Honestly, we need some reforms dealing with plea bargains. Outright removing the practice for every offense is a terrible idea because that can often be one of the few avenues open for getting some of the bigger criminals because it's the only way to get one of their underlings to flip and provide the state with something.
That said, I don't think a plea deal should be on the table for every offense. There are a number of offenses that should just straight up not be offenses and probably a number of offenses where the punishment is just straight unreasonable bullshit. So in principle you do away with a bunch of the tyrannical petty puritan nonsense and you probably end up in a system where the plea deal just isn't really attractive because if you get found guilty, the punishment will no longer destroy your life and well also we won't be wasting a ton of time on prosecuting crimes that petty asswipes put forwards as being crimes (plus that is very pertinent to this thread is that's also less bullshit that racist pig cops can just arbitrarily charge people with based on skin color or how fucking petty the officer is feeling).
Also if you get those down to reasonable levels. It gets fairly easy to have a rule where you don't get to plea deal minor offenses. Again, since what's left of those will no longer fucking destroy someone, like I don't know, we don't send someone to jail for 5 years because it's their 3rd time getting caught stealing a 99 cent candy bar. People won't feel the need to plea deal. If they know they are fucked, they'll just plead guilty and pay the fine or schedule the community service (IMO if you take the ability to plea deal off the table, it's likely an offense that you can't justify jail time for anyways).
I know someone will say, but Mill, that just means more people will fight their case. To that I respond, good, if someone feels they didn't violate the law, let them make their case. Given the amount of bullshit we've seen, where minorities get reamed every step of the way. If someone can't royally fuck their lives over, then they'll be less likely to make petty charges. If people are more likely to argue their case in court, maybe that will force cops to think twice before they arrest someone for not respecting their petty fucking egos. Maybe the risk of racking up a record where 70% or more of the people you charge get off the hook, will either result in some law enforcement being less shit or maybe their community will finally get rid of them. If the concern is that those extra cases will suck up even more resources, well hire more judges and give more public funding to public defense divisions. Alternatively, maybe we should be less gung-ho about selecting prosecutors and law enforcement personnel that see their work being all about how many people they can put behind bars, rather than doing what's best for their community, which is put less people in prison, fix social problems and actually go after the real criminals. Another alternative, is again to revisit your laws and determine if it's really worth the resources to enforce the law or if it's just a waste of fucking time that is meant to be dickish towards members of society that have little means to fuck back against true injustice.
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
edited August 2021
Yeah the state of plea bargaining in this country is an active circumvention of the very idea of fair trials, and the means by which they are enforced is disgustingly unjust. The fact is, there's a lot of shit that's illegal right now that shouldn't be and things that shouldn't be as illegal as they currently are. There are two big factors I think that really contribute to making the whole justice system worse for everyone and the first is the fact that basically everyone in the US has, at some point, committed a crime. There's so many laws currently on the books and a great many of them are not at all inherently intuitive, they're not things most people know or assume would be illegal, so if they want the police can try and find something to pin on basically anyone.
This compounds the issue of plea bargains as a way around due process because prosecutors can just stack on violation after violation, many of them variations on the same broken law, to make it so that people feel they need to take the bergain because otherwise they'll either get found guilty of SOMETHING, or if they add a bunch of them together even minor violations can stack up into major punishments, and the second is the presumption that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That might work more or less in a common-law system that only really penalizes a relatively narrow field of behaviors that are broadly agreed societally are wrong (murder, theft, assault, etc.) but in our current system it is so incredibly easy to run afoul of some obscure or poorly worded law or regulation that for the common citizen, there is an unfounded presumption that we should all know the law when the number of laws has reached the dizzying point where you'd need your own legal department to keep a handle on everything that might be illegal or not.
This empowers officers and prosecutors with the enormous discretion to prosecute or not prosecute based pretty much just on their own whims. I was reading an old article the other day about a man who was arrested and charged under a poorly written computer fraud act written in the late 70's and last amended in the mid 90's, for leeching wifi from a cafe. Not just a civil charge, a "stop leeching our bandwidth" but a state and federal crime for doing something people do all the time that can result in a five year sentence and 10k in fines. In the particular case the judge was lenient because he had no idea he was breaking the law so they 'only' gave him 40 hours of community service and a 400 dollar fine. And that was only and totally at the discretion of the justice system.
I want to quote something I think is emblematic of the problem from that article here
"Coincidentally, the cafe owner that Peterson was leeching WiFi off of didn't even realize that what Peterson was doing was a crime at the time. Neither did the police officer. "I had a feeling a law was being broken, but I didn't know exactly what," Sparta police chief Andrew Milanowski told the TV station. "
In a system like this, how can we fail to have an utterly corrupt and unaccountable system. When the police can arrest you based on the suspicion that what you're doing might break the law, even if they don't know which one or how, and whether and how much to charge you and for what is completely at the discretion of utterly callous prosecutors offices who care more about their stats than actually accomplishing anything. Frankly, genuine ignorance of the law should be an excuse, at least for crimes outside the core of basic societal laws (again, theft, murder, rape, assault. These basics.) and there should be an absolute limit to how many crimes you can charge someone with at once to make sure you pick very carefully what crimes you want to accuse someone of. Simply stacking on accusations in the hopes that the sheer weight of it will crush your opposition, or something will eventually stick, makes a mockery of the idea of justice in this country.
Lord_Asmodeus on
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
There actually is a recognized exception to the whole ignorance of the law bit. In at least some cases, courts have held someone could not reasonably have been aware of a law (this is all things like "just moved to an area and some odd local ordinance" though I think).
One wonders what the number of innocent people who accept a plea bargain because a bunch of bullshit charges are thrown at them is. Bet it's infuriatingly large.
One wonders what the number of innocent people who accept a plea bargain because a bunch of bullshit charges are thrown at them is. Bet it's infuriatingly large minority.
Fixed that for you.
Would wager a significant sum that the percentage of people arrested who are coerced into a plea deal, and the percentage of people for whom the DA drops charges, have a substantial colour correlation. Though the colour probably most important, is green.
If you can afford a decent attorney, that means the prosecution has to devote time to a case, and risks losing it, and conviction rates are important for advancement (another shitty metric).
One wonders what the number of innocent people who accept a plea bargain because a bunch of bullshit charges are thrown at them is. Bet it's infuriatingly large minority.
Fixed that for you.
Would wager a significant sum that the percentage of people arrested who are coerced into a plea deal, and the percentage of people for whom the DA drops charges, have a substantial colour correlation. Though the colour probably most important, is green.
If you can afford a decent attorney, that means the prosecution has to devote time to a case, and risks losing it, and conviction rates are important for advancement (another shitty metric).
Bingo. Poor people have to make do with public defenders, who are extremely good at their jobs by dint of having a metric boatload of cases constantly but no time to mount proper defenses for them because they have a metric boatload of cases constantly. There's a perverse incentive to keeping them deprived of the resources they need to be effective.
So, rather than trying to fix any of that, what I'm hearing is that DAs and PDs should have similar resources, provided by the .gov (who is supposed to have an interest in justice, not just winning). I also think it would not be a TERRIBLE idea (but I could be wrong) to require all DA's to spend an equal amount of time working as PDs (and if we're going to have winning cases as a metric, have it there too).
So, rather than trying to fix any of that, what I'm hearing is that DAs and PDs should have similar resources, provided by the .gov (who is supposed to have an interest in justice, not just winning). I also think it would not be a TERRIBLE idea (but I could be wrong) to require all DA's to spend an equal amount of time working as PDs (and if we're going to have winning cases as a metric, have it there too).
It's always amazed me that you can pay for legal representation, it seems like something that should only be provided, for free, by the government.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
So, rather than trying to fix any of that, what I'm hearing is that DAs and PDs should have similar resources, provided by the .gov (who is supposed to have an interest in justice, not just winning). I also think it would not be a TERRIBLE idea (but I could be wrong) to require all DA's to spend an equal amount of time working as PDs (and if we're going to have winning cases as a metric, have it there too).
It's always amazed me that you can pay for legal representation, it seems like something that should only be provided, for free, by the government.
When the government is the one who is charging and prosecuting you, on behalf of themselves, its nice to have the option to not be reliant on them for your defense too.
But absolutely, DA's should have to take rotations as PDs, and the PD office should ostensibly be getting more funding than the DA office, seeing as the DA has the Police working for them, and the PD's would need to hire investigators of their own.
The problem is DA's are still DA's even when acting as a PD and would be less incentivized career wise to do well.
The real answer is to make being a PD more attractive a job so that people who would become corporate lawyers and DA's have an alternative option that is good beyond "everyone deserves representation".
*edit* I think every DA should have to be pulled from PDs though.
As the eviction moratorium expires, and there has been a wave of places essentially criminalizing homelessness, we should remember that slavery is still legal as long as it's prison labor and more industries than one would like to think rely on that labor.
Dr. Sarah Taber with a tweet thread, while QRTing a Guardian article talking about prison labor as a way to shore up the "labor shortage," which is really just a shortage of people willing to work for a not-livable wage with little to no benefits:
I was tweeting years ago about how criminalizing everything-> using prison labor for everything was going to be A Growing Problem, BECAUSE I HAD SPENT YEARS WORKING WITH PRISON LABOR CREWS THAT A LOT OF FARMS ALREADY RELY ON.
I saw all the economics at work.
In person.
Click through for the whole thread, lots of good observations that I am not posting because of length and copying text from Twitter on mobile is a pain.
NEW: Two NYPD cops had sex with a vulnerable teen member of the police youth program, taking advantage of the underage girl to “satisfy their depraved interests,” an internal department judge has ruled.
Both cops had denied the allegations and remained on the force at full pay until they were fired on March 25 — four years after the allegations were reported to the Brooklyn DA, the NYPD’s IAB, according to records.
Neither officer was ever criminally charged.
Even when you face consequences as a cop they aren't the same consequences as us normal folk.
I was a member of the police explorer program in my youth, and it was really good and informed me a lot about law enforcement, general police work and procedures that I think everyone should receive basic knowledge of in school. That said, we found out it was that good, specifically because one officer said when he was a kid in the program it was so fucking awful and not this but similar bullshit was happening and they wanted to change it.
I still recommend the program, but I saw a lot of vulnerable kids in the membership. Know what your kids are doing as parents, please be involved. Sadly, it's all up to the officers in charge of the precincts program.
Edit: What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
DiannaoChong on
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
One wonders what the number of innocent people who accept a plea bargain because a bunch of bullshit charges are thrown at them is. Bet it's infuriatingly large minority.
Fixed that for you.
Would wager a significant sum that the percentage of people arrested who are coerced into a plea deal, and the percentage of people for whom the DA drops charges, have a substantial colour correlation.
Analyzing more than 30,000 Wisconsin cases over a seven-year period, the study found significant racial disparities in the plea-bargaining process. White defendants were 25 percent more likely than Black defendants to have their most serious initial charge dropped or reduced to a less severe charge; Black defendants were more likely than whites to be convicted of their highest initial charge. As a result, white defendants who faced initial felony charges were approximately 15 percent more likely than similar Black defendants to be convicted of a misdemeanor instead. White defendants with no prior convictions were over 25 percent more likely than Black defendants with no prior convictions to receive a charge reduction.
The disparities were even greater in misdemeanor cases. White people facing misdemeanor charges were nearly 75 percent more likely than Black people to have all charges carrying potential imprisonment dropped, dismissed, or reduced to lesser charges. White defendants charged with misdemeanors who had no prior criminal history were 46 percent more likely than similar Black defendants to have all charges carrying a potential sentence dropped or reduced to charges that carry no potential imprisonment.
What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
Places are making laws that outlaw sleeping outside or in one's vehicle essentially anywhere the cops deem to be of "public interest" or similar phrasing.
Edit: What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
The justices left in place a 2018 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that fining or jailing homeless people for staying outside or in unauthorized places if a bed at an emergency shelter is not available is unconstitutional. The city had appealed that ruling, arguing that the decision threatened public health and safety.
NEW: Two NYPD cops had sex with a vulnerable teen member of the police youth program, taking advantage of the underage girl to “satisfy their depraved interests,” an internal department judge has ruled.
Both cops had denied the allegations and remained on the force at full pay until they were fired on March 25 — four years after the allegations were reported to the Brooklyn DA, the NYPD’s IAB, according to records.
Neither officer was ever criminally charged.
Even when you face consequences as a cop they aren't the same consequences as us normal folk.
I was a member of the police explorer program in my youth, and it was really good and informed me a lot about law enforcement, general police work and procedures that I think everyone should receive basic knowledge of in school. That said, we found out it was that good, specifically because one officer said when he was a kid in the program it was so fucking awful and not this but similar bullshit was happening and they wanted to change it.
I still recommend the program, but I saw a lot of vulnerable kids in the membership. Know what your kids are doing as parents, please be involved. Sadly, it's all up to the officers in charge of the precincts program.
Edit: What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
Alternatively: Don't, ever, talk to the fucking cops.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
Yes, but by the very nature of the program these people are police so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
Yes, but by the very nature of the program these people are police so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
No, it seems directly applicable to the specific program in question. The poster even provided a direct and personal example of that fact.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
Yes, but by the very nature of the program these people are police so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
No, it seems directly applicable to the specific program in question. The poster even provided a direct and personal example of that fact.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
Yes, but by the very nature of the program these people are police so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
No, it seems directly applicable to the specific program in question. The poster even provided a direct and personal example of that fact.
Well, a direct personal example of the fact that he wasn't abused, and the person was very nice to him and totally seemed like a good guy who would never do that sort of thing.
So, rather than trying to fix any of that, what I'm hearing is that DAs and PDs should have similar resources, provided by the .gov (who is supposed to have an interest in justice, not just winning). I also think it would not be a TERRIBLE idea (but I could be wrong) to require all DA's to spend an equal amount of time working as PDs (and if we're going to have winning cases as a metric, have it there too).
It's always amazed me that you can pay for legal representation, it seems like something that should only be provided, for free, by the government.
When the government is the one who is charging and prosecuting you, on behalf of themselves, its nice to have the option to not be reliant on them for your defense too.
But absolutely, DA's should have to take rotations as PDs, and the PD office should ostensibly be getting more funding than the DA office, seeing as the DA has the Police working for them, and the PD's would need to hire investigators of their own.
The current design so transparently advantages economic privilege that it is just accepted that someone can hire a better lawyer and get out of crimes. Or that to receive justice you need a certain level of money, and the more money, the more justice.
I think there shouldn't be a distinction between PD and DA. One job where you are randomly assigned defendant or prosecutor each case
Antinumeric on
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
NEW: Two NYPD cops had sex with a vulnerable teen member of the police youth program, taking advantage of the underage girl to “satisfy their depraved interests,” an internal department judge has ruled.
Both cops had denied the allegations and remained on the force at full pay until they were fired on March 25 — four years after the allegations were reported to the Brooklyn DA, the NYPD’s IAB, according to records.
Neither officer was ever criminally charged.
Even when you face consequences as a cop they aren't the same consequences as us normal folk.
I was a member of the police explorer program in my youth, and it was really good and informed me a lot about law enforcement, general police work and procedures that I think everyone should receive basic knowledge of in school. That said, we found out it was that good, specifically because one officer said when he was a kid in the program it was so fucking awful and not this but similar bullshit was happening and they wanted to change it.
I still recommend the program, but I saw a lot of vulnerable kids in the membership. Know what your kids are doing as parents, please be involved. Sadly, it's all up to the officers in charge of the precincts program.
Edit: What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
Alternatively: Don't, ever, talk to the fucking cops.
I was around when that video first popped up on these forums, you can probably find a post by me agreeing with that video more than a decade ago. And its 100% right. And before it popped up in these forums, they directly taught us things like this, and what you do and dont have to do in traffic stops, etc. Things that if people understood as common knowledge, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. The lack of knowledge that the average person knows about the systems that govern them leads to a complacency where they assume in an issue, the officer did the right thing.
The program has you interacting with police and members of the justice system (public defenders, incarcerated speakers serving community service, prosecutors, judges, techs, analysts, not just police). It's mostly lecture and activity based, if you wanted to stay silent the whole time you could. It's mostly lectures and access to things like local radio codes and samples of training for different disciplines(broader CSI,maintenance for dogs/horses/vehicles, gun safety, photography,lab equipment). It gave us, as kids, access to technology the public would not have seen for decades (night vision and heat cameras) otherwise because of the connections involved.
Divesting police out of the local community, that they should be interacting with and protecting, leads to bad places. We are seeing the effects of that now. Pushing groups of people out of society isn't going to help any kind of future relations with the public and worsens the 'us vs them' mentality. Ride along programs are good, police explorers as a program in good faith, are good. It educates the public about how and what the police do, and the justice system at large. They organize experts, speakers, and mock trials recreations with real lawyers and judges for the public to sit in on and ask questions, and do volunteer work. It's a community service program.
We should absolutely be holding officers to a higher standard, and those cops should have been charged. But what happened there can happen in any power structure with children involved in a community org. My advice about involvement and noping out if theres red flags applies to knitting circles, too.
It's weird to respond to a story that says cops raped minors who joined the minors-joining-cops pipeline by saying you saw a bunch of vulnerable minors in the program, but also you still recommend minors join cops in their program?
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
Vulnerable people are not necessarily people taken advantage of. The other kids I had seen that were in a bad place, had a place to go because of the program, and were inspired by the program to seek out a future(not directly in police work). They also weren't in worse situations because they had, essentially, a place to go weekly that gave them support if they needed it.
So, rather than trying to fix any of that, what I'm hearing is that DAs and PDs should have similar resources, provided by the .gov (who is supposed to have an interest in justice, not just winning). I also think it would not be a TERRIBLE idea (but I could be wrong) to require all DA's to spend an equal amount of time working as PDs (and if we're going to have winning cases as a metric, have it there too).
It's always amazed me that you can pay for legal representation, it seems like something that should only be provided, for free, by the government.
When the government is the one who is charging and prosecuting you, on behalf of themselves, its nice to have the option to not be reliant on them for your defense too.
But absolutely, DA's should have to take rotations as PDs, and the PD office should ostensibly be getting more funding than the DA office, seeing as the DA has the Police working for them, and the PD's would need to hire investigators of their own.
The current design so transparently advantages economic privilege that it is just accepted that someone can hire a better lawyer and get out of crimes. Or that to receive justice you need a certain level of money, and the more money, the more justice.
I think there shouldn't be a distinction between PD and DA. One job where you are randomly assigned defendant or prosecutor each case
This was kind of my point about homelessness laws, 9th circuit(from the example above) can say whatever it wants, but when Officer Smith arrests 50 homeless people and the public defender cant possibly keep up, they are going to get plea deals and not court dates citing precedent. People still get arrested for burning flags and that was a monumental supreme court case. The homeless are going to have a hard time getting restitution from the state for abuses on being maliciously charged.
I think going "if only the people would act better around police we wouldn't be having these problems" is... wrong. To say the least.
If you are replying to me, I didnt say "people need to be nicer to police" I said "dont exile a group of people and expect relations with a community to get better"
I think going "if only the people would act better around police we wouldn't be having these problems" is... wrong. To say the least.
If you are replying to me, I didnt say "people need to be nicer to police" I said "dont exile a group of people and expect relations with a community to get better"
Talking about this party in particular:
And before it popped up in these forums, they directly taught us things like this, and what you do and dont have to do in traffic stops, etc. Things that if people understood as common knowledge, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. The lack of knowledge that the average person knows about the systems that govern them leads to a complacency where they assume in an issue, the officer did the right thing.
I think going "if only the people would act better around police we wouldn't be having these problems" is... wrong. To say the least.
If you are replying to me, I didnt say "people need to be nicer to police" I said "dont exile a group of people and expect relations with a community to get better"
Talking about this party in particular:
And before it popped up in these forums, they directly taught us things like this, and what you do and dont have to do in traffic stops, etc. Things that if people understood as common knowledge, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. The lack of knowledge that the average person knows about the systems that govern them leads to a complacency where they assume in an issue, the officer did the right thing.
I'm not sure how to phrase this without it seeming mean, but, that really obviously doesn't say what you're saying it said? And it's really weird that you didn't realize that even on revisiting it and extracting it as a quote?
It's suggesting that people who understand what police are supposed to be doing would be less likely to give police the benefit of the doubt when they act maliciously.
I think going "if only the people would act better around police we wouldn't be having these problems" is... wrong. To say the least.
If you are replying to me, I didnt say "people need to be nicer to police" I said "dont exile a group of people and expect relations with a community to get better"
Talking about this party in particular:
And before it popped up in these forums, they directly taught us things like this, and what you do and dont have to do in traffic stops, etc. Things that if people understood as common knowledge, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. The lack of knowledge that the average person knows about the systems that govern them leads to a complacency where they assume in an issue, the officer did the right thing.
I was reading that part as “if the average person knew the shit cops got up to, they wouldn’t be so quick to assume the officer is in the right”.
I was reading that as "the things that police tell people they need to do when they are pilled over by police, so the police don't murder them. Wouldn't we be in a better place if more black people knew this so they wouldn't be so frequently murdered by police."
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
There isn’t a thing you can do if a cop decides it’s time for you to die, because there’s no accountability.
Charles Kinsey was laying on the ground with his hands in the air and a cop shot him and killed him. Oh, just by the way, the cop was found guilty. Of a misdemeanor. And is still a cop from what I can tell.
Trying to tell people they shouldn’t do whatever to cops lest they feel the wrath feels a lot like telling a battered spouse that if they just behaved better maybe their partner wouldn’t beat them.
The last decade has made me terrified of the police. There's nothing to stop then from killing you at any time and there's no mechanism for any punishment after the fact. They can do whatever they want to you at any time.
I was pulled over for speeding maybe two years ago. The second time I've ever been pulled over in twenty years of driving.
After pulling over I immediately rolled down my window, turned off the car and put both hands outside of the window so he could see them. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I wanted him to be able to see my hands at all times and I didn't want him to kill me.
One wonders what the number of innocent people who accept a plea bargain because a bunch of bullshit charges are thrown at them is. Bet it's infuriatingly large.
This is the core of the innocence project, isn't it? People who were innocent and took a plea that bought them 40 to life instead of a capital case.
Hell, when we know someone has been wrongfully convicted we STILL dangle "cop to this lesser plea for time served so we can get you out of jail" and if they don't take the deal we LEAVE THEM IN JAIL while the prosecutor decides whether or not to try again. And when they take the deal just to make the injustice stop, we go ahead and treat them like a felon forever anyway.
The last decade has made me terrified of the police. There's nothing to stop then from killing you at any time and there's no mechanism for any punishment after the fact. They can do whatever they want to you at any time.
There isn’t a thing you can do if a cop decides it’s time for you to die, because there’s no accountability.
Charles Kinsey was laying on the ground with his hands in the air and a cop shot him and killed him. Oh, just by the way, the cop was found guilty. Of a misdemeanor. And is still a cop from what I can tell.
Trying to tell people they shouldn’t do whatever to cops lest they feel the wrath feels a lot like telling a battered spouse that if they just behaved better maybe their partner wouldn’t beat them.
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That said, I don't think a plea deal should be on the table for every offense. There are a number of offenses that should just straight up not be offenses and probably a number of offenses where the punishment is just straight unreasonable bullshit. So in principle you do away with a bunch of the tyrannical petty puritan nonsense and you probably end up in a system where the plea deal just isn't really attractive because if you get found guilty, the punishment will no longer destroy your life and well also we won't be wasting a ton of time on prosecuting crimes that petty asswipes put forwards as being crimes (plus that is very pertinent to this thread is that's also less bullshit that racist pig cops can just arbitrarily charge people with based on skin color or how fucking petty the officer is feeling).
Also if you get those down to reasonable levels. It gets fairly easy to have a rule where you don't get to plea deal minor offenses. Again, since what's left of those will no longer fucking destroy someone, like I don't know, we don't send someone to jail for 5 years because it's their 3rd time getting caught stealing a 99 cent candy bar. People won't feel the need to plea deal. If they know they are fucked, they'll just plead guilty and pay the fine or schedule the community service (IMO if you take the ability to plea deal off the table, it's likely an offense that you can't justify jail time for anyways).
I know someone will say, but Mill, that just means more people will fight their case. To that I respond, good, if someone feels they didn't violate the law, let them make their case. Given the amount of bullshit we've seen, where minorities get reamed every step of the way. If someone can't royally fuck their lives over, then they'll be less likely to make petty charges. If people are more likely to argue their case in court, maybe that will force cops to think twice before they arrest someone for not respecting their petty fucking egos. Maybe the risk of racking up a record where 70% or more of the people you charge get off the hook, will either result in some law enforcement being less shit or maybe their community will finally get rid of them. If the concern is that those extra cases will suck up even more resources, well hire more judges and give more public funding to public defense divisions. Alternatively, maybe we should be less gung-ho about selecting prosecutors and law enforcement personnel that see their work being all about how many people they can put behind bars, rather than doing what's best for their community, which is put less people in prison, fix social problems and actually go after the real criminals. Another alternative, is again to revisit your laws and determine if it's really worth the resources to enforce the law or if it's just a waste of fucking time that is meant to be dickish towards members of society that have little means to fuck back against true injustice.
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
This compounds the issue of plea bargains as a way around due process because prosecutors can just stack on violation after violation, many of them variations on the same broken law, to make it so that people feel they need to take the bergain because otherwise they'll either get found guilty of SOMETHING, or if they add a bunch of them together even minor violations can stack up into major punishments, and the second is the presumption that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That might work more or less in a common-law system that only really penalizes a relatively narrow field of behaviors that are broadly agreed societally are wrong (murder, theft, assault, etc.) but in our current system it is so incredibly easy to run afoul of some obscure or poorly worded law or regulation that for the common citizen, there is an unfounded presumption that we should all know the law when the number of laws has reached the dizzying point where you'd need your own legal department to keep a handle on everything that might be illegal or not.
This empowers officers and prosecutors with the enormous discretion to prosecute or not prosecute based pretty much just on their own whims. I was reading an old article the other day about a man who was arrested and charged under a poorly written computer fraud act written in the late 70's and last amended in the mid 90's, for leeching wifi from a cafe. Not just a civil charge, a "stop leeching our bandwidth" but a state and federal crime for doing something people do all the time that can result in a five year sentence and 10k in fines. In the particular case the judge was lenient because he had no idea he was breaking the law so they 'only' gave him 40 hours of community service and a 400 dollar fine. And that was only and totally at the discretion of the justice system.
I want to quote something I think is emblematic of the problem from that article here
"Coincidentally, the cafe owner that Peterson was leeching WiFi off of didn't even realize that what Peterson was doing was a crime at the time. Neither did the police officer. "I had a feeling a law was being broken, but I didn't know exactly what," Sparta police chief Andrew Milanowski told the TV station. "
In a system like this, how can we fail to have an utterly corrupt and unaccountable system. When the police can arrest you based on the suspicion that what you're doing might break the law, even if they don't know which one or how, and whether and how much to charge you and for what is completely at the discretion of utterly callous prosecutors offices who care more about their stats than actually accomplishing anything. Frankly, genuine ignorance of the law should be an excuse, at least for crimes outside the core of basic societal laws (again, theft, murder, rape, assault. These basics.) and there should be an absolute limit to how many crimes you can charge someone with at once to make sure you pick very carefully what crimes you want to accuse someone of. Simply stacking on accusations in the hopes that the sheer weight of it will crush your opposition, or something will eventually stick, makes a mockery of the idea of justice in this country.
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Fixed that for you.
Would wager a significant sum that the percentage of people arrested who are coerced into a plea deal, and the percentage of people for whom the DA drops charges, have a substantial colour correlation. Though the colour probably most important, is green.
If you can afford a decent attorney, that means the prosecution has to devote time to a case, and risks losing it, and conviction rates are important for advancement (another shitty metric).
Bingo. Poor people have to make do with public defenders, who are extremely good at their jobs by dint of having a metric boatload of cases constantly but no time to mount proper defenses for them because they have a metric boatload of cases constantly. There's a perverse incentive to keeping them deprived of the resources they need to be effective.
It's always amazed me that you can pay for legal representation, it seems like something that should only be provided, for free, by the government.
When the government is the one who is charging and prosecuting you, on behalf of themselves, its nice to have the option to not be reliant on them for your defense too.
But absolutely, DA's should have to take rotations as PDs, and the PD office should ostensibly be getting more funding than the DA office, seeing as the DA has the Police working for them, and the PD's would need to hire investigators of their own.
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The real answer is to make being a PD more attractive a job so that people who would become corporate lawyers and DA's have an alternative option that is good beyond "everyone deserves representation".
*edit* I think every DA should have to be pulled from PDs though.
Dr. Sarah Taber with a tweet thread, while QRTing a Guardian article talking about prison labor as a way to shore up the "labor shortage," which is really just a shortage of people willing to work for a not-livable wage with little to no benefits:
Click through for the whole thread, lots of good observations that I am not posting because of length and copying text from Twitter on mobile is a pain.
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I was a member of the police explorer program in my youth, and it was really good and informed me a lot about law enforcement, general police work and procedures that I think everyone should receive basic knowledge of in school. That said, we found out it was that good, specifically because one officer said when he was a kid in the program it was so fucking awful and not this but similar bullshit was happening and they wanted to change it.
I still recommend the program, but I saw a lot of vulnerable kids in the membership. Know what your kids are doing as parents, please be involved. Sadly, it's all up to the officers in charge of the precincts program.
Edit: What is changing/passing about laws about homelessness? I thought it was a pretty blanket law across America already that being homeless was illegal.
Indeed. Didn't take long to find a study.
Research Finds Evidence of Racial Bias in Plea Deals
Places are making laws that outlaw sleeping outside or in one's vehicle essentially anywhere the cops deem to be of "public interest" or similar phrasing.
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Not in the 9th circuit at present. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-homelessness/u-s-supreme-court-leaves-in-place-ruling-barring-prosecution-of-homeless-idUSKBN1YK1EA
Alternatively: Don't, ever, talk to the fucking cops.
And I don't think that is what you intended to say, but I don't k ow how else to read it
"Programs that help minors can be good or bad entirely based on who is running them" seems a perfectly coherent point.
Yes, but by the very nature of the program these people are police so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
No, it seems directly applicable to the specific program in question. The poster even provided a direct and personal example of that fact.
yes but shryke you see
Well, a direct personal example of the fact that he wasn't abused, and the person was very nice to him and totally seemed like a good guy who would never do that sort of thing.
Oh, I was serious about the punchline and content/message of the joke. The last people who should be around children are the police.
The current design so transparently advantages economic privilege that it is just accepted that someone can hire a better lawyer and get out of crimes. Or that to receive justice you need a certain level of money, and the more money, the more justice.
I think there shouldn't be a distinction between PD and DA. One job where you are randomly assigned defendant or prosecutor each case
I was around when that video first popped up on these forums, you can probably find a post by me agreeing with that video more than a decade ago. And its 100% right. And before it popped up in these forums, they directly taught us things like this, and what you do and dont have to do in traffic stops, etc. Things that if people understood as common knowledge, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. The lack of knowledge that the average person knows about the systems that govern them leads to a complacency where they assume in an issue, the officer did the right thing.
The program has you interacting with police and members of the justice system (public defenders, incarcerated speakers serving community service, prosecutors, judges, techs, analysts, not just police). It's mostly lecture and activity based, if you wanted to stay silent the whole time you could. It's mostly lectures and access to things like local radio codes and samples of training for different disciplines(broader CSI,maintenance for dogs/horses/vehicles, gun safety, photography,lab equipment). It gave us, as kids, access to technology the public would not have seen for decades (night vision and heat cameras) otherwise because of the connections involved.
Divesting police out of the local community, that they should be interacting with and protecting, leads to bad places. We are seeing the effects of that now. Pushing groups of people out of society isn't going to help any kind of future relations with the public and worsens the 'us vs them' mentality. Ride along programs are good, police explorers as a program in good faith, are good. It educates the public about how and what the police do, and the justice system at large. They organize experts, speakers, and mock trials recreations with real lawyers and judges for the public to sit in on and ask questions, and do volunteer work. It's a community service program.
We should absolutely be holding officers to a higher standard, and those cops should have been charged. But what happened there can happen in any power structure with children involved in a community org. My advice about involvement and noping out if theres red flags applies to knitting circles, too.
Vulnerable people are not necessarily people taken advantage of. The other kids I had seen that were in a bad place, had a place to go because of the program, and were inspired by the program to seek out a future(not directly in police work). They also weren't in worse situations because they had, essentially, a place to go weekly that gave them support if they needed it.
This was kind of my point about homelessness laws, 9th circuit(from the example above) can say whatever it wants, but when Officer Smith arrests 50 homeless people and the public defender cant possibly keep up, they are going to get plea deals and not court dates citing precedent. People still get arrested for burning flags and that was a monumental supreme court case. The homeless are going to have a hard time getting restitution from the state for abuses on being maliciously charged.
The police destroy or confiscate what little possessions homeless people have when they arrest them. It's an affront to dignity and basic morality.
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If you are replying to me, I didnt say "people need to be nicer to police" I said "dont exile a group of people and expect relations with a community to get better"
Talking about this party in particular:
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I'm not sure how to phrase this without it seeming mean, but, that really obviously doesn't say what you're saying it said? And it's really weird that you didn't realize that even on revisiting it and extracting it as a quote?
It's suggesting that people who understand what police are supposed to be doing would be less likely to give police the benefit of the doubt when they act maliciously.
I was reading that part as “if the average person knew the shit cops got up to, they wouldn’t be so quick to assume the officer is in the right”.
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Charles Kinsey was laying on the ground with his hands in the air and a cop shot him and killed him. Oh, just by the way, the cop was found guilty. Of a misdemeanor. And is still a cop from what I can tell.
Trying to tell people they shouldn’t do whatever to cops lest they feel the wrath feels a lot like telling a battered spouse that if they just behaved better maybe their partner wouldn’t beat them.
I was pulled over for speeding maybe two years ago. The second time I've ever been pulled over in twenty years of driving.
After pulling over I immediately rolled down my window, turned off the car and put both hands outside of the window so he could see them. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I wanted him to be able to see my hands at all times and I didn't want him to kill me.
This is the core of the innocence project, isn't it? People who were innocent and took a plea that bought them 40 to life instead of a capital case.
Hell, when we know someone has been wrongfully convicted we STILL dangle "cop to this lesser plea for time served so we can get you out of jail" and if they don't take the deal we LEAVE THEM IN JAIL while the prosecutor decides whether or not to try again. And when they take the deal just to make the injustice stop, we go ahead and treat them like a felon forever anyway.
It's literally absolute power. And, well.
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Kinsey survived.
But yeah.