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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.
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
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
... 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.
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".
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.
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 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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Well yes. It's up to the jury. That's the whole point.
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.
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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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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."
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."