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This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence do

by wahern 2y ago

This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. For both aggravating and mitigating circumstances evidence does need to be submitted, and there are standards of proof to be applied. It's just that the procedural rules can be different and, depending on the context and jurisdiction, sufficiency can be decided by the judge alone. In some jurisdictions, for example, aggravating evidence may need to be put to the jury, while mitigating evidence need not be. The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. It isn't supposed to cut both ways. The prosecution is supposed to have the higher burden, and admitting unproven allegations is excessively prejudicial. > In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose. The lesson from this should be to make the protections strong enough that they can't be thwarted like this. For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one. It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be rare.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  So e.g. >90% (or whatever it’s now multiplied by several times) should be entirely ignored because the legal/judicial system won’t have enough resources to prosecute them?
  - kortilla 2y ago
    Yes. Scale up the judicial system and cut laws if needed. Also, there will likely still be some pleas. Some people own up to being guilty and want to move on. There is an absolute dearth of lawyers to support this. We just need more courts and more judges for the initial surge of a couple of years.
    - wqaatwt 2y ago
      So most property crimes will not longer be prosecuted? Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK? Isn’t the American legal system already very bloated and inefficient? So spending even more money on it might not be the best idea?
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK? The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that. A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.
        wqaatwt 2y ago
        Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different. Especially if we consider how a lot of crimes like DUIs are somewhat open & shut compared to more serious offenses. > so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  You misunderstand the judge's role in this In common law, you are found guilty, and then sentenced. The judge does the sentencing, the jury finds you guilty or not. Then there is precedent. Guidelines are created based on caselaw, so if a simular type of case arrises, that forms the "expectation" of what the sentence will be. This means that you don't need specific levels of a crime. For example drug trafficking can be a single gram of coke for personal use, vs 15 tonnes for commercial exploitation. hence the range in sentences.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Suppose you're charged with two crimes in two separate courts. The first is jaywalking, the second is murder, but the judge is given unlimited discretion to determine sentencing. To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking. The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere. Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
    - wahern 2y ago
      That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty. A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice. What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections. Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time. Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else. [1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
- gizmo 2y ago
  > For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one. Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Prosecutors can then spend their court time arguing more important cases, judges don't have to patiently direct clown shows where guilt is extremely obvious, and the defendant gets a lesser sentence. There is plenty of abuse in the plea system, and no shortage of outrageous prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn't invalidate the principle of plea bargaining. No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. That isn't justice. Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Suppose we're talking about a case where it's a foregone conclusion. 0% chance that the defendant will be acquitted, never going to happen. Then the defendant should plead guilty and save themselves some time and effort regardless of whether it leads to a lesser sentence, right? You don't need to coerce them because they can't possibly gain anything. Now suppose that the chance isn't 0%, it's, say, 10%. Should we coerce these people into a guilty plea by giving them a 100% chance of six months vs. a 90% chance of five years? Out of a million of them, a hundred thousand would be found not guilty, so no. > No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. This is why the right to a speedy trial exists, even though it has been eroded dramatically by basically making it a false choice between "you have your trial immediately with no chance to prepare a defense even though the prosecution has secretly been investigating you for months" and "you waive your right to a speedy trial entirely and rot in jail for years awaiting trial". The way it ought to work is that the defendant has a right to set a "not after" date where the prosecution either has to proceed or release them from jail and drop the charges, which gives them enough time to actually prepare a defense without opening the door to being detained indefinitely awaiting trial even after they're prepared. The prosecution already has this up until the statute of limitations has run, because they can already wait to file charges until they've prepared their case. > Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility. Or we could just have fewer laws and then assign the resources necessary to prosecute the remaining more important ones. Notice that if you get rid of e.g. drug laws, you also get rid of all the murders and other crimes that come along with the existence of drug cartels, and the load on the courts goes down dramatically.

by wahern 2y ago

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> This cuts both ways as judges often adjust their sentencing downward based on mitigating evidence. It isn't supposed to cut both ways. The prosecution is supposed to have the higher burden, and admitting unproven allegations is excessively prejudicial. > In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose. The lesson from this should be to make the protections strong enough that they can't be thwarted like this. For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one. It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be rare.

wqaatwt 2y ago
So e.g. >90% (or whatever it’s now multiplied by several times) should be entirely ignored because the legal/judicial system won’t have enough resources to prosecute them?
- kortilla 2y ago
  Yes. Scale up the judicial system and cut laws if needed. Also, there will likely still be some pleas. Some people own up to being guilty and want to move on. There is an absolute dearth of lawyers to support this. We just need more courts and more judges for the initial surge of a couple of years.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    So most property crimes will not longer be prosecuted? Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK? Isn’t the American legal system already very bloated and inefficient? So spending even more money on it might not be the best idea?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK? The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that. A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.
      - wqaatwt 2y ago
        Yet the conviction rate in England was 84 % in magistrates courts (misdemeanors and low level felonies) and 78 % in crown courts (more serious crimes) which is not that different. Especially if we consider how a lot of crimes like DUIs are somewhat open & shut compared to more serious offenses. > so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)
KaiserPro 2y ago
You misunderstand the judge's role in this In common law, you are found guilty, and then sentenced. The judge does the sentencing, the jury finds you guilty or not. Then there is precedent. Guidelines are created based on caselaw, so if a simular type of case arrises, that forms the "expectation" of what the sentence will be. This means that you don't need specific levels of a crime. For example drug trafficking can be a single gram of coke for personal use, vs 15 tonnes for commercial exploitation. hence the range in sentences.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Suppose you're charged with two crimes in two separate courts. The first is jaywalking, the second is murder, but the judge is given unlimited discretion to determine sentencing. To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking. The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere. Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
  - wahern 2y ago
    That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty. A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice. What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections. Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time. Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else. [1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
gizmo 2y ago
> For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one. Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Prosecutors can then spend their court time arguing more important cases, judges don't have to patiently direct clown shows where guilt is extremely obvious, and the defendant gets a lesser sentence. There is plenty of abuse in the plea system, and no shortage of outrageous prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn't invalidate the principle of plea bargaining. No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. That isn't justice. Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Suppose we're talking about a case where it's a foregone conclusion. 0% chance that the defendant will be acquitted, never going to happen. Then the defendant should plead guilty and save themselves some time and effort regardless of whether it leads to a lesser sentence, right? You don't need to coerce them because they can't possibly gain anything. Now suppose that the chance isn't 0%, it's, say, 10%. Should we coerce these people into a guilty plea by giving them a 100% chance of six months vs. a 90% chance of five years? Out of a million of them, a hundred thousand would be found not guilty, so no. > No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. This is why the right to a speedy trial exists, even though it has been eroded dramatically by basically making it a false choice between "you have your trial immediately with no chance to prepare a defense even though the prosecution has secretly been investigating you for months" and "you waive your right to a speedy trial entirely and rot in jail for years awaiting trial". The way it ought to work is that the defendant has a right to set a "not after" date where the prosecution either has to proceed or release them from jail and drop the charges, which gives them enough time to actually prepare a defense without opening the door to being detained indefinitely awaiting trial even after they're prepared. The prosecution already has this up until the statute of limitations has run, because they can already wait to file charges until they've prepared their case. > Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility. Or we could just have fewer laws and then assign the resources necessary to prosecute the remaining more important ones. Notice that if you get rid of e.g. drug laws, you also get rid of all the murders and other crimes that come along with the existence of drug cartels, and the load on the courts goes down dramatically.