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Answer: the law sucks. Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. (this should be a much loved amendm

• tharne 6y ago
  > Proposed fix: put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. That's a good idea, but much harder to implement than it sounds. Being a small time drug dealer may be a victimless crime to many people, but it certainly isn't to parents who've had a teenager who's OD'd. And then there are crimes like insurance fraud, that don't hurt any one individual, but do make the cost of living higher for everyone else who's premiums go up as a result. TLDR; it's very hard to determine which crimes are and are not "victimless".
  • tyleo 6y ago
    Idk, maybe I’m not understanding something but I feel like both of those examples are crimes with victims. I’d err on the side of avoiding false positives and say that only actions impacting yourself receive the protections of an amendment. Ex: * not wearing a seatbelt * consuming drugs
    • anovikov 6y ago
      Well, in a country with socialised medicine, which the U.S. is going to become under Biden as it seems, not wearing a seatbelt or consuming drugs will not be victimless anymore.
      • InitialLastName 6y ago
        Given that we don't let hospitals or paramedics check if people can pay before they provide emergency care, this is already the case.
    • rticesterp 6y ago
      70K overdose deaths per year is certainly not victimless: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html Families lose sole providers and parents have to bury their own children.
      • banannaise 6y ago
        This is a public health problem, not a crime problem. The fact that the United States treats it as a crime problem is a big part of why it's gotten so bad.
        • tharne 6y ago
          It's not as if it has to one or the other, it can be both. The fact is, there is both a public health component as well as a moral component associated with the drug trade.
      • tyleo 6y ago
        Who is charged with these crimes right now? You point to CDC data of overdoses but is there matching data about people being charged with crimes here? If not I don’t understand how the proposed amendment could make this situation any worse than it is now, while it may help many other situations.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        95k deaths a year are due to alcohol, many more premature deaths because of obecity, smoking and other vices. So lets be consistent
        • josephcsible 6y ago
          You can't just look at absolute deaths. You need to compare the chance that a hard drug user dies of a drug-related cause with the chance that an alcohol user dies of an alcohol-related cause. The number of people who drink alcohol is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people who do drugs, but the number of alcohol deaths is not orders of magnitude higher than the number of drug deaths.
    • InitialLastName 6y ago
      Not necessarily disagreeing, but if you don't have the means to pay for your own healthcare, both of those actions have a downside risk that creates a victim out of your entire community. A society where paramedics make sure car crash victims or overdosed drug users can pay the bill before they provide emergency care isn't one I want to live in.
    • unishark 6y ago
      Well in the kind of political views such arguments come from, a victim would be someone who's rights were violated, not just someone for whom the interaction turned out to be detrimental but consented anyway.
    • D13Fd 6y ago
      Consuming drugs is not a crime in most jurisdictions. And with not wearing a seatbelt, you are the victim, along with your loved ones and the rest of us who have to help bear the cost of the emergency response to accidents involving major injuries or fatalities.
    • wonderwonder 6y ago
      This gets tricky though as you get deeper. Ok you don't want to wear your seatbelt, what about your kids in the car? Does a baby have to sit in a baby seat? If you don't want to wear a seatbelt, get in an accident and have to get scraped off the sidewalk, what about the person that has to scrape you up? If you are disabled due to the accident, who pays your disability? Who looks after your kids now that you are gone? Society has to shoulder that expense. Does forcing people to wear seatbelts result in a reduced financial burden to others? Interesting questions.
      • tyleo 6y ago
        I feel like adults supervising minors are responsible for their safety. Even now it’s not a minor who is fined if they aren’t wearing a seatbelt, it’s the driver. I find the point about financial burden to society more interesting because it’s hard to articulate a clear test that would indicate whether society is a victim or not. A few others have made the same point as you. I’d love if anyone has ideas here.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        " If you don't want to wear a seatbelt, get in an accident and have to get scraped off the sidewalk, what about the person that has to scrape you up" What about that person? Also, if financially burdening society is a crime, then we ought to imprison CEOs of tabacco and alcohol companies. What about abundance of sugar in food where it doesn't belong, unhealthy lifestyles, etc. Where is the line that preserves any liberties? And before you say it's obvious, alcohol and McDonald have both ruined more lives than weed ever did.
        • wonderwonder 6y ago
          I fully support the legalization of marijuana. Again you have raised interesting questions, at what point does society have the right to impose restrictions on your free will and at what point are people pushing clearly harmful products to willing consumers liable? I don't know the answers, but these are things a society wrestles with all the time as it evolves.
    • saiya-jin 6y ago
      Not wearing a seatbelt in accident could be argued increases the cost of your healthcare treatment (or possibly reduces if you go too fast). In same vein as that insurance example. Consuming drugs - what about blowing pot smoke on kids playing in the park or walking across the street? Leaving used needles scattered on the ground? What about smoking pot with a friend? What all conditions must be OK for that friend to co-smoke? We can come up with more or less obscure but real examples all day. That's not how laws should be designed.
    • tzs 6y ago
      Not wearing a seat belt does not impact only yourself. If you are driving and encounter a situation where you have to swerve sharply to avoid an accident and you are not wearing a seat belt it is harder to maintain control of the car. A sharp swerve tends to make you lurch to the side relative to the car, which tends to cause you to turn the steering wheel more or less than you intended to turn it. A properly used seat belt limits the extent of that lurch. If you've got access to a big empty parking lot, it is interesting to do some testing making sharp turns with and without your seat belt. That belt makes a lot of difference.
  • gizmo686 6y ago
    Any constitutional amendment would require the courts to work out what it means; and we have seen the courts come up with very complicated rules for seemingly simple constitutional ones. A relatively simple system would be to require the state to articulate who the victim is. It is then a constitutionally protected defense that the alleged victim was not a victim. Regarding the insurance company, this seems like the exactly the type of scenario that corporate personhood was designed for.
• sopooneo 6y ago
  Is drunk driving without running anyone over that particular night victimless? I agree with your sentiment generally, but I think the details get tricky.
  • tyleo 6y ago
    I feel like potential to put others at risk would void protection under the amendment. I don’t think it would have to be 100% perfect, just better than we are doing now while avoiding false positives. Anyways, I feel like we have courts to interpret these things. The existing amendments are interpreted in a variety of convoluted ways depending on the scenario.
    • giantg2 6y ago
      Well, what defines that potential risk? They can already charge you with crimes for endangering yourself. It's mostly stuff like drunk in public, excessive speeding with moby else around or in the car, or doing donuts alone in a snowy parking lot. If we leave it up to the courts, it's not worth the paper its written on.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Yes. So just fine the person and make them do community service. Which is usually what the courts do for DUI without a victim assuming the accused lawyers up.
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    yes, just like shooting a gun out your window because you felt like it and not hitting anything is victimless but probably good to discourage anyway.
  • _fat_santa 6y ago
    I think the exemption should be where the crime, even though victimless, has a high chance of causing someone harm. Drunk driving would fall into that category. However something like illicit drug consumption would not.
• throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  > put the right not to be charged with a victimless crime in a constitutional amendment. Unfortunately the only way this would happen is over a lot of dead bodies or if you spend three generations boiling the frog. People are too addicted to using overt state violence (as opposed to obfuscated state violence, i.e. fines) to prevent people from engaging in behavior they don't like or risky but not guaranteed harmful behavior. The idea that you could get a DUI or sell heroin and as long as nobody gets hurt the max penalty would be a fine, community service, etc. etc. is just unacceptable to them (despite that being the typical end result in those cases assuming the person charged lawyers up). You can already see this in the comments.
• wonderwonder 6y ago
  They would just ignore or find a way around it. Civil asset forfeiture exists despite the 4th amendment. "Drug sniffing" dogs do to. They will just charge people they don't like with something else, like arresting someone for resisting arrest.
• tzs 6y ago
  That victimless crimes (or purportedly victimless crimes) are responsible for most prisoners in the US is one of those "everybody knows" things, so it might be puzzling that your call to stop putting perpetrators of victimless crimes in prison would get a bunch of quick down votes. Alas, in this case it turns out that it is also one of those "everybody knows" things where everybody turns out to be wrong, and that is covered very early in the article. That's what makes the article interesting--it is not just another article about how our prisons are stuffed to overflowing due to victimless crime. Instead, it finds that that explanation is wrong, and goes on to work out what is actually going on, which is a lot more interesting. Note that if the question instead had been "why are there so many people in America who have been in prison" rather than asking about people who are in prison, then it is possible that victimless crime would be the answer.
• giantg2 6y ago
  I don't know about that as the fix. There are plenty of things that need to be fixed in the law. In my opinion most come from laziness, win-at-all costs mindset, and ignoring rule of law from the people who run the system. Reigning in LEO/DA/judge discretion would make the system more fair and potentially prompt the public to demand we fix the broken laws since they would be more likely to be subjected to them rather than let off the hook. I've seen people admit to crimes and be let off the hook based on discretion when others have not. I've seen DAs violate their office policy to ignore misconduct allegations against LEOs - not just performing a shotty investigation, but deciding not to investigate at all even though it's part of a case they are prosecuting. I've also seen a judge give contradictory reasoning in the same case to the detriment of the defense (said lack of a record means they are denying the motion from the defense, when the defense later said they had a record he then said no prior records were allowed to be used). Changing the mindset of the public from "those criminals deserve it" and truly believing in innocent until proven guilty would also help with the bias defendants face in the system. The first person to call the police is labeled as the victim and that carries a huge bias that affects police and DAs to the point that they don't perform though investigations. In science and other logic based fields you at least think about the devils advocate perspective to verify you are right. This doesn't happen in law. As soon as they get the evidence to "prove" you are guilty, they stop looking. You could have a valid defense or have information that one of their facts is wrong if they investigate a little deeper, but they won't. This puts the defense at a disadvantage since the police and DA have much greater power to investigate than a defendant does. This victim/complainant positive bias will only get worse with things like ex-parte red flag laws and Marcy's law. These are popular with the public, yet in many cases undermine constitutional protections. We even see that things like PFAs are being sought without basis with the intent of weaponizing them in divorces. And this is done with the knowledge of and even pressure from the lawyers, who are supposed to be held to the ethical standards of the bar. We also need better oversight and higher standards for those who run the system. I've seen a trooper contradict himself multiple times in official reports and in court, one of which I believe was an outright lie to the judge. The investigator said it was just a misunderstanding and they did not care about the contradictions. Any other witness would have been discredited. I doubt they logged these contradictions as Giglio information for future cases. Magistrates in my states aren't required to be lawyers or even pass the bar in my state. I've had magistrates believe that they were being called prejudiced when being asked to dismiss a case with prejudice. Unreal. Cost of prosecution is covered by the government and virtually unlimited. Cost of defense, other than the indignant, is not covered and can outweigh the cost of pleading guilty and paying a fine. You aren't reimbursed after being found not guilty. This means you can be punished (pay more) more as an innocent person than if you were guilty. How is this justice? Most cases are settled in plea deals. Many people settle because they could be held in jail while waiting. In many states, if you're not in custody, they consider a speedy trial as anything that starts withing 4 or 5 years. So much for that constitutional protection.