11 ms·

How and why the US Justice Department over-prosecutes

217 points by antics 14y ago

mieubrisse 14y ago
Though the article brings up an interesting point for consideration, I found it relying more on inflammatory statements than anything else. "The Justice Department was bagging obscenity law trophies by going after the poor, the suicidal, the insane, the cognitively impaired— because that's the way they rack up numbers and status. That's the way their fuel their careers at the Justice Department— not by taking on constitutional issues, or injustice, or fat cats who believe they're above the law." I'd be interested in seeing numbers on whether defendants convicted of obscenity charges really do have a higher incidence rate of poverty, mental illness, etc. to back the author up.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I never thought about that but it does make sense: the prosecutors get professional advancement based on numbers, not the quality of cases. We had a dinner party last night and everyone at the table thought that the US has serious citizen rights, etc. problems and the situation is getting worse.
- mpweiher 14y ago
  And let's not even get started on the problems if you're not a citizen. Trivial example: at the 29c3, an NSA whistleblower was complaining that the NSA was now eavesdropping on US citizens, oh the outrage! And explicitly listed the UN human rights conventions...forgetting that those same human rights conventions apply to the people he'd been eavesdropping on for the last 30-40 years with no problems whatsoever, the very people he was giving this presentation to.
michaelfeathers 14y ago
How can it be fixed?
- wissler 14y ago
  At root this is a philosophical problem. The professional philosophers have created a disarray in the field of values, claiming that they are subjective and arbitrary, and that's resulted in the inability of people to rally around common, objective values of right and wrong. And when you say something like this, you generally just get what these philosophers have said repeated back to you, and some weak-kneed alternative to saying "this is right, that is wrong", which is precisely why we are where we are.
  - michaelfeathers 14y ago
    No offense, but I think I'll listen to systems thinkers and legal experts rather than philosophers for a little while.
    - wissler 14y ago
      And this is different from the status quo how? How does running to the same group of "experts" who have engineered our social systems help? Note how conditioned the response is: you see a problem with the system, you're conditioned to trust in the system (and its approved representatives) to give you answers. You're part of the problem of course. You and everyone like you. By rejecting philosophy you reject ethics and therefore any possible means of addressing these systematic problems.
    - wissler 14y ago
      I am of course in the minority, but it's not the minority who's created these major systemic problems. We try to point them out and are ignored (and here, downvoted), and you bumbling fools keep doing things that wreck civilization. Inadvertently of course. But good intentions count for zero, you still bear partial responsibility for widespread injustice.
      - Yaa101 14y ago
        The problem lies in Democracy, it is not for nothing that it is called the least worst ruling system. The difference between most democracies and dictatorships is that a dictatorship is despotism by minority and most democracies despotism by majority, not often are democracies systems of fairness.
jamesaguilar 14y ago
Slightly less sinister hypothesis: aaronsw turned down a slap on the wrist plea bargain. The prosecutor charged the maximum because it is a waste of time to take a guy to federal court over a $20k fine and a year of probation. You know that maximum about malice, incompetence, etc.? I'm not saying I _know_ for sure but it strikes me that most people think they are doing good in the world and I don't get why this prosecutor isn't getting the same benefit of doubt. Actually, I kind of do. Aaron was one of the community's favorites and to some degree that trumps truth-finding.
- kenko 14y ago
  "The prosecutor charged the maximum because it is a waste of time to take a guy to federal court over a $20k fine and a year of probation." You know the prosecutor could have just not taken him to court at all, right?
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  Why not just drop the fucking case then? Jesus, how many millions of our tax dollars were spent doing our best to drive this kid to suicide? JSTOR didn't want prosecution and arguably neither did MIT. I can't stand these justifications that seem to make everyone a slave to the machine. Heck, you and I break hundreds of laws a day, maybe even a felony or two or three. Federal prosecutors can do whatever they want with us. We have no power over them. We can at least expect them to go after real crime with real victims instead of political activists. If we lived by these "go by the letter of the law and prosecute everyone who breaks any law" ideals then literally everyone except newborns would be in prison.
  - cynicalkane 14y ago
    Pro tip: if someone calls a hypothesis "slightly less sinister", he is probably not trying to justify it as a good thing. What the OP is talking about is why prosecutors are the way they are, and suggesting the answer is more complicated than "these specific people are evil". This is worthy of discussion and it's not up to you to kill it by accusing the OP of defending a situation he is clearly not defending.
  - 14y ago
dlss 14y ago
Why is this on the front page? This is barely even about Aaron Schwartz -- he wasn't disabled, friendless, or prone to drooling for example. Less of these kinds of posts, please. That said, I'm glad it was here if only to read jamesagilar's pointing out that "aaronsw turned down a slap on the wrist plea bargain". Thanks James!
- konstruktor 14y ago
  Did you read TFA? Not making any judgment about the claim: What she suggests is that he was an easy victim for the plea bargain game because of his known problems with depression.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I agree the linked article isn't really about Swartz, but I think it's a reasonable opportunity to look at how U.S. federal prosecution works/fails in general.
- sbov 14y ago
  A felony isn't a slap on the wrist. It can have a long lasting affect on your life, closing up whole career opportunities and making travel a pain in the ass.
- smsm42 14y ago
  It is on the front page because this is happening in the USA every day, every hour. But we usually hear about it only when somebody high-profile enough is hurt by the criminal prosecution machine. But make no mistake of thinking the same machine doesn't hurt people 24/7 - we just don't hear about it often. Maybe if we did, we could get some way to fix it or at least make it less cruel and inhumane. Most of the readers here, I presume, are lucky enough to have very small chance of being pulled into the criminal prosecution machine unless they do something out of the ordinary - like Aaron Swartz did. But it still exists right next to us and we better not forget about it.
pasbesoin 14y ago
A worthy lasting legacy would be for Mr. Swartz's story to shed an undeniable and transforming light upon the farce that our "adversarial" justice system has become. It is all too seldom about "justice" and all too often about "career". And... these prosecutors are public employees. Our employees. We cannot and should not divorce ourselves from their malicious malfeasance, when and as it occurs. Nor can we nor should we divorce ourselves from the system that creates it. Swartz's case gains publicity through his prominence. But similar oppression, often combined with a grinding and defining lack of opportunity, plays out thousands of times every day, on the streets and in the families of this country. We can't make it perfect. But we should be trying a damned sight more to make it better. If we are sincere about this.
- regnum 14y ago
  Check out Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line. It really makes evident the "career" climbers in the justice system and how they can spoil freedom for those who they target. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Thin_Blue_Line/60034937?locale=en-US http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Thin_Blue_Line/6003493...
- rprasad 14y ago
  4 black teens in NY went to prison for 2 decades after a white woman mistakenly identified them as her attackers. Texas has executed several innocent men. The South had a history of lynching black men without a trial, and letting whites who murdered colored folk (black or otherwise) free. People of Japanese descent were forcibly interned during WWII and SCOTUS upheld internment. The American justice system survived all of this, and you think that Mr. Swartz is a "transforming light"? I'm sorry, but compared to these other miscarriages of justice, the Swartz case isn't even a drop in a bucket.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
guard-of-terra 14y ago
What I didn't understand from the article is: Do they have death sentence for obscenity?
- rprasad 14y ago
  In some countries they do (take a guess), but not in the West.
thenetwork 14y ago
The presence of a quota system that requires that the government bring a certain number of cases and provides bonuses and rewards connected to "bringing more cases" means that honorable and honest prosecutors fall behind and cannot compete and dirty and heartless prosecutors are able to meet their goals and get ahead. It is not possible to fight the federal government, only a man of enormous strength and enormous balls can successfully do this. Most capitulate, the others lose because the government burden of proof is a joke.

217 points by antics 14y ago

Though the article brings up an interesting point for consideration, I found it relying more on inflammatory statements than anything else. "The Justice Department was bagging obscenity law trophies by going after the poor, the suicidal, the insane, the cognitively impaired— because that's the way they rack up numbers and status. That's the way their fuel their careers at the Justice Department— not by taking on constitutional issues, or injustice, or fat cats who believe they're above the law." I'd be interested in seeing numbers on whether defendants convicted of obscenity charges really do have a higher incidence rate of poverty, mental illness, etc. to back the author up.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I never thought about that but it does make sense: the prosecutors get professional advancement based on numbers, not the quality of cases. We had a dinner party last night and everyone at the table thought that the US has serious citizen rights, etc. problems and the situation is getting worse.

mpweiher 14y ago
And let's not even get started on the problems if you're not a citizen. Trivial example: at the 29c3, an NSA whistleblower was complaining that the NSA was now eavesdropping on US citizens, oh the outrage! And explicitly listed the UN human rights conventions...forgetting that those same human rights conventions apply to the people he'd been eavesdropping on for the last 30-40 years with no problems whatsoever, the very people he was giving this presentation to.

michaelfeathers 14y ago

How can it be fixed?

wissler 14y ago
At root this is a philosophical problem. The professional philosophers have created a disarray in the field of values, claiming that they are subjective and arbitrary, and that's resulted in the inability of people to rally around common, objective values of right and wrong. And when you say something like this, you generally just get what these philosophers have said repeated back to you, and some weak-kneed alternative to saying "this is right, that is wrong", which is precisely why we are where we are.
- michaelfeathers 14y ago
  No offense, but I think I'll listen to systems thinkers and legal experts rather than philosophers for a little while.
  - wissler 14y ago
    And this is different from the status quo how? How does running to the same group of "experts" who have engineered our social systems help? Note how conditioned the response is: you see a problem with the system, you're conditioned to trust in the system (and its approved representatives) to give you answers. You're part of the problem of course. You and everyone like you. By rejecting philosophy you reject ethics and therefore any possible means of addressing these systematic problems.
  - wissler 14y ago
    I am of course in the minority, but it's not the minority who's created these major systemic problems. We try to point them out and are ignored (and here, downvoted), and you bumbling fools keep doing things that wreck civilization. Inadvertently of course. But good intentions count for zero, you still bear partial responsibility for widespread injustice.
    - Yaa101 14y ago
      The problem lies in Democracy, it is not for nothing that it is called the least worst ruling system. The difference between most democracies and dictatorships is that a dictatorship is despotism by minority and most democracies despotism by majority, not often are democracies systems of fairness.

jamesaguilar 14y ago

Slightly less sinister hypothesis: aaronsw turned down a slap on the wrist plea bargain. The prosecutor charged the maximum because it is a waste of time to take a guy to federal court over a $20k fine and a year of probation. You know that maximum about malice, incompetence, etc.? I'm not saying I _know_ for sure but it strikes me that most people think they are doing good in the world and I don't get why this prosecutor isn't getting the same benefit of doubt. Actually, I kind of do. Aaron was one of the community's favorites and to some degree that trumps truth-finding.

kenko 14y ago
"The prosecutor charged the maximum because it is a waste of time to take a guy to federal court over a $20k fine and a year of probation." You know the prosecutor could have just not taken him to court at all, right?
drzaiusapelord 14y ago
Why not just drop the fucking case then? Jesus, how many millions of our tax dollars were spent doing our best to drive this kid to suicide? JSTOR didn't want prosecution and arguably neither did MIT. I can't stand these justifications that seem to make everyone a slave to the machine. Heck, you and I break hundreds of laws a day, maybe even a felony or two or three. Federal prosecutors can do whatever they want with us. We have no power over them. We can at least expect them to go after real crime with real victims instead of political activists. If we lived by these "go by the letter of the law and prosecute everyone who breaks any law" ideals then literally everyone except newborns would be in prison.
- cynicalkane 14y ago
  Pro tip: if someone calls a hypothesis "slightly less sinister", he is probably not trying to justify it as a good thing. What the OP is talking about is why prosecutors are the way they are, and suggesting the answer is more complicated than "these specific people are evil". This is worthy of discussion and it's not up to you to kill it by accusing the OP of defending a situation he is clearly not defending.
- 14y ago

dlss 14y ago

Why is this on the front page? This is barely even about Aaron Schwartz -- he wasn't disabled, friendless, or prone to drooling for example. Less of these kinds of posts, please. That said, I'm glad it was here if only to read jamesagilar's pointing out that "aaronsw turned down a slap on the wrist plea bargain". Thanks James!

konstruktor 14y ago
Did you read TFA? Not making any judgment about the claim: What she suggests is that he was an easy victim for the plea bargain game because of his known problems with depression.
_delirium 14y ago
I agree the linked article isn't really about Swartz, but I think it's a reasonable opportunity to look at how U.S. federal prosecution works/fails in general.
sbov 14y ago
A felony isn't a slap on the wrist. It can have a long lasting affect on your life, closing up whole career opportunities and making travel a pain in the ass.
smsm42 14y ago
It is on the front page because this is happening in the USA every day, every hour. But we usually hear about it only when somebody high-profile enough is hurt by the criminal prosecution machine. But make no mistake of thinking the same machine doesn't hurt people 24/7 - we just don't hear about it often. Maybe if we did, we could get some way to fix it or at least make it less cruel and inhumane. Most of the readers here, I presume, are lucky enough to have very small chance of being pulled into the criminal prosecution machine unless they do something out of the ordinary - like Aaron Swartz did. But it still exists right next to us and we better not forget about it.

pasbesoin 14y ago

A worthy lasting legacy would be for Mr. Swartz's story to shed an undeniable and transforming light upon the farce that our "adversarial" justice system has become. It is all too seldom about "justice" and all too often about "career". And... these prosecutors are public employees. Our employees. We cannot and should not divorce ourselves from their malicious malfeasance, when and as it occurs. Nor can we nor should we divorce ourselves from the system that creates it. Swartz's case gains publicity through his prominence. But similar oppression, often combined with a grinding and defining lack of opportunity, plays out thousands of times every day, on the streets and in the families of this country. We can't make it perfect. But we should be trying a damned sight more to make it better. If we are sincere about this.

regnum 14y ago
Check out Errol Morris' documentary The Thin Blue Line. It really makes evident the "career" climbers in the justice system and how they can spoil freedom for those who they target. http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Thin_Blue_Line/60034937?locale=en-US http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Thin_Blue_Line/6003493...
rprasad 14y ago
4 black teens in NY went to prison for 2 decades after a white woman mistakenly identified them as her attackers. Texas has executed several innocent men. The South had a history of lynching black men without a trial, and letting whites who murdered colored folk (black or otherwise) free. People of Japanese descent were forcibly interned during WWII and SCOTUS upheld internment. The American justice system survived all of this, and you think that Mr. Swartz is a "transforming light"? I'm sorry, but compared to these other miscarriages of justice, the Swartz case isn't even a drop in a bucket.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

guard-of-terra 14y ago

What I didn't understand from the article is: Do they have death sentence for obscenity?

rprasad 14y ago
In some countries they do (take a guess), but not in the West.

thenetwork 14y ago

The presence of a quota system that requires that the government bring a certain number of cases and provides bonuses and rewards connected to "bringing more cases" means that honorable and honest prosecutors fall behind and cannot compete and dirty and heartless prosecutors are able to meet their goals and get ahead. It is not possible to fight the federal government, only a man of enormous strength and enormous balls can successfully do this. Most capitulate, the others lose because the government burden of proof is a joke.