://nevertakeaplea.org/. There are flyers we hand out at court, too. Glad to see more and more people are waking up to this.
This activism is a nice complement to it: Not only demand a jury trial but convince the jury to acquit because the law is unjust, too.
Liberty in your lifetime
Mass incarceration isn't a libertarian issue. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, an embarassment to the "land of the free". You should take a look of the reality you live in before you lecture others on naivete.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
The majority of Slashdot posters live in the US. This is concerning US law. Considering how much US law is changing (or trying to change) to make certain things very difficult for nerds, this matters. A lot. This also matters if you live outside of the US since, unless you weren't aware, the US can do whatever the fuck they want where ever the fuck they want because they can.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
I've been through the jury selection process. By identifying oneself as aware of or willing to nullify, a person could either be kicked out of the pool, or even be declared in contempt of court (skirting one's duty to faithfully serve as instructed, as a means of skipping jury duty). It depends on jurisdiction, how one states his or her opinion to the court, and the judge's mood.
In my case, I didn't have to press the issue- they found jurors before they got to me and asked their questions.
Jury nullification undermines the legal process and is not a good thing in any way.
You can get all romantic about the thought of saving some young guy from jail for drugs possession but would you find it so noble if a Klan member got away with murdering an innocent African American youth by his all white jury? How about an innocent man who clearly didn't commit murder being found guilty because he was gay and the jury thought homosexuals were sinful and he deserved to be punished anyway?
Laws are put into place by people elected by millions of voters. A single (or even a sizable minority) person in a Jury undermining this because of his personal, political views is democratic and goes against the whole principle of justice being blind. This is why any judge (and lawyers for both sides) worth their salt, are on the lookout for people looking to attempt jury nullification and if you lie to them in order to try it out... Enjoy being found in contempt (or worse).
Sadly, what will ACTUALLY happen if you bring this up during voir dire is that the judge will hold you in contempt for "poisoning the jury pool" and you spend some time in jail.
If the judge hears of you bringing it up in the jury box - and remember, jury deliberations are NOT actually private or protected, the other jurors are free to rat you out - then he can do the same thing, hold you in contempt and replace you with an alternate.
While in college, I made enemies with the local college police. They had a pretty good reputation for harassment and lack of faith in the constitution, so local lawyers had made themselves available for advice, free of charge, to students in my particular situation. The police would pull me over, ask to search me... my car... they'd roll up on me while I was walking down the street. They'd meet me outside of class to ask me "Questions" regarding topics I had no knowledge of.
The lawyer was very wise and told me a few things:
Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them.
The police are not here to serve and protect. They are here to arrest people. Period. They have special police, called detectives, that gather evidence, but the vast majority of police do one thing and one thing only... arrest people. When talking to a police officer, remember their goal. They are not your friend. They are not there to help. They are there to either arrest you, or someone you know. Why are you helping them arrest you by continuing to talk?
The police do not decide if you are guilty. Often they try to coerce you into giving them more evidence against you, by convincing you that if you admit to something, or let them search you, they will find you more believable. You have NO REASON to care what the police believe. Their opinion is not important. If they have cause to arrest you, you are going to jail. PERIOD. When the police officer walks up to you, they already know if they are going to arrest you or not. Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you in a court of law. By talking or letting them search you, you are simply giving them more evidence... or even giving them a reason to arrest you where one did not exist before.
After speaking with the lawyer, I took his advice. Every time a police officer tried to talk to me, I simply refused. "I'm sorry sir, I have nothing to say to you" if they continued, then I used the lawyers line "Rights are like muscles, they become weak if you do not exercise them." I've used this line dozens of times in my life and I have never had a cop continue to bug me after using it... although several commented that it was clever.
The campus police quickly realized I wasn't going to fall for their games anymore. So they charged me with something I had nothing to do with. I demanded a trial, much to their dismay. They tried numerous times to plead me out. I took it to court and acted as my own lawyer. They actually called several witnesses, none of whom had ever seen me before. The judge threw it out. I gave the prosecutor and police officer the devil horns and winked on the way out. I was never pulled over or questioned again in that town.
I was wondering what was up with the extremely high incarceration rate in the US (around an order of magnitude higher than where I live). This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
The part about the length of the jail terms is enlightening, but I still have to wonder if the average American thinks it's okay that the closest comparison one can find is Russian Gulags from the 40s and 50s...
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
You insensitive clod! You'll be cheating judges, prosecutors, public defenders and cops out of a living!
Have gnu, will travel.
The dutch labour party (ex-socialists, now more commonly thought of as bleeding hearts) lost its leader who was the Mayor of Amsterdam during massive budget overruns, a political murder by a Muslim on a critic of Islam, increasing racial tension, race related riots, failure of expensive projects to get the races to live to gether (IJburg) and increased attacks on Homo sexuals by Muslims. Name: Job Cohen... the guy then became leader of labour and was not nearly as successful as a politician in the opositions as you might have thought.
So, they currently have a leadership election and one of the leaders prides himself on having been a street coach for troubled youths... He claims though sentencing is not the answer. What then is the answer is not answered but he claims though sentencing does not stop re-offending. It tells you a lot a because anyone with a working brain cell will realize that the toughest sentence if that of death and dead people seldom re-offend.
Mind you, he has a point. There are a lot of countries in the world and over history an almost infinite variety of methods have been used to deter crime. And not a single one of them really works, no not even the bullet to the head. The Chinese are current masters in it and their crime rate is on in increase. They show weekly interviews with the condemned and in China if you are from a bad area, you don't have a longer life expectenancy on deathrow then you got in your own home, 1 week and you are dead. And as said, the crime rate is on the rise. The US has though sentences and a high crime rate.
Holland has a liberal system AND a high crime rate. Oh, the statistics vary but if you then put them into context such as that the dutch legal system is extremely bad at getting convictions, you have to wonder what the real crime rate.
As for re-offending, almost any system claims something between 70-80% FAILURE RATE and that is ONLY counting those criminals who are successfully tracked at going through the entire legal procedure again leading to a served jailed sentence AGAIN. Oh, if a criminal re-offends but gets killed by the police in full view of a million witnesses who swear he was committing the crime, IT STILL DOES NOT COUNT AS RE-OFFENDING.
Plea bargains, parole, suspended sentences, time served etc etc they are all just patches to make a system that barely works not collapse completely. And we need the system to work because there are areas of the world where the system HAS collapsed and they are not nice places to be. Prove me wrong and move to Somalia or even just Mexico.
And you want to overload this barely functioning machine? If you are in America, you are just living thanks to the believe by Mexicans and blacks that the system will prevent them from just taking what they want. If that ever crumbles, every rich spoiled white /. nerd is going to get it is so bad that they will pray for a jock to pants them one last time before they die. It is lucky the blacks of LA are so dumb they rioted by attacking each other instead of descending enmass on Hollywood and taking out every rich white person thinking that black and hispanic cops are going to risk their lives for their rich asses and you better hope the system keeps that believe in tact.
The system ain't perfect but so far it works. If you want to improve it think real hard whether you are going to survive its destruction. It might be nice to watch an old crappy building being blown up to make space for something new, BUT NOT WHEN YOU ARE STANDING ON TOP OF IT.
Fight the man! It is not a battle cry the man should be using. And unless you suck as a nerd, you are the 1%.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Who decides what crimes are "victimless"? You? Me? The defendant? The Jury?
Many people would consider drunk driving victimless; same as many consider blocking traffic and trespassing in empty buildings victimless.
Have we really decided that the justice system is so corrupt that a primary goal is to "crash the system"?
But the vice & victimless crimes are the masses taking the plea-bargains. Nearly everyone would have to be in on this for it to work.
There is a war going on for your mind.
You can get all romantic about the thought of saving some young guy from jail for drugs possession but would you find it so noble if a Klan member got away with murdering an innocent African American youth by his all white jury?
There are a lot more drug persecutions than lynchings these days, so on the balance we're still ahead.
Laws are put into place by people elected by millions of voters
By an extremely flawed process that ensures good policy cannot prevail. From the mathematics of winner takes all voting, to the extraordinary American propaganda machine it's nearly impossible for good policy to prevail against electioneering. Just government is based on the consent of the people, and you can't actually assess the consent of the people with such broken apparatus. It's thus impossible to consider the American government legitimate.
goes against the whole principle of justice being blind.
When you nullify, you're passing judgement on the law, not the defendant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can get all romantic about the thought of saving some young guy from jail for drugs possession but would you find it so noble if a Klan member got away with murdering an innocent African American youth by his all white jury? How about an innocent man who clearly didn't commit murder being found guilty because he was gay and the jury thought homosexuals were sinful and he deserved to be punished anyway?
The OP said "victimless BS charges". Neither of your examples qualify as "victimless BS".
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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.
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.
Corzine is following the truism that "all politicians should be limited to two terms - one in office and one in prison." Obama is just taking a detour, the long way round.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
This is a good idea, but it is hard to get people to cooperate. Like the famous Prisoner's Dilemma, while cooperation is the best bet from all parties, for an individual, plea bargaining is the logical choice. The system can easily handle one person deciding not to play the game. Okay, it's not quite the same as the prisoner's dilemma since if everyone else takes the plea bargain it makes sense for you to do so, but sadly people aren't perfect logicians.
The unspoken assumption there is that you were going to lose the criminal case, so they money and time you'd spend on the jury trial would be wasted.
That's not always the case. In some unknown but probably large fraction of cases, the DA not only wants to bypass the trial because it saves him money and effort, but he also doesn't have enough evidence to assure a conviction. He's pretty sure you did it -- enough to put your ass in jail --- but not so sure he can meet the standards of proof that a jury trial would require. So he tries to frighten and bully you into going to prison.
To assess whether this is a good idea, you need a good lawyer and you need to tell him or her all about the evidence that the state has -- and might have -- against you. Then the attorney can make something of an informed assessment of:
1. What it is the state will likely charge you with -- you can't believe the DA -- he's trying to bully you.
2. How likely it is, given what you know about the evidence, that the state can prove its case in court. You can always reassess after discovery.
3. The range of likely sentences you would get if convicted on each count.
4. How much of your money and time this is likely to eat up assuming a vigorous defense.
And there's a tactic you can sometimes use in your favor. Some cases are complicated and could take a long time to prepare. Or they could be in busy offices and get lower priority than higher-profile or more serious cases. In that case, you may have an advantage by demanding a *speedy* trial. It's your right. That means either the state has to put aside other cases to prepare yours for trial sooner or it has to go ahead with a case that's less fully prepared and your chance of acquittal may be improved.
Now I feel guilty. I may have helped douchebags get off.
When I was in Chicago, a lawyer friend advised going to court for minor traffic offenses id you had the time - dockets were so overloaded that judges would usually simply dismiss things like an illegal turn simply because they had more important cases to push through, or the cop would often not show up leading to a dismissal. if everyone that got a traffic summons went to court the system would crash almost instantly; which is why fines need to be low enough to get people to say its easier to pay or offer traffic school to keep it off your record.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That's a different thing. Criminal cases are always free, if you want them to be. The public defender's office will represent you free of charge. Despite the tripe you hear on Slashdot, they will likely do a good job too as criminal defense is their specialty, they've quite a bit of experience.
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.
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?
And what does he expect this would result in?
OK, we destroy the ability of the legal system to function.
The right to demand a trial with a jury would be revoked in a week.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
It is really sooo simple. I had a ticket. I decided to fight it. Notice To Appear. At the trial date there were 20 cases. 2 Pleaded guilty (funny guys). 2 decided to plead not guilty, but they did not fight properly so they lost. I fought with claws and fangs. I lost half of their time. I managed to deal adjourment, and at the next trial date, the officer did not appear, so i have won.
So, to summarize it, if of these 20 and some people all had decided to fight, that would mean that instead of 99% convictions, there would at most 3-4.......Anyone wanna to comment? No comment.
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You don't have to pick something that will get you the death penalty that will get you life in prison to make your point.
Go to a protest, get arrested for tresspassing, make and ass of yourself so you actually get charged, demand a trial even if they offer you a light fine, and clog up a court room for a few hours/days. Multiply that by 1000 and suddenly the court system in a city is shut down for a month. Multiply that by another 1000 and you'd shut down half the courts in the country.
limited scope, but from my own person experience none-the-less:
Many years ago I was in the hospital for several days, for -what turned out to be- salmonella.
Six months after I am out, I get a "final notice" from the hospital for $7500. wtf is this? I never got the first bills. (not an excuse for non-payment but the truth)
Not only that, I had less than a week to pay or they would sue me!
Having no lawyer and no clue how to counter (I didn't have $7500 at the time), I contacted my landlord who had just finished telling me how wonderful this lawyer was that she had found after going through a bunch of shysters.
Contacted the lawyer, laid everything out for him, asked him how much it would cost, he said he would file a response and request a jury trial.
He seemed pretty sure that they would throw up their hands and walk away from it rather than agree to a jury trial.
Sure enough, I never heard a word from them again. Still use the same doctor.
They never sent me another bill, never tried to set up a payment plan, never dinged my credit report
Lawyer's estimate was $350, he ended up charging me $750 before I told him to stop "monitoring" the case and billing me for each time he "checked up on it."
I like microcars
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... but do you really consider "crashing the U.S. justice system" to be a worthy goal?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If you expect that most of the randomly selected jury supports the Klan, then the legislators and judges they elect probably will, too.
This is really interesting. Thanks for posting this!
The Jury, apparently.
If I may make a quick fix to the above it should probably read "what one or more consenting..." no reason that you should need two people or more for the government to leave you alone in that respect.
Well yes. It's up to the jury. That's the whole point.
I can apply the law to the facts. Which is true. It doesn't mean once I hear all of the facts that I will. Learn the legal lawyer BS double-talk. And for all the 1960s refusal to convict White on Black crime. There was also a rash of jury nullifications between 1850 - 1860 in the North US to refuse to enforce the fugitive slave act. It goes both ways. In my State the Constitution guarantees the right of a jury to judge the law and the facts.
I served as a juror and the foreman on a Rape of a minor case. It astounded me how little it takes to put someone in jail. It went down Not Guilty it didn't start that way.
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.
so long as the only people that can afford to be on one are rich, retired or some combination thereof. I had a scary moment when I got called for a grand jury at my State Capital. I don't live in the State Capital. That, plus a 3 month trial and I'd be destitute. My job would fire me, I'd lose my house, etc, etc. So I sent a hardship letter and they excused me. In the end I can imagine the composition of that Jury, a bunch of rich, let's face it white, conservatives.
Unless you can figure out some way to elevate jury service to the level of Military service (e.g. with equivalent pay and protection), your wasting your time. But anyone who's ever read the history of this country can probably tell you that's sorta the point.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I went to traffic court (and BTW I was guilty of the offense I got the ticket for, I admit it. Not DUI mind you) here in Victoria. There were about 20 people sitting and standing outside the court room. The first thing that happened is one cop showed up with a clipboard and starting reading out names - he then told those people they could go home because the cop who ticketed them couldn't make the court in time. About 8 or so people left.
The rest of us were processed in the court room. Your name was called up and the judge asked if you had a lawyer present - or could provide a reason under the law why you should not be charged (meaning quote case law, specific statues etc). If you couldn't do that, you got fined by the judge. If you couldn't afford the amount of the fine you could plead your lack of income and they would reduce it considerably (i.e. $375 -> $75 with 3 months to pay it).
That said, the local police do seem to go on ticketing sprees. Some weeks they only stop a few folks but at other times they are handing out tickets continuously. I have to presume its a revenue thing for the city (similarly, the city has started putting 2 block zones where the usual speed limit of 50 kph is reduced to 30 or 40, I presume to make speeding offense revenue easier to generate).
Mostly the cops here are pretty decent.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
You're the expert - you're obviously so sloshed you can't read quoted posts
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
but a good place to start would be for the government (and annoying nosy neighbors) to mind their own business
Have you suggested that to your local, state or federal elected representatives? Do you work on any candidates' campaigns?
The Occupy Something movement seems more about throwing a hissy fit than offering a better alternative and working to bring it about, which is why I can't take it seriously.
Ten years or so ago, I had a laptop stolen out of my home. A couple of kids came in while we were watching a movie in the other room and snagged my briefcase with my laptop in it. We reported this to the police. Several months later, the police arrested the kids while they breaking into another home. They found my laptop under one of the kid's bed.
So I went down to the county courthouse to talk with the prosecutor. In that meeting, they brought my laptop out, I identified it. The prosecutor asked me how much the laptop was worth. I was honest, a hundred bucks if that. (It was an old Toshiba 486 with 8MB of RAM that I'd bought used off of ebay with no OS and installed Linux.) I can recall the way her face fell to this day. It was as if the words "felony conviction" were floating through her head and just floated away never to be seen again.
So she bluffed the kid. She implied that she might be bringing serious felony charges, ones that could certainly be avoided if he plead out to lesser felony charges. He took the bait and plead guilty. By doing do, he avoided being charged with something that the prosecutor could not have proven had the case gone to court.
I let many companies and people abuse me because I couldn't afford time or attorneys to take them to court. Then I turned my attention to learning enough to be competent enough to put a stop to that. Way overdue.
People should be comfortable representing themselves more. Perhaps not for a crucial criminal trial, but for everything else it should be considered. Basics of the legal system and navigating it should be taught in high school. The fact is that you can combat many opponents well if it costs you next to nothing and they feel they have to pay a lot for attorneys. True to some extent even for well-funded opponents in some circumstances. A major problem is that a lot of information, like process / procedures / formats, is hidden, but you can get it eventually.
I've successfully run a couple civil actions and successfully contested a couple low-level parking / traffic tickets. I just appealed one in California Appellate court, raising some interesting (to me) constitutional issues. (Waiting for my loss letter...) Good to do A) to work out the details of the process, B) to learn the law better, and C) protest annoying and not-helping-safety/society abuse of laws to meet a quota. I even recently figured out the details of filing citizen's arrest requests to maximally complain about a very dangerous, and illegal, maneuver of a CHP to give someone a speeding ticket. The officer was the only unsafe driver I saw between SF and SJ. (Next time, I'll get positive ID.)
In California, additional "fees" were added to traffic tickets that make a typical speeding ticket >$500 and really minor infractions start at $240. That's enough to be worth contesting at every point. In fact, it may be enough to change the rules of evidence in some cases.
I need to populate my pro-se site soon with some of these as examples, if people are interested.
http://pro-se.org/
And yes, I want to attack the overbroad "unlicensed practice of law" statutes that exist in 49 states. Of course you can't fraudulently hold yourself out as a bar-certified lawyer, and you shouldn't (can't, according to those laws) give people advice about what they should do. (The latter makes sense in a narrow sense: Besides what the law means, and what past cases have found, to actually advise people, you should know what the local custom, practices, probabilities, leanings, etc. the local judges and prosecutors have. That is separate from talking about the law or your own experience or analysis / opinions. First amendment rules there. That's the best I can understand the real legal line for conduct.) People aren't confused about who is a doctor just because they suggest that you eat better, get exercise, and take Ritalin or whatever. It is a ridiculous abuse of the public to enact laws so clearly designed to prevent sharing of information to protect blessed professionals.
Stephen D. Williams
The reason demanding our rightful trials would crash the system is because the system makes it so goddamn easy to arrest people that the courts are flooded with unnecessary accused people.
Of course it's primarily the Drug War that creates all these arrests. The blockage of our system by all those people destroys its justice at every step, and not just for the people unnecessarily arrested.
But there's no disincentive for the teeming masses of legislators (county/municipal, state, Federal) who created this damaging vulnerability. And for the teeming pool of lawyers from which legislators crawl, there's only guaranteed employment in perpetuating the Drug War and other unnecessary arrests.
--
make install -not war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick
So I guess if that's speedy enough for you. Maybe people following this idea would crash the jails?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
Yes, if you're dumb enough to talk about it. Don't mention it. And when you get to the vote, vote not guilty and refuse to elaborate beyond "I just don't think he's guilty". You'll sound dumb, but so what?
I'm an Assistant Prosecutor in one of the busiest (and understaffed) circuits in Missouri. We have two associate judges (who generally hear misdemeanor cases, one more than the other) and one circuit judge (who generally hears felony cases and most civil cases). We share our circuit judge with the other county in the circuit.
We get about one jury a month. Yes, ONE JURY A MONTH. In the third or forth busiest circuit in Missouri. How many jury trials do we have set in any given month? 40-60. We can only try one of those a month because the legislature won't give us another circuit judge. As a consequence, some of these cases are several years old -- some people remain in custody that entire time. And if a civil case is ready to try, forget it - unless you're accused of murder, you're gonna have to wait.
And you know what? The vast majority of them don't need to be jury trials. For instance, our ONE jury trial this month was an Assault 1st, Burglary 1st, and Armed Criminal Action. The defendant confessed on video tape to detectives - the confession was good and was not coerced in any way. We offered him a deal two years ago that would've resulted in probation along with drug treatment. The defendant demanded his trial (along with jury sentencing), was found guilty within an hour, and sentenced to 6 years in prison within another hour. While he got his trial, somebody in custody had to sit downstairs another month while this guy had his trial that wasn't needed (or could have been handled in a bench trial).
What's the solution? It ain't bogging the court system down, I can tell you that, because it's already bogged down enough!
Disclaimer: I am a *former** Lay Advocate in civil, constitutional and family matters. ...In the UK we already have this problem, where in civil litigation, everything's done as close to politely as possible. Everybody (theoretically) agrees on a compromise, and the judge rubberstamps it. That's the extremely short version.
When trying to apply this method to criminal prosecutions, everything falls over.
A court adjudicator hears differing stories from two sides (generally), which for the most part are disparate in the extreme. A court hearing two sides is an adversarial one, and there's simply no way that it can be otherwise. It is for the court, not either one side, to decide one way or the other; in theory, this would be the side with the most plausible story, backed up with the most plausible evidence.
The start of it falling over is where representation for each side agrees on what evidence should be submitted. This, I argue, is solely the purview of he who holds said evidence; his lawyers obligation is to submit any and all materials relevant to the case - whether or not is is in his clients' interest to do so, as his primary obligation is to the Law. When agreement is made as to what evidence should be suppressed, then the spirit of the Law is being sullied. I do not agree with this.
*This is why I said *former* Lay Advocate. I quit because everywhere I turned, evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Public Authorities, NHS Trusts and of Police individuals, was being suppressed in situations where criminal prosecutions against individuals and corporate bodies should have been brought instead. Where in such cases, the futures of entire families were being decided upon not the preponderance of actual physical evidence, but the batshit predictions of fraudsters masquerading as "child psychologists" whose ramblings were taken as "Gospel Honest Truth, Guv" by imposters posing as judges who then signed off on orders to make children from prebirth to 16 disappear forever.
Fuck that. I want nothing more to do with the legal system in the UK, because it's downright unlawful. Hell, it's not that. It's because no matter how hard I tried, I saw more kids taken into the arms of strangers who went on to do fuck knows what with them than I saved from such a fate. Far more. And it wrecked me every time.
One of these days I'm gonna have to write about it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The current one is pretty much worthy of a banana republic, learn from the European countries where a supreme court judge is a job, where you apply, and you sit for x number of user (usually 5) and then you have to apply again.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
it may not be "Legally" enough, but the jury is free from any consequence for their decision, and you don't have to mention jury nullification, once deliberations start you can semaphore your intentions with very hard headed remarks "i don't think he did it" "that weed could belong to anyone" unless you have a real authoritarian bootlicker once the other members of the jury realize you will not budge, they will want to go home and go along with you. and if you can't drag them along you can at least force a mistrial and give the defendant another shot at justice.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
Not this again.
Jury Nullification is Russian Roulette with all chambers loaded.
Ask a black man or woman of a certain age what jury nullification meant to them. Ask a border state Hispanic legal or illegal immigrant the same question now.
The geek enters a court as the outsider --- not the home town boy ---- and he will ---- quite predictably --- get hammered into the marble flooring if he tries to play the nullification card.
Brah, you gotta learn to take the good with the bad. Sure, you run the risk that the occasional slippery bastard will do and end run around the legal system, but the flip side is sending innocent people to prison. As such, the people involved in the original creation of our system of government decided that erring on the side of the innocent was in everybody's best interest.
I am just so happy that I continually run into people who hold opinions completely contrary to the general idea behind a livable legal system. These are the same people who, upon encountering me, lecture on about the need for stream-lined justice (getting rid of the appeals court), and mouthing off about how they've never had so much as a speeding ticket. Shortly thereafter, they usually receive a speeding ticket, and their opinion begins to change.
Spend some time, involuntarily if you can, at a prison / institution. You'll see something most people in power rarely understand, something you can't get by just 'visiting' some inmates. You'll see what hell looks like, and how all the 'help' you receive is typically nothing but salt in your wounds.
I am John Hurt.
If the people do not wish to stand for justice, how do you expect the courts to enforce it?
I am John Hurt.
More along the lines of traffic was flowing at 80 MPH (all of it) on a major highway (2,3,4,5 lanes at times), the posted speed limit was 55 MPH, and it was around that time of month that the traffic cops felt the need to rough up the peasantry.
It's especially rich coming from some judges who quote traffic law to you when you're on the stand ("Endangering the safety of others!"), then speed themselves on the way home (with a prescription for eye-glasses that hasn't been updated in years). Just had a judge caught the other day who was dismissing her own tickets (logged into the court system and deleted the summonses).
Our legal system is so hopelessly corrupt that part of me wants to flee the country and not look back, and the other half wants to stick around and see just how bad it can really get (For Science!),
I am John Hurt.
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!
The fact still remains that, by convicting another human being of a 'crime' that you don't personally consider wrong you are acting against your own code of ethics which, by definition, is wrong. So yes, I do think voting your conscience both on the evidence and on the justice of the law itself is our responsibility, not just as citizens, but as human beings. That anyone could punish another human being for something they don't believe is wrong is incredible to me. I would never do so. If I were ever on a jury it would be instant mistrial for any crime in which I cannot easily find a victim.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I can see that argument. Prosecutors "invent" criminal situations where the situation is clearly different... Like the the "getaway driver" gets life while the "trigger man" got to plea down.
Juries are spooned only the charges and situations the prosecution wants... Like the OJ case where they only put on the table some crazy case that the guy with millions of dollars, personally plotted first degree murder on his drugged out wife. Had they went for something reasonable like second degree, or manslaughter they might have got him...
But they didn't give the jury that option. I think in a lot of situations they prey on the jury not knowing what the "reasonable" sentence is... When you are put on a jury, you have the impression that the "letter of the law" is what you are judging against... But in reality it is only the one law that got put in front of you... NOT what "the law" actually does.
You'll notice the PROSECUTOR doesn't have to start each trial with THEIR hand on the Bible to tell the WHOLE truth.... Therein lies the problem with the system.
IAAL in fact I'm a DA. So let me give you some perspective from the other side. If a prosecutor is doing his/her job then if they don't believe someone committed a crime or even if they don't believe there is a likelihood of conviction then they must dismiss the case. I am most proud of the times I have dismissed cases where through further investigatory work or an honest evaluation of the case I found I could not in good conscience proceed. I would hold out my dismissals as some of my greatest achievements even over my convictions of extremely dangerous and evil murderers and rapists. Why is this? Because as a prosecutor you have the ultimate discretion on whether to proceed and your decision is paramount in its effect on peoples lives. My greatest fear would be to prosecute an innocent man but as a prosecutor with morals and who never just settles for taking someone's word for it (unless there word is corroborated by extrinsic evidence) I dig and use my own investigators and review the forensic evidence until I'm satisfied I have the guilty party. Therefore, it is very unlikely for me to convict an innocent person (short of a perfectly executed set up that is near impossible despite what the media would have you believe) especially since I have dismissed cases where I didn't believe the defendant committed the crime or when I didn't believe I could secure a conviction. I sometimes joked with a defense attorney colleague of mine, "if your guy is truly innocent I'm your favorite DA but conversely if your guy did it look out because I'm coming for him/her come hell or high water!" She agreed with my assessment. Now the problem is not every DA is like this, some are in the job just to make their trial bones and then get to the defense side some are lazy and just looking for the paycheck and will use the stiff sentence or habitual counts as a hammer just because they don't want to do the work. But there are a cadre of career prosecutors who like me do it for the right reasons and live up to the higher standards reserved for those who protect the People. I have never minded someone demanding a trial as I enjoyed the process but there is something to be said where the defendant delights in re-victimizing the victim. I once had to sit a watch as a defendant's attorney at his direction cross-examined a sexual assault victim not once not twice but three times due to mistrials and misconduct by the defense and he throughly enjoyed the hell he put her through on each occasion. (on a side note he tied her up cut her clothes off with a knife, held a gun to her head broke her jaw and nose, and then tortured her sexually). We had the evidence from the start and even though there always is the possibility of an acquittal there should be a punitive penalty for exercising your rights when in doing so this type of harm occurs. (second side note the judge witnessed how much the defendant delighted in the pain he both initially caused and the subsequently caused to the victim during the trial and he was sentenced to 48-life in Dept of Corrections. By in large most of my cases are not even close when it comes to guilt or innocence, its just a matter of considering all the factors and coming up with an appropriate plea based on criminal history, age, impact of crime and community safety. I often wonder what would happen if the defense could convince a large majority to demand trials (this would have to be public defenders as most who retain private attys couldn't afford to go to trial) what would happen? The result would be many lower level criminals would get more substantial sentences while taking away prosecutors ability to adequately attend to serious criminals so as a byproduct inevitability some cases where further work and investigation would be necessary to secure a conviction guilty defendants would go free and continue to hurt those we seek to protect causing more victimization and pain to those who are least able to protect themselves. Sorry for the verbosity of my post but I obviously feel strongly about this issue.
Liberal? It's been the Conservatives at the forefront of the "fuck them, imprison them all, especially the n____s and spics" system.
I can't believe this wasn't modded flamebait. Total bullshit.
What, you didn't think that sentencing guidelines different for "crack" and "powder" cocaine came out of nowhere did you? Crack is predominantly used by blacks, powder primarily used by the silver-spoon sons of the upper crust
Right, and crack dealers were destroying black neighborhoods, which is why the likes of Rep. Maxine Waters (South Central LA) and LA Mayor Tom Bradley - both blacks - lobbied the Reagan Administration to increase sentences for crack. Now it's suddenly a racially-based conspiracy to imprison blacks because of disparate sentencing. Newsflash: Disparate racial outcomes are not per se proof of a racial bias.
But never let the truth get in the way of a good "he's racist!" meme.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Made up by liberals. There is absolutely no evidence of this nonsense. It's a myth.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Ask yourself the same question the day your trial for [whatever heinous thing you did or did not do] starts.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
indeed. Demanding - and getting, no questions asked - pretty much any individual they choose anywhere in the World, extradited to the US for incarceration in the deepest shit pit they can find for them?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
As I understand it, the "jury of peers" is supposed to be generally representative of the makeup and views of the community in which the accused lives. Weather you or I agree with those views is largely irrelevant. The whole point of jury nullification is that the jurors are ultimately charged with being just even if it means overriding what you or I think, or what the person who wrote a law thinks, on a case by case basis. This is a world of grey we live in, and the best result we can hope for in a real world scenario is going to be mostly just with uncertain outcomes resulting in the accused being released. While jury nullification can result in what we would deem unjust decisions, it would seem to me that our system is rife with them now, largely because we've removed the human element from the process and are trying to dispense justice by robotically relying on laws most people don't understand and don't believe in. Which do you think is the greater evil?
Punishment breeds anarchists. I prefer a less revenue centric approach which ofcuses on protecting the rest of us from those who have demonstrated they will commit actual crime with actual victims. In a free society, the State should never be able to file charges against anyone, for anything. For there to be a crime there must be a victim.
Magna Carta 1297, Clause 29: "... We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right."
Representation that acts in your interest is your Lawfully guaranteed RIGHT! It does NOT depend on your status or role.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
BSOD THE JUSTICE SYSTEM!
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.
The proper response to this should have been a Constitutional ammendment:
In cases of murder in any degree, assault, or rape a jury shall not nullify the law. Congress shall have the power to establish penalties for members of a jury that do so.
That would have actually required thought, effort, and respect for the Constitution. Instead we got judges who lie to juries, and effective triple jeopardy by trying people on Federal civil rights charges if murder didn't stick, and then civil charges if neither murder nor civil rights violations stuck. Don't get me started on the "civil" system...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A denial of service attack works best when you don't care about the packets or the machines sending them.
TFA is suggesting is that real people disregard their own best interests (plea bargains, lesser charges) for an experiment (jury demands) that is unlikely to achieve anything unless nearly everyone participates at once.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
What about the other 20 trials that didn't make it to a jury because the charges had a potential sentence of 50 years, and the plea bargain was for two years? Unless the accused felt that there was at least a 96% chance of acquittal they would accept the plea, and even if they thought their odds were more favorable they might still take the plea if they're the sort of person who buys fire insurance.
Frontline covered a case where a woman in prison for years with many years to go was offered a chance to re-plead guilty and get out immediately on time served. However, for religious reasons she did not feel she could lie and confess to a crime she did not commit, so she is still in prison. Please explain how that is justice...
Yeah, take a look at speed limits sometime and tell me with a straight face that they were enacted based on the will of the people. Ditto for any other law that is broken routinely by 51% or more of the population.
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."
Public defenders represent far too many clients to do a good job for all of them. They've gotta pick and choose which cases they'll pay time and attention to, and if yours is a piddly misdemeanor case that won't advance his reputation, don't expect him to do as well for you as a paid one.
I was surprised to discover the rate of premarital pregnancy and divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.
It's not really a surprise when you think about it.
And something tells me you haven't. (I'll give you a hint: The abortion rates are much lower).
A lot of well-meaning (but naive) Christians raise their kids in a heavily sheltered environment. Then they turn 18, go out on their own, and receive the shock of their lives when they are suddenly confronted with decisions they were never prepared to face. It's not a surprise that as young adults, they would engage in risky behavior like casual unprotected sex.
Please tell me you're not that naive. A vast majority of the time, kids are already exposed to many of the ills of life ("like casual unprotected sex.") long before they turn 18. Those who have been taught otherwise are more likely to avoid those situations. There are exceptions, and parents who push too hard are more likely to get active rebellion.
But to pretend that this is something that magically happens at 18 is inane.
A laundry list of "dos and don'ts" doesn't build character or cultivate wisdom, it just prohibits.
This is true. The lack of laundry lists also doesn't cultivate wisdom.
It transmits little or no understanding and even less ability to reason through a situation and make good decisions.
Not on its own, it doesn't. It does provide a starting point for wise decisions, though. Even with an unwise parent who never explains why the rules exist, children will likely start thinking about "why" sooner than those whose parents never brought up the subject.
And parents who care enough to teach silly little moral rules are much, much more likely to expound on the importance of those rules than parents who don't. Granted, that only teaches the beginnings of wisdom to kids willing to listen.
Such religious prohibition combined with severe social stigma may have mostly worked during the 1950s, among the Puritans, and during the Victorian Era, but there aren't so many external restraints governing consenting adults anymore.
Please note that those weren't just religious prohibitions. They were transmitted that way, sure, but they wouldn't have survived any better than blood sacrifice if those societies didn't see wisdom in them. It has been said "If there is one thing to learn about history, it's that we learn nothing from history."
I consider that a good thing, but it doesn't produce good results if there is no internal decision-making that can plan ahead and evaluate risk.
Uh, yeah? No duh? And please note that you're talking about people taking risks with the lives of their unborn children. Unless they're prepared to do right by them, it's incredibly selfish and should bear a social stigma. I'm frequently amazed that people can't see why we have so many social problems.
If the inability to evaluate cause-and-effect in order to consider the ramifications of one's decisions is a disease, I say we are suffering a pandemic.
Those who grow up in religious households are far more likely (anecdotally) to learn about cause and effect in their personal lives. And yes, we do seem to be in a pandemic of sorts.
Doing whatever feels good in the moment with no thought to secondary and tertiary effects sounds great but it doesn't result in a life that most people would want to be stuck with.
You're preaching to the choir.
Speaking of your discovery, have you ever met a woman who is a pastor's daughter? They have quite the reputation. Sure it's a stereotype, but it has some basis in fact.
Yes it does, for two reasons. (1) Some pastors are idiots and push way
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
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?
Well as the saying goes, it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted. I have a feeling that the type of person who would vote not guilty for a man accused of killing another man, despite sufficient evidence, based on racial reasons is going to continue to do so regardless of if jury nullification is advocated or not. On the other hand there are probably a lot of people who would vote guilty for someone accused of a victimless crime simply because they are instructed to vote based on facts and not let their feelings of the silliness of the law weigh in at all.
Rightly? No, sadly and wrongly. You probably should read up on the history of Jury Nullification (start here: Jury Nullification in the United States) and you will find that it was first used to prevent convictions under the fugitive slave laws. Jury Nullification is a viable answer... but it must be applied on a per case basis. You cannot go in as a juror with the express intent of nullifying a law that you do not like. You must give the prosecution a chance to present its case.
OCO is Loco
Mass incarceration isn't a libertarian issue.
America, Land of the Imprisoned
Victimless Crime Constitutes 86% of The Federal Prison Population
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No, we're spending lots of $$$ prosecuting people who copy songs.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I am curious, what happens if someone accused of a crime (let us presume him innocent) gives no response to the accusation? Does not plead guilty to anything; does not plead innocent either; does not request his lawyer; does not request a public defender; does not make any effort to defend himself. Play dead. Shut down. Tight-lipped stony faced blank stare into space. Or if you really want, the P.O.W. approach: name and "Not guilty", nothing more, in response to everything. Let the world see you traumatized by being dragged through court despite your innocence. Non-violent resistance; jam the courts with mute, inert, innocent bodies.
What can the court do? They can't convict you without a guilty plea or a guilty verdict, so they will have to take you to trial. Even if you could afford a lawyer, if you refuse to call one or do anything to defend yourself, surely they can't consider you competent to defend yourself, and so you will get a public defender. Then you answer factual questions only to your public defender and give him the same silent treatment if he dares bring up plea bargaining, and refuse to speak to anyone unless advised by your defender to testify on the stand.
At that point we have the real test of how much "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is still practiced. A person who is truly not guilty should be able to get off scott free with no defense, because the burden of proof is on the prosecution; an innocent man should not have to prove his innocence in the slightest.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Tell that to the mexicans, all those drug related murders are for the sake of the American drug consumption. But hey, the US successfully outsourced the crime so they can make their statistics look better.
You can make statistics show anything you want, count a little bit of this, a little more of that. Don't qualify drunk driving deaths as murder anymore, if medics manage now to save more people, that shows less people died from gun wounds so clearly the number of people that got shot have gone down.
I have heard for decades that crime has been going down in Holland. In such a small country, that should have resulted in zero murders by now. Odd that this isn't the case.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Routinely, very violent crimes are discovered of mass murderers who have been killing people for years and managed to hide this. Are you so naive to think that when these cases are discovered IF they ever are, that the statistics for the years the killings happened in are revised? Silly boy, of course they are not. All a drop shows is that less crimes have been reported and solved. And it is not like the system has never been caught out trying to hide crimes to make themselves look good. Bike thefts in Holland for instance are handled with just a piece of paper so who bothers to report them anymore. HEY! Crime has dropped.
Wake up and smell the coffee kid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... up to a point were the whole US is populated only by prison inmates, guards, and lawyers. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.
Everybody is still innocent until proven guilty, but what they do to innocent people these days is hard to fathom.
Ack. No. Everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
"Convicted" and "guilty" can be very different things. People who commit crimes are guilty, and people who are convicted are "found to be guilty".
I know. It's subtle, but it's important. (And I wish that more lawyers and judges understood this.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
So were the hippies, so were the punks?
Emotions! In your brain!
It's a tool like any other. It can be used for good or for evil. Juries should always seek true justice first.
But it is an Mammon nation - which explains why we have a percentage-wise prison population larger than even China. Follow the money.
Well as the saying goes, it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted.
Then instead of causing harm to one innocent person you enable ten evil doers to harm many innocent people.
The idea being that the ten criminals will cause less damage than an unchecked government. If a criminal tries to take my liberty and I defend myself, there is a great deal of support for me in the law (details subject to jurisdiction). If a government agent tries to take my liberty and I defend myself, they will send more and better armed government agents until they have their way or I am dead.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Jury nullification undermines the legal process and is not a good thing in any way.
Jury nullification is a part of the legal process and does not undermine it in any way. What do you think a jury is for? To determine the facts? HA! There has never been a reason to believe that a random bunch of twelve people can determine facts better than a well trained and experienced judge. The purpose of a jury is to over-ride the states desire to punish someone. That's why a guilty verdict can be overturned on appeal but a verdict of not guilty can't.
Like many aspects of our justice system (such as the requirement for warrants for searches) the jury system is designed to make it harder to obtain convictions. Like anything, it can be abused by those who seek evil rather than justice. This in no way invalidates the proper use of jury nullification.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
This sounds like a good idea to me. We need something to happen to illustrate to everyone just how much our rights and our respect for the Constitution have eroded. Most people have no clue.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I would legalize pot and severely curtail the war on drugs. This massive for-profit prison system is out of hand. Once it became profitable for private companies to keep incarceration up - things have gotten turned upside down.
This link (sorry so long don't feel like html):
http://animalnewyork.com/2012/03/private-prison-company-cca-asks-state-governments-to-keep-prisons-90-full/
gets into what I'm talking about. The massive incarceration rate is resulting in essentially slave labor. Look it up, find out for yourselves how many Govt organizations and companies use prison labor exclusively.
Flappinbooger for President!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
"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."
What is it with you Americans? It's MORE THAN, not 'more THAT'...
"that ANY foreign terrorist"
That? That?
It was a typo. Next time, try checking out my posting history and see if it's unusual for me to do that before complaining.
Now really if that's your sole contribution, it is unworthy and a waste of our time.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
are the lawyers, and no one else.
>by asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial
Well, does the supposed criminal represent himself or have a lawyer who tells him what his options are and let it be known that if he takes a plea bargain, not only does it make it easier on him, but on the lawyer too.
Replace all the lawyers that want you to take the easy road out with someone like minded who wants to fight, then you will see
more of what this story is about. The judges and jury have no real impact here, they are not the reason for someone to be in jail, that person
got caught and has a lawyer telling him, well if you did do it and they have proof, what else can we do, lets see what they will offer.
Even if you have a criminal case and there is no 'possible' jail time you automatically do not qualify for an appointed attorney regardless of income. Now where is the justice in this with the social stigma about to unveil with a record?
http://www.mafiasecurity.com maf
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.
We do not want to crash the government, we just want to reclaim our rights. America has more prisoners (not per capita, simply "more") than any other country, and historically the only countries to maintain larger prison populations were Nazi Germany and the USSR. We make more and more things criminal in this country, to the point where the government itself has lost track of how many laws are on the books. We imprison people for having feral hemp growing on their land. We even convicted someone of importing illegal comic books (which contained nothing but cartoons).
The Nazis and the Soviets were able to arrest mass numbers of people because they did not have a drawn out procedure for establishing guilt. The police would simply show up and arrest people. Now in the USA, we are coercing people to forgo their right to a trial, to just plead guilty to a "lesser" crime and spend some years in prison.
The point here is that we should not be abandoning rights that protect us from tyranny. If the entire government collapsed just because people exercised their rights, then the government needed to be abolished and rebuilt anyway.
Palm trees and 8
Lead by example, or get off the pot.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It kinda makes my point that you're willing to make that comparison, Godwin's law and all.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
OK, so he had plausible deniability because all he really told the kid was that young blond-hared blue-eyed boys like he are prime rape-meat for ethnic prison gangs. The kid got "scared straight to hell.
Seastead this.
Hi:
Good for you! As previous posters have noted: there should be a victim who points a finger before you can be arrested for anything.
Traffic violations, infractions like speeding have no victim; they are excuses to detain and surveil in the name of 'public safety' to procure some higher level of safety (potentiall less injury).
Its more often than not a shakedown in collusion with the insurance industry (points==more$)
If I get a speeding ticket i view the fine as a low-cost front-row ticket to the best theater in town; a cheap opportunity to drag out the process to a point where they just get sick of me.
Delay, stall, resist, fight back. I get to turn the worm and cross examine the citing officer to my hearts content. Payback for being stopped and detained for no good reason with no real victim or actual damage done.
And, if found innocent, I'll call that officer as a witness in any subsequent similar offence.
Too much of the system counts on people too willing to just pay up and not push back.
resist propaganda
Actually, child, I will be retiring next year. At the age of 30. A couple of extremely useful inventions and a series of wise investments will allow me to do so.
You need to learn the difference between "law" and "legislation". Legislation is often confused with law, and as a result, we find our prisons overflowing with those who haven't harmed anyone but themselves, and those who wouldn't have had the incentive to harm anyone without the specter of unlimited government force making them move what should be legal operations into the shadows.
Did I say that the US government is killing people en masse? The truth is that we do have a lot of prisoners, and that only the Soviets and the Nazis had more. It is not possible for a country to have so many prisoners while simultaneously giving each person a jury trial before their incarceration -- court procedures are too expensive, too time consuming, and people would start to notice (and complain) that they are being called to jury duty every other week. That is basically the point of the right to trial; as with the rest of the bill of rights, the 6th amendment is intended as a protection from tyranny.
Really, the issue should not be that I am willing to make the comparison to Nazi Germany and the USSR, but whether or not the comparison is valid. You may not think the comparison is valid, but the actual number of prisoners is a hard and undeniable fact. The only question that needs to be considered is whether or not the US is justified in having so many prisoners, particularly given the fact that only a minority of those prisoners are actually found guilty by a jury. I would say that the fact that we have millions of prisoners and that many of them were not even convicted by a jury is evidence that the system is beyond simply being broken; we are not even bothering with the system at all, despite proudly declaring that we have one.
Palm trees and 8
The US has one of the highest incarcination rates in the country
I think you meant in the world, and you are almost right. The U.S. has THE highest incarceration rate in the world, by far. With 3% of the world's population, the U.S. holds 25% of the world's prisoners.
I pretty much agree (IANAL, though). I have served on 3 juries and it's pretty clear ... open and shut cases rarely go to trial. Generally speaking jury trials only happen when the defense (for whatever reason) is convinced they can win, but the prosecution still thinks they can win (or, due to politics, has to try anyway). That's a pretty small number of cases.
That seems to completely overlook the fact that it was a choice they made to act criminally
The crime is complete fucking unjust. Hello?
So how many innocent people jailed is it worth to ensure that cowards like you live in a "safe" world?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
You can get all romantic about the thought of saving some young guy from jail for drugs possession but would you find it so noble if a Klan member got away with murdering an innocent African American youth by his all white jury? How about an innocent man who clearly didn't commit murder being found guilty because he was gay and the jury thought homosexuals were sinful and he deserved to be punished anyway?
Jury nullification has nothing to do with either of the scenarios you just described. You've just described acquittal by a biased jury, and that happens *already*.
Jury nullification would be those non-impartial juries, rather than returning a not guilty verdict, instead saying "we refuse to convict because we believe murder is not a crime." That's clearly absurd. If their verdict somehow set precedent, they would have just removed "murder" from the lawbooks in ALL cases, not just ones where it's an all-white-jury judging a Klan member.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Jury Nullification still looking noble to you?
Not from your poor understanding and ridiculous strawman presentations of it, no.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
"No jury will convict me."
Yes. Bad guys will say that. And it's sometimes true. And the key word is convict. Conviction has jack shit to do with nullification.
What they DON'T say is, "any jury would nullify any law you bring against me," because it's absurd. You (and many others, including those that modded you insightful) clearly have no understanding of what jury nullification actually means.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Just make the DoJ pay the innocents FULL costs in any jury case that does not result in a guilty conviction. This would A:make them focus on real cases that matter. B:give everyone that is innocent incentive to go to trial.
It's got to be more then $5000 for a federal case. Cases involve much more then the jury trial hours. There is the pretrial, with evidence hearings, etc. this stuff drags on for months or years before you get a jury. Unless you are rich, you are hiring a hourly rate lawyer, and it's going to be $150 an hour at least. including office hours billed. If you are lucky you might get legal aid or a firm to take the case pro bono, but those are super rare. And most legal aid, or student lawyers are just not very good.
it's not just the sentencing guidelines, it's the absurd laws. Every single person is guilty of at least 20-50 different federal laws at any one time. Before you know what happened, they have you stacked up threatening you with 20 to life. The jury trial is not supposed to protect just the innocent, but the guilty, and the guilty that did no harm to society, By making the process open. The DA is a political office, and some DA's once elected, want high conviction rates. How do you do that? By going after the poor that can't defend themselves. A lot of these people might not have been living upstanding uplifting lives. Might of had some gray areas, doesn't mean they did what they were accused of. ".I could get a jury trial for a speeding ticket if I wanted" Maybe you could, but I was refused one. And in some states they are defacto not done anymore. Why don't you lie some more you whitebred elitist?
Who's 'Arian Seid'?
And it's only two because nobody ever bothered with rock'n roll.
At least the federal government bothers with rock music as long as you count the fact that copyright infringement is strict liability, and even an accidental infringer is liable. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton.
...does not suddenly mean that we shouldn't care about what negative effects (if any) legalization...
Well, I'm having a problem with the effect the current legal status of substances and vice have on society right now. You mean legalization will make things worse? Oh my. We'd better clamp down even harder then.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
The fact that the US is even being compared and is comparable to China is telling.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Rich, bored people with personal problems can get prescription opiate drugs (Michael Jackson being an obvious example.) Poor people with similar problems turn to heroin, which they cannot afford without turning to crime. Since heroin is dirt cheap to make, it might just as well be made available cheaply to them. But our duty of social care means we should work with the people who take heroin to try and resolve the problems that lead to it in the first place.
Of course, that's a rational socialist strategy, which is why it can't be adopted by US administrations; there is too much money in the supply of illegal drugs and the operation of prisons. Since the present American system severely harms the competitiveness of the American economy, the rest of the world might think it has little interest in bringing about change there.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Our lecturer on addictive drugs told us that in the UK, until the law changed as a result of pressure from the US, a major component of heroin addicts were medical professionals who took it to dampen the anxiety caused by the responsibility of their jobs. A significant number of physicians and senior nurses were addicts. Because they knew what they were doing and had easy access, nobody noticed. There were also a lot of alcoholic physicians whose performance would have been far more seriously affected - but alcoholism is still seen in many quarters as acceptable.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I believe the numbers I was referencing were rankings. Thus, they were slightly below us in the rankings, as in, only one or two spots lower. I apologize for the confusion (and would also like to reiterate that I was not intending to argue a side with that post).
UK defendant here: I had a drunk neighbour living above me. Every evening he would get pissed and start jumping up and down on the floor then the furniture for about 1 1/2 hours. One day it was my tune to get pissed and I ended the night knocking on his door; very loudly. So loudly it drew blood. And the police came. He never answered the door. But he called the police and I spent the night in the cells. The next day a lawyer told me to admit everything. The police offered me a police caution. I was given to believe (by my lawyer) that I might be looking at a thousand quid fine if found guilty. So I said OK and paid an £80 get out of gaol card. Then the cops told the landlord what I did and they came around and wanted a £1000 for damages to the door. So I was screwed. How could I prove it the the other monkey swinging on the door two or three times a week that did the damage? I wish I had grabbed the ball and jarled! What exactly is a police caution and what happens if you refuse it thank you very much all the same officer?
The terroristic threats by prosecutors should be met with snorts of derision, they prey on the ignorance of the oppressed permanent underclass created by the poorly funded and deliberately crippled educational system and the fear of authority that comes with the wholesale murder and mayhem visited on minority communities by the "tactical" "swat" Jack booted, body armored, full auto occupying army of murderous thugs that riddle the body of a 57 year old woman because they "feared for their lives" as she was holding a six inch serrated steak knife "menacingly" As a reward for murder the uniformed thugs each got a few days off with pay!
Way to Go!
Our "Criminal Justice System" Is run by criminals and affords justice to no one!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Explain that to the innocent (family of) that was "executed" by mistake or by deliberate misconduct!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
was not used as the be all and end all of evil life destroying drugs as it isn't. Heroin addicts can lead long and productive lives as long as they have access to a clean and affordable supply of their drug of choice. A prime example being Dr. William Stewart Halsted, who is known as the "father of modern surgery". He invented most of the basic techniques of modern surgery during a period of forty years when he was a heroin addict.
If you are interested give this a read it's an eye opener for many people.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.