12 ms·

One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases

89 points by ALee 8y ago

jMyles 8y ago
There's no question that the "justice" system is just completely broken. The only reason we even comply with it at all is not a sense that it is creating peace and order in society, but simply that the people who administer it are hellishly violent to people who try not to comply (or, in some cases, even people who are just merely critical, as evinced by, for example, retaliatory actions taking by police departments in response to facebook posts). Nevertheless, articles like this are good for putting things into focus. The graphic showing the assessment that "Mr. Talaska needed to do the work of five full-time lawyers to serve all of his clients" is convincing and powerful. But at the end of the day, the question is this: what are we going to do in order to replace this system? Can we effectively build an alternate system (perhaps based on restorative justice) in parallel, and then hope for a clean drop-in replacement? Is there precedent for such a thing in history? A runaway justice system seems like such a difficult thing to fix, but I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that it's a top priority for the health and direction of the United States, if they are to survive at all.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Not practical for many reasons, but: Ban plea bargains and automatically exonerate anyone that sits more than 30 days awaiting trial. The system would probably adjust to fit crimes worth going after. Maybe there's some less drastic version of this that forces the state hand.
  - gleenn 8y ago
    Can you expand on why plea bargains are bad?
    - ttul 8y ago
      Because the accused thinks he doesn’t have a chance at trial with an overworked public defender, he takes the plea and is - for all intents and purposes - denied due process. If plea bargains were harder to execute, then DAs would be forced to be more choosey about the cases they decide to prosecute, knowing that flimsy cases would clog the system and cause many cases to be stayed due to the unreasonable passage of time...
      - bdcravens 8y ago
        I've had the misfortune of knowing people who rejected the plea bargain. It's always a gamble of being found not guilty, because in the punishment phase, it's always 3x or more of the previous offer.
        tyingq 8y ago
        Maybe that is something interesting to look at? Cap the punishment to some lower multiple of any plea bargain offered?
        gpm 8y ago
        A reasonable multiplier here would be 1. Anything more is coercion to give up your rights. The issue with this is of course that if people exercise their rights, the courts would be swamped.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Even if I knew I was guilty and that the state had all the evidence to prove it, why would I ever take a plea deal that was no better than the worst-case trial outcome? DA could make a mistake; I might come up with a particularly recalcitrant jury; I might end up with an appealable matter.
        gpm 8y ago
        You wouldn't. That's fine. That's your right. The state has no right to punish you for exercising it. Except, practically today they do punish, and practically the system would grind to a halt otherwise.
    - edoo 8y ago
      They've built an incentive system to prevent people from actually defending themselves in a court of law. Only 3% of federal cases go to trial. Imagine having the option of 2 years in a minimum security or possibly face 10 years in a higher security prison. If you have a family, even if innocent, you take the 2 years.
    - xfitm3 8y ago
      "Guilty pleas have replaced trials for a very simple reason: individuals who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial face exponentially higher sentences if they invoke the right to trial and lose. Faced with this choice, individuals almost uniformly surrender the right to trial rather than insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, defense lawyers spend most of their time negotiating guilty pleas rather than ensuring that police and the government respect the boundaries of the law including the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, and judges dedicate their time to administering plea allocutions rather than evaluating the constitutional and legal aspects of the government’s case and police conduct. Equally important, the public rarely exercises the oversight function envisioned by the Framers and inherent in jury service." https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-innocent-people-pleading-guilty-a-new-report-says-yes/#717d12ff5193 https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-inno... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-bargaining-courts-prosecutors/524112/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...
      - jdietrich 8y ago
        To give a tangible example, Aaron Swartz was offered a plea bargain for six months in federal prison, on charges that carry a maximum sentence of 35 years imprisonment. In simple game theoretic terms, it's usually optimal to take the plea bargain even if you're innocent, you've got good representation and your case is strong. A certainty of a short sentence is preferable to the possibility of your life being ruined.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      Not easy to sum up here. Search a bit, and you'll find very little in defense of them outside of "courts are too busy without them". You find many reasons they aren't good, however. Essentially, a plea bargain has less protection around it. Police can legally lie to you about evidence, witnesses, etc. Then throw you in a room with a prosecutor where you weigh risk of a trail vs what's offered, probably with only an overworked public defender to help advise you. I believe in other countries (UK?) the police aren't allowed to lie to you about evidence, potential consequences, etc.
    - alistairSH 8y ago
      There is an incentive for the prosecutor to charge the defendant with as many crimes as possible, possibly felonies when misdemeanors are more appropriate. Let the defendant plead down to those misdemeanors, get a win, but at the same time deprive a scared defendant out of his right to a proper trial. Mandatory minimum sentencing makes this even worse for the defendant. Throw the dice with a potential three years behind bars on a felony, or take the deal and walk out after a few weeks but with a permanent record.
      - thomasz 8y ago
        Piling on charges over charges for the same deed is something that doesn't happen outside the US, AFAIK. If you kill somebody and steal a car to drive his body into the desert to bury it, you won't get charged for theft, "Withholding Evidence", "Obstruction Of Justice" and what not, not even for trying to break out of jail later. You will be charged for the murder.
        tyingq 8y ago
        I think the US does more of it, but it does happen elsewhere. Here's one in Denmark: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/peter-madsen-sentenced-life-murdering-kim-wall-submarine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/peter-madsen-s... Murder, sexual assault, desecrating a corpse. That was a particularly gruesome case though. The US does tend to do a lot of upgrading charges from misdemeanor to felony, or felony b to felony a, etc. Often based on unrelated prior convictions.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Why not? You have literally committed those additional crimes, and maybe the state can't get you on the murder, but they can get you on the disposing the body, stealing the car, or whatever else. I don't think it should be the case that if acquitted of the worst of the crimes, you walk on all of them. I do think that the sentencing should default to concurrent for tightly related crimes, of course.
        alistairSH 8y ago
    - mikeash 8y ago
      A plea bargain is essentially a punishment for insisting on your right to a trial. There’s nothing wrong with allowing people to plead guilty, but the part where you offer the accused a lighter sentence for doing to (equivalently, threaten a heavier sentence for wanting a trial) is awful.
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    > The system would probably adjust to fit crimes worth going after. Or reinterpret what a "speedy trial" is (as would juries)
    - iguy 8y ago
      If I understand right, this was roughly the system 50-60 years ago. From memory, the average murder trial took under 2 weeks, and very few went to appeal. We've replaced that with a system which in some ways has much higher standards. There appear to be decades worth of appeals possible on death row, involving all kinds of experts. But the flip side of this is that most trials don't happen, thanks to plea bargains.
    - phissk 8y ago
      Keep educating anyone who might ever serve on a jury about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification and make then feel ok about using it aggressively. If people used this every time it looked like the 'justice' system was extorting defendants the practice would stop pretty fast.
  - wtvanhest 8y ago
    A less aggressive step could be that the max penalty could only be 10% more than the best plea bargin offer. That would still allow for pleas, but would remove the ridiculous asymmetry that currently exists. We could leave in the 30 day rule though which would significantly improve the system.
  - jaredklewis 8y ago
    Great ideas. “An affluent society ought not be miserly in support of justice, for economy is not an objective of the system.” Everyone will say it is not practical because of cost, but I’m quite sure if we spent half the money we do on guns and missiles (and maybe paid back some loans so we didn’t spend so much on interest) there would be enough money.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    You might get a SF tenderloin situation, where when random homeless people attack you unprovoked and the police do shit all, same with brazen, obvious property theft and shitting on the street. The populace will get pissed off and demand something to be done when every day crime like that is not dealt with. Yes there is a mental health aspect with some of it, and they need proper mental hospitals with permanent or temporary care for those people who need it, but statistics show there will always be that %1 antisocial portion of the populace that will do that crap if no enforcement exists for them.
  - analog31 8y ago
    Perhaps a less drastic version is that the police have to register all of the evidence at their disposal, for review by the court, before any pleading can occur. This prevents the police from using plea bargaining to hide a lack of evidence.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      Ideally, in a common law system, they're supposed to provide all of their evidence in order to secure the arrest warrant in the first place. What a cluster.
      - tyingq 8y ago
        In the US the police can legally lie to you about evidence, potential punishment, charges, etc.
- bellerose 8y ago
  > The only reason we even comply with it at all is not a sense that it is creating peace and order in society, but simply that the people who administer it are hellishly violent to people who try not to comply (or, in some cases, even people who are just merely critical, as evinced by, for example, retaliatory actions taking by police departments in response to facebook posts). There's another reason you missed, for why people comply with the "justice" system and may not necessarily think the system needs overall. The belief: It will never happen to me, I'm a good citizen and people who put themselves in situations are the ones punished. Basically, persons who put too much faith in self determination for life outcomes and failing to understand a lot is outside our control.
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  For meaningful change to happen, it must come from a cultural shift in society. A better system cannot be designed from the top down. A good place to start is to shift the very conception of "justice" from "make the bad guy pay" to "make the victim whole." (This is your restorative justice, I believe.) If a larger and larger proportion of society sees justice in a different light, then things will change. Juries will no longer hand down indictments or convictions for whole classes of victimless crimes. More focus will be placed on arrangements between criminal and victim that are agreeable to both parties, rather than a heavy-handed sentence from the state to "send a message."
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    What is the restorative justice solution for murder, rape, or battery causing permanent physical harm? I agree our justice system is somewhat out of hand, but I also believe that there is a (tiny) sliver of the human population who need to be removed from walking the streets freely.
    - Youden 8y ago
      Where the victim can't be made whole due to irreversible harm, salvage what remains of the situation and rehabilitate the offender. That may require imprisonment but the imprisonment should be focused on rehabilitating the imprisoned so that they can be quickly released and become productive members of society. If an offender can't or won't be rehabilitated, only then should they be left to rot. They should at least be kept in humane conditions however.
    - jwagenet 8y ago
      Check out the podcast “Ear Hustle” for a window into the world of criminals who have been able to walk back the behaviors that caused their crimes. There are certainly individuals who never look inward and take responsibility for their actions, but many figure things out after 5-10 years and have no opportunity to repent for another 25.
  - deogeo 8y ago
    > A good place to start is to shift the very conception of "justice" from "make the bad guy pay" to "make the victim whole." I'm a full supporter of the eye-for-an-eye school of justice as retribution, and I still find the US system far too severe and unfair (other countries' too, but less so). I think people just have the wrong idea about how the system works (or doesn't), how terrifying it must be to be tried for a felony even if you're innocent. And for most felonies, with the exception of rape and (attempted) murder, even eye-for-an-eye would prescribe a far lower sentence. What's needed isn't for the conception of justice to change, but for people to realize how broken the current system is.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
  The system's not fair and is favored to those with the most money. Government has unlimited money.
  - mythrwy 8y ago
    They really don't though. Thus one defendant for so many cases.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      The government, of course, is the persecution in these cases. The defending lawyer is the bone they throw their victims. But the judges keep convicting, keep the system going, despite the large scale violations of the constitutional rights of so many.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Legally, the government is the prosecution, though some would argue that persecution is additionally correct, though with a different meaning.
donmcronald 8y ago
That's the worst (mobile) site layout I've seen in a long time.
tyingq 8y ago
As a US citizen, it's honestly embarrassing. The high volume also means prosecutors get to use plea deals as extortion, even when they have no chance of actually prosecuting. Then there's also the awful state of our bail/jail/prison system. It seems like the demographics are changing enough that we could actually start changing our punishment (vs rehabilitation) centric justice system. We're now close to 1% of the adult population in prison, and 2% on probation. I wonder what the percentage of "was ever in prison, or had an immediate family member in prison" is.
- perfmode 8y ago
  I'm super interested to know the "has had a parent in prison while under the age of 18". That would certainly bring to light the broader impact of imprisonment.
  - Someone 8y ago
    https://everysecond.fwd.us/downloads/EverySecond.fwd.us.pdf https://everysecond.fwd.us/downloads/EverySecond.fwd.us.pdf (for those who dislike PDF, the report also is on https://everysecond.fwd.us https://everysecond.fwd.us, but I find it unnavigable): ”adults age 18 to 29 reported having had a parent incarcerated at more than twice the rate of respondents from other age groups (34 percent compared to 14 percent)” That doesn’t quite answer your question, but it seems likely to be closer to that 34% than to that 14%, unless older people somehow forgot that their parent went to jail in their youth (the numbers are from “online and phone surveys”), or the younger respondents exaggerated.
- Latteland 8y ago
  It's worse than embarrassing, it's disgusting, it's shameful, it's kind of indicative of the breakdown of our societal norms - see politics for another area. A lot of those people were minorities, all of them must have been poor. We don't have equal rights for people who can't afford a lawyer. If you are a juror in a case, you have to consider if this is the situation. It never really hit me that I could be one of the people who could be faced with a situation like this - could I detect that non-existent defense lawyer, could I be strong enough of character to discuss that with the other jurors. I'm sure that for our entire history this has been something faced by poor and minority defendants, but I think it must be worse than in the past because of the plea bargain hunting by prosecutors and the increasing prosecution and filling of prisons. We have maybe 3 levels of criminal justice in America. The larger group of people who can't afford a lawyer and have an overburdened public defender, regular people who can afford a lawyer, and then rich people who can afford endless money to challenge even reasonable evidence - think any celebrity accused of a crime. Prosecutors try to plea bargain cases, and poor people probably are told by their overburdened public defender to go along with it. If a lot of those people didn't plea bargain but went to a real trial, then the public defender wouldn't even be able to go to that many trials. One of the presidential candidates this year was a prosecutor (Sen. Kamala Harris), and she was one of those who in some cases at least didn't seem to intervene in cases where there was proprietorial malfeasance.
burtonator 8y ago
Someone needs to make the argument that if the defense attorney does not have the same budget per case as the prosecutor that it's essentially like not having an attorney. The government wants it both ways. Corporations are people and money = speech. However, if you're poor, and have no money to defend yourself, it doesn't matter because the government essentially gives you a few dollars. They're giving you a FRACTION of a lawyer. I don't want a court appointed attorney. If I can't afford a lawyer the courts should give me a budget to hire my own lawyer.
- Latteland 8y ago
  I agree that when there is no time to do anything for the case, that this should be a strong aspect of a challenge to a conviction. I don't know about the same budget though, what about OJ Simpson's huge defense team vs the state. Those people basically have no defense, and I think if there is no budget for adequate defense, then you cannot prosecute them. I need to find out how my own large city fares in this scenario of public defender time.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    True.. the reverse is true too. If a defendant wants to spend more than the state the defendant should be required to make the difference vs they are spending.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      Then the state has the incentive to fund the prosecutor's office to 0% because they can make defendants pay for it as soon as they want to defend themselves at all, and prosecutors get the incentive to create massive administrative burdens because every dollar a defendant spends dealing with their obstructionism is another dollar they get from the defendant. You also screw over the poor because now their defense costs are doubled (on top of the obstructionism) when they couldn't afford them to begin with. And if a defendant spends $50,000 to successfully prove that it was someone else, now they have to pay $50,000 to the prosecutor's office for falsely accusing them. Unless the prosecutor only gets the money if they win, in which case we get a whole new set of problematic incentives on the other side (make up evidence to win major cases or your office goes bankrupt), and we're back to the original problem where the rich get away with everything by outspending the government and then don't have to pay because they got away with it.
KEyHcRQXDu2wGI 8y ago
Land of the free
nyolfen 8y ago
louisiana might be the worst place in the country to encounter the justice system. fun fact: it’s prohibited to seek damages if you’re exonerated after you’ve been imprisoned by them
mrleiter 8y ago
As a law student (in a civil law jurisdiction) aspiring to become a criminal attorney, this is sickening. It's a machine that is crushing individuals who stand almost no chance. It's wrong in so many places, I don't even know where to begin with. Whether it's the well known plea deal business that renders courts and trial by jury useless plea by plea; or the money public defenders earn; or the way prisons work in the US (by focusing on punishment and locking up, rather than resocialising) and so on and so forth. Everybody deserves a fair trial. I think in the US it's even in the Bill of Rights or its amendments. You maybe fucked up in live at one point and very often it's due to circumstances that are out of your hands. But you still are a human and you still deserve to be treated with respect.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
devoply 8y ago
Never ever be caught up in the criminal justice system without your own lawyer that you have paid for, period. In fact they should sell some cheap insurance for this purpose.
- minkzilla 8y ago
  Great advice for people who are rich. Meaningless a large chunk of the population.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  Prepaid legal is apparently an industry.
edoo 8y ago
In some places if they run out of public defenders they hire a private attorney to act as one and they get paid a straight fee per case, no matter if the defendant pleads guilty on day one or it takes years. There is no better way to incentivize a public defender to push for a plea bargain.
bookofjoe 8y ago
"A Naked Singularity," Sergio De La Pava's debut novel — a fictionalized account of his life as a public defender in Manhattan (self-published in 2008) that went on to win the PEN Prize for Debut Fiction in 2013 after being commercially re-published in 2012 — is superb. From Wikipedia: "He works as a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time." See: http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-naked-singularity-by-sergio-de-la-pava http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-naked-singularity-by-serg...
williesleg 8y ago
Well fuck, we absolutely don't need any new lawyers. They suck donkey balls. And got us into this mess to begin with. Leeches on society.
mmmBacon 8y ago
My god, I feel for these people. When you read stuff like this, you have to wonder why anyone is a public defender and grateful that people sign up. It seems soul crushing even for the most idealistic of people. The caseload results in situations beyond your control that can punish you. I also have to wonder if one of the reasons why we have so many people in jail is because we have hugely overworked public defenders.
- phissk 8y ago
  Keep educating anyone who might ever serve on a jury about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification and make then feel ok about using it aggressively.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

89 points by ALee 8y ago

There's no question that the "justice" system is just completely broken. The only reason we even comply with it at all is not a sense that it is creating peace and order in society, but simply that the people who administer it are hellishly violent to people who try not to comply (or, in some cases, even people who are just merely critical, as evinced by, for example, retaliatory actions taking by police departments in response to facebook posts). Nevertheless, articles like this are good for putting things into focus. The graphic showing the assessment that "Mr. Talaska needed to do the work of five full-time lawyers to serve all of his clients" is convincing and powerful. But at the end of the day, the question is this: what are we going to do in order to replace this system? Can we effectively build an alternate system (perhaps based on restorative justice) in parallel, and then hope for a clean drop-in replacement? Is there precedent for such a thing in history? A runaway justice system seems like such a difficult thing to fix, but I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that it's a top priority for the health and direction of the United States, if they are to survive at all.

tyingq 8y ago
Not practical for many reasons, but: Ban plea bargains and automatically exonerate anyone that sits more than 30 days awaiting trial. The system would probably adjust to fit crimes worth going after. Maybe there's some less drastic version of this that forces the state hand.
- gleenn 8y ago
  Can you expand on why plea bargains are bad?
  - ttul 8y ago
    Because the accused thinks he doesn’t have a chance at trial with an overworked public defender, he takes the plea and is - for all intents and purposes - denied due process. If plea bargains were harder to execute, then DAs would be forced to be more choosey about the cases they decide to prosecute, knowing that flimsy cases would clog the system and cause many cases to be stayed due to the unreasonable passage of time...
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      I've had the misfortune of knowing people who rejected the plea bargain. It's always a gamble of being found not guilty, because in the punishment phase, it's always 3x or more of the previous offer.
      - tyingq 8y ago
        Maybe that is something interesting to look at? Cap the punishment to some lower multiple of any plea bargain offered?
        gpm 8y ago
        A reasonable multiplier here would be 1. Anything more is coercion to give up your rights. The issue with this is of course that if people exercise their rights, the courts would be swamped.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Even if I knew I was guilty and that the state had all the evidence to prove it, why would I ever take a plea deal that was no better than the worst-case trial outcome? DA could make a mistake; I might come up with a particularly recalcitrant jury; I might end up with an appealable matter.
        gpm 8y ago
        You wouldn't. That's fine. That's your right. The state has no right to punish you for exercising it. Except, practically today they do punish, and practically the system would grind to a halt otherwise.
  - edoo 8y ago
    They've built an incentive system to prevent people from actually defending themselves in a court of law. Only 3% of federal cases go to trial. Imagine having the option of 2 years in a minimum security or possibly face 10 years in a higher security prison. If you have a family, even if innocent, you take the 2 years.
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    "Guilty pleas have replaced trials for a very simple reason: individuals who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial face exponentially higher sentences if they invoke the right to trial and lose. Faced with this choice, individuals almost uniformly surrender the right to trial rather than insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, defense lawyers spend most of their time negotiating guilty pleas rather than ensuring that police and the government respect the boundaries of the law including the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, and judges dedicate their time to administering plea allocutions rather than evaluating the constitutional and legal aspects of the government’s case and police conduct. Equally important, the public rarely exercises the oversight function envisioned by the Framers and inherent in jury service." https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-innocent-people-pleading-guilty-a-new-report-says-yes/#717d12ff5193 https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-inno... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-bargaining-courts-prosecutors/524112/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      To give a tangible example, Aaron Swartz was offered a plea bargain for six months in federal prison, on charges that carry a maximum sentence of 35 years imprisonment. In simple game theoretic terms, it's usually optimal to take the plea bargain even if you're innocent, you've got good representation and your case is strong. A certainty of a short sentence is preferable to the possibility of your life being ruined.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Not easy to sum up here. Search a bit, and you'll find very little in defense of them outside of "courts are too busy without them". You find many reasons they aren't good, however. Essentially, a plea bargain has less protection around it. Police can legally lie to you about evidence, witnesses, etc. Then throw you in a room with a prosecutor where you weigh risk of a trail vs what's offered, probably with only an overworked public defender to help advise you. I believe in other countries (UK?) the police aren't allowed to lie to you about evidence, potential consequences, etc.
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    There is an incentive for the prosecutor to charge the defendant with as many crimes as possible, possibly felonies when misdemeanors are more appropriate. Let the defendant plead down to those misdemeanors, get a win, but at the same time deprive a scared defendant out of his right to a proper trial. Mandatory minimum sentencing makes this even worse for the defendant. Throw the dice with a potential three years behind bars on a felony, or take the deal and walk out after a few weeks but with a permanent record.
    - thomasz 8y ago
      Piling on charges over charges for the same deed is something that doesn't happen outside the US, AFAIK. If you kill somebody and steal a car to drive his body into the desert to bury it, you won't get charged for theft, "Withholding Evidence", "Obstruction Of Justice" and what not, not even for trying to break out of jail later. You will be charged for the murder.
      - tyingq 8y ago
        I think the US does more of it, but it does happen elsewhere. Here's one in Denmark: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/peter-madsen-sentenced-life-murdering-kim-wall-submarine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/peter-madsen-s... Murder, sexual assault, desecrating a corpse. That was a particularly gruesome case though. The US does tend to do a lot of upgrading charges from misdemeanor to felony, or felony b to felony a, etc. Often based on unrelated prior convictions.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Why not? You have literally committed those additional crimes, and maybe the state can't get you on the murder, but they can get you on the disposing the body, stealing the car, or whatever else. I don't think it should be the case that if acquitted of the worst of the crimes, you walk on all of them. I do think that the sentencing should default to concurrent for tightly related crimes, of course.
        alistairSH 8y ago
  - mikeash 8y ago
    A plea bargain is essentially a punishment for insisting on your right to a trial. There’s nothing wrong with allowing people to plead guilty, but the part where you offer the accused a lighter sentence for doing to (equivalently, threaten a heavier sentence for wanting a trial) is awful.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  > The system would probably adjust to fit crimes worth going after. Or reinterpret what a "speedy trial" is (as would juries)
  - iguy 8y ago
    If I understand right, this was roughly the system 50-60 years ago. From memory, the average murder trial took under 2 weeks, and very few went to appeal. We've replaced that with a system which in some ways has much higher standards. There appear to be decades worth of appeals possible on death row, involving all kinds of experts. But the flip side of this is that most trials don't happen, thanks to plea bargains.
  - phissk 8y ago
    Keep educating anyone who might ever serve on a jury about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification and make then feel ok about using it aggressively. If people used this every time it looked like the 'justice' system was extorting defendants the practice would stop pretty fast.
- wtvanhest 8y ago
  A less aggressive step could be that the max penalty could only be 10% more than the best plea bargin offer. That would still allow for pleas, but would remove the ridiculous asymmetry that currently exists. We could leave in the 30 day rule though which would significantly improve the system.
- jaredklewis 8y ago
  Great ideas. “An affluent society ought not be miserly in support of justice, for economy is not an objective of the system.” Everyone will say it is not practical because of cost, but I’m quite sure if we spent half the money we do on guns and missiles (and maybe paid back some loans so we didn’t spend so much on interest) there would be enough money.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- woolvalley 8y ago
  You might get a SF tenderloin situation, where when random homeless people attack you unprovoked and the police do shit all, same with brazen, obvious property theft and shitting on the street. The populace will get pissed off and demand something to be done when every day crime like that is not dealt with. Yes there is a mental health aspect with some of it, and they need proper mental hospitals with permanent or temporary care for those people who need it, but statistics show there will always be that %1 antisocial portion of the populace that will do that crap if no enforcement exists for them.
- analog31 8y ago
  Perhaps a less drastic version is that the police have to register all of the evidence at their disposal, for review by the court, before any pleading can occur. This prevents the police from using plea bargaining to hide a lack of evidence.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    Ideally, in a common law system, they're supposed to provide all of their evidence in order to secure the arrest warrant in the first place. What a cluster.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      In the US the police can legally lie to you about evidence, potential punishment, charges, etc.
bellerose 8y ago
> The only reason we even comply with it at all is not a sense that it is creating peace and order in society, but simply that the people who administer it are hellishly violent to people who try not to comply (or, in some cases, even people who are just merely critical, as evinced by, for example, retaliatory actions taking by police departments in response to facebook posts). There's another reason you missed, for why people comply with the "justice" system and may not necessarily think the system needs overall. The belief: It will never happen to me, I'm a good citizen and people who put themselves in situations are the ones punished. Basically, persons who put too much faith in self determination for life outcomes and failing to understand a lot is outside our control.
clarkmoody 8y ago
For meaningful change to happen, it must come from a cultural shift in society. A better system cannot be designed from the top down. A good place to start is to shift the very conception of "justice" from "make the bad guy pay" to "make the victim whole." (This is your restorative justice, I believe.) If a larger and larger proportion of society sees justice in a different light, then things will change. Juries will no longer hand down indictments or convictions for whole classes of victimless crimes. More focus will be placed on arrangements between criminal and victim that are agreeable to both parties, rather than a heavy-handed sentence from the state to "send a message."
- sokoloff 8y ago
  What is the restorative justice solution for murder, rape, or battery causing permanent physical harm? I agree our justice system is somewhat out of hand, but I also believe that there is a (tiny) sliver of the human population who need to be removed from walking the streets freely.
  - Youden 8y ago
    Where the victim can't be made whole due to irreversible harm, salvage what remains of the situation and rehabilitate the offender. That may require imprisonment but the imprisonment should be focused on rehabilitating the imprisoned so that they can be quickly released and become productive members of society. If an offender can't or won't be rehabilitated, only then should they be left to rot. They should at least be kept in humane conditions however.
  - jwagenet 8y ago
    Check out the podcast “Ear Hustle” for a window into the world of criminals who have been able to walk back the behaviors that caused their crimes. There are certainly individuals who never look inward and take responsibility for their actions, but many figure things out after 5-10 years and have no opportunity to repent for another 25.
- deogeo 8y ago
  > A good place to start is to shift the very conception of "justice" from "make the bad guy pay" to "make the victim whole." I'm a full supporter of the eye-for-an-eye school of justice as retribution, and I still find the US system far too severe and unfair (other countries' too, but less so). I think people just have the wrong idea about how the system works (or doesn't), how terrifying it must be to be tried for a felony even if you're innocent. And for most felonies, with the exception of rape and (attempted) murder, even eye-for-an-eye would prescribe a far lower sentence. What's needed isn't for the conception of justice to change, but for people to realize how broken the current system is.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
The system's not fair and is favored to those with the most money. Government has unlimited money.
- mythrwy 8y ago
  They really don't though. Thus one defendant for so many cases.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    The government, of course, is the persecution in these cases. The defending lawyer is the bone they throw their victims. But the judges keep convicting, keep the system going, despite the large scale violations of the constitutional rights of so many.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      Legally, the government is the prosecution, though some would argue that persecution is additionally correct, though with a different meaning.

donmcronald 8y ago

That's the worst (mobile) site layout I've seen in a long time.

tyingq 8y ago

As a US citizen, it's honestly embarrassing. The high volume also means prosecutors get to use plea deals as extortion, even when they have no chance of actually prosecuting. Then there's also the awful state of our bail/jail/prison system. It seems like the demographics are changing enough that we could actually start changing our punishment (vs rehabilitation) centric justice system. We're now close to 1% of the adult population in prison, and 2% on probation. I wonder what the percentage of "was ever in prison, or had an immediate family member in prison" is.

perfmode 8y ago
I'm super interested to know the "has had a parent in prison while under the age of 18". That would certainly bring to light the broader impact of imprisonment.
- Someone 8y ago
  https://everysecond.fwd.us/downloads/EverySecond.fwd.us.pdf https://everysecond.fwd.us/downloads/EverySecond.fwd.us.pdf (for those who dislike PDF, the report also is on https://everysecond.fwd.us https://everysecond.fwd.us, but I find it unnavigable): ”adults age 18 to 29 reported having had a parent incarcerated at more than twice the rate of respondents from other age groups (34 percent compared to 14 percent)” That doesn’t quite answer your question, but it seems likely to be closer to that 34% than to that 14%, unless older people somehow forgot that their parent went to jail in their youth (the numbers are from “online and phone surveys”), or the younger respondents exaggerated.
Latteland 8y ago
It's worse than embarrassing, it's disgusting, it's shameful, it's kind of indicative of the breakdown of our societal norms - see politics for another area. A lot of those people were minorities, all of them must have been poor. We don't have equal rights for people who can't afford a lawyer. If you are a juror in a case, you have to consider if this is the situation. It never really hit me that I could be one of the people who could be faced with a situation like this - could I detect that non-existent defense lawyer, could I be strong enough of character to discuss that with the other jurors. I'm sure that for our entire history this has been something faced by poor and minority defendants, but I think it must be worse than in the past because of the plea bargain hunting by prosecutors and the increasing prosecution and filling of prisons. We have maybe 3 levels of criminal justice in America. The larger group of people who can't afford a lawyer and have an overburdened public defender, regular people who can afford a lawyer, and then rich people who can afford endless money to challenge even reasonable evidence - think any celebrity accused of a crime. Prosecutors try to plea bargain cases, and poor people probably are told by their overburdened public defender to go along with it. If a lot of those people didn't plea bargain but went to a real trial, then the public defender wouldn't even be able to go to that many trials. One of the presidential candidates this year was a prosecutor (Sen. Kamala Harris), and she was one of those who in some cases at least didn't seem to intervene in cases where there was proprietorial malfeasance.

burtonator 8y ago

Someone needs to make the argument that if the defense attorney does not have the same budget per case as the prosecutor that it's essentially like not having an attorney. The government wants it both ways. Corporations are people and money = speech. However, if you're poor, and have no money to defend yourself, it doesn't matter because the government essentially gives you a few dollars. They're giving you a FRACTION of a lawyer. I don't want a court appointed attorney. If I can't afford a lawyer the courts should give me a budget to hire my own lawyer.

Latteland 8y ago
I agree that when there is no time to do anything for the case, that this should be a strong aspect of a challenge to a conviction. I don't know about the same budget though, what about OJ Simpson's huge defense team vs the state. Those people basically have no defense, and I think if there is no budget for adequate defense, then you cannot prosecute them. I need to find out how my own large city fares in this scenario of public defender time.
- burtonator 8y ago
  True.. the reverse is true too. If a defendant wants to spend more than the state the defendant should be required to make the difference vs they are spending.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Then the state has the incentive to fund the prosecutor's office to 0% because they can make defendants pay for it as soon as they want to defend themselves at all, and prosecutors get the incentive to create massive administrative burdens because every dollar a defendant spends dealing with their obstructionism is another dollar they get from the defendant. You also screw over the poor because now their defense costs are doubled (on top of the obstructionism) when they couldn't afford them to begin with. And if a defendant spends $50,000 to successfully prove that it was someone else, now they have to pay $50,000 to the prosecutor's office for falsely accusing them. Unless the prosecutor only gets the money if they win, in which case we get a whole new set of problematic incentives on the other side (make up evidence to win major cases or your office goes bankrupt), and we're back to the original problem where the rich get away with everything by outspending the government and then don't have to pay because they got away with it.

KEyHcRQXDu2wGI 8y ago

Land of the free

nyolfen 8y ago

louisiana might be the worst place in the country to encounter the justice system. fun fact: it’s prohibited to seek damages if you’re exonerated after you’ve been imprisoned by them

mrleiter 8y ago

As a law student (in a civil law jurisdiction) aspiring to become a criminal attorney, this is sickening. It's a machine that is crushing individuals who stand almost no chance. It's wrong in so many places, I don't even know where to begin with. Whether it's the well known plea deal business that renders courts and trial by jury useless plea by plea; or the money public defenders earn; or the way prisons work in the US (by focusing on punishment and locking up, rather than resocialising) and so on and so forth. Everybody deserves a fair trial. I think in the US it's even in the Bill of Rights or its amendments. You maybe fucked up in live at one point and very often it's due to circumstances that are out of your hands. But you still are a human and you still deserve to be treated with respect.

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devoply 8y ago

Never ever be caught up in the criminal justice system without your own lawyer that you have paid for, period. In fact they should sell some cheap insurance for this purpose.

minkzilla 8y ago
Great advice for people who are rich. Meaningless a large chunk of the population.
selimthegrim 8y ago
Prepaid legal is apparently an industry.

edoo 8y ago

In some places if they run out of public defenders they hire a private attorney to act as one and they get paid a straight fee per case, no matter if the defendant pleads guilty on day one or it takes years. There is no better way to incentivize a public defender to push for a plea bargain.

bookofjoe 8y ago

"A Naked Singularity," Sergio De La Pava's debut novel — a fictionalized account of his life as a public defender in Manhattan (self-published in 2008) that went on to win the PEN Prize for Debut Fiction in 2013 after being commercially re-published in 2012 — is superb. From Wikipedia: "He works as a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time." See: http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-naked-singularity-by-sergio-de-la-pava http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-naked-singularity-by-serg...

williesleg 8y ago

Well fuck, we absolutely don't need any new lawyers. They suck donkey balls. And got us into this mess to begin with. Leeches on society.

mmmBacon 8y ago

My god, I feel for these people. When you read stuff like this, you have to wonder why anyone is a public defender and grateful that people sign up. It seems soul crushing even for the most idealistic of people. The caseload results in situations beyond your control that can punish you. I also have to wonder if one of the reasons why we have so many people in jail is because we have hugely overworked public defenders.

phissk 8y ago
Keep educating anyone who might ever serve on a jury about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification and make then feel ok about using it aggressively.

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