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This Week’s Crime Column: What Wasn’t Covered at the Sotomayor Hearings
Monday, July 20th, 2009This week, my criminal justice column for Reason looks at how last week’s Sotomayor hearings showed there’s no real national debate on what protections the Constitution should afford criminal defendants. If you’re a national politician, there’s really only one acceptable position on crime: We need to get tougher on it.
Except Jim Webb.
We really went down hill when the court allowed D.U.I. road blocks due to the ‘tragedy ‘ of D.U.I.Now we know very few drunk drivers are stopped in these and in many none.They have expanded as a way to fight the drug war as as a means of revenue in tickets that would have not been written otherwise.If your stopped and exersise your rights to remain silent and ask for a attorney your considered guilty.We also have seen many accepted forensic methods to be science and their are even questions about fingerprints.Much of this is pushed aside in order to convict the guilty,many of which have done no harm besides smoking a plant.Sex and hate crimes have been expanded,or created,so anyone who thinks and writes those those thoughts could be subject to years in prison.I see no end in sight
junk science that is
“We need to get tougher on it.”
Taliban here we come!
@ #2: That’s all very scary, so I don’t know why your post makes me think the real danger to society is improper spelling and punctuation. ;-)
Tougher on crime (real crimes with real non consenting victims), yes!
This bullshit the politicians and police play with tough on the innocent by screwing them over and making them criminals, hell no.
I’ve been told here in Florida that the criminal court judges in one county actually jointly own a private prison and often the people they sentence end up making them money from the state. How the fuck is that not a conflict of interests?
I agree, there wasn’t nearly enough discussion of the rights of the accused. There also wasn’t enough discussion of executive power, particularly in the realm of national security.
I’m not sure these statistics – “ruled for the government in 83% of immigration cases, in 92% of criminal cases.” – are very enlightening, though. The government tends not to bring criminal cases to trial without strong evidence. They tend to plead the iffier ones out rather than take the chance on an acquittal. It would be interesting to see the figures for Sotomayor compared to those of the courts as a whole.
Another home run Radley. These weekly columns are fantastic.
It’s so sad to me that topics that have a profound, visceral impact on the lives of citizens can be reduced to political third rails and lip service. These people really don’t care one bit about reality; it’s all just one gigantic game. I’ll go with my mainest man McNulty, from back in season 1:
If only half you motherfuckers in the State’s Attorney’s office didn’t want to be judges, didn’t want to be partners in some downtown law firm, if half of you had the fucking balls to follow through you know what would happen? A guy like that would be indicted, tried and convicted. And the rest of them would back up enough so we could push a clean case or two through your courthouse. But no; everybody stays friends, everybody gets paid, and everybody’s got a fucking future.
“Tougher on crime (real crimes with real non consenting victims), yes!”
We dont necessarily need to get “tougher” on that crime either. We have some of the harshest sentences around. What we need to do is get smarter in how we deal with the offenders. Other countries have figured out how to do this.
“I’ve been told here in Florida that the criminal court judges in one county actually jointly own a private prison and often the people they sentence end up making them money from the state. How the fuck is that not a conflict of interests?”
It is. There was a case where juveniles were being sentenced to a facility where the judges who sentenced them were getting kickbacks. Radley covered the story here.
The government tends not to bring criminal cases to trial without strong evidence. They tend to plead the iffier ones out rather than take the chance on an acquittal.
You’re right on that, joe. The ability of prosecutors to pile on charges to make going to trial a gigantic risk is the area where the accused really get screwed in our justice system. It all but guarantees that innocent people will have to take some sort of deal while guilty parties have nothing to lose.
I don’t expect any real debate though, as for most people “accused= guilty”.
Do you watch any of the law and order type shows? At the end of the day, the police & prosecutors always solve the puzzle, always get it right, and the trial is only there to provide a bit of suspense by occasionally acquitting the criminal for one reason or another.
I used to watch a lot of those types of shows before I broke out of my slave-mode thinking. Several hundred episodes at least. Not once did an innocent guy get acquitted. Guilty guys would get acquitted occasionally, due to technicalities, such as having evidence thrown out for illegal searches. Innocent guys would very occasionally get convicted (and then a prosecutor or policeman invariably played the hero by quickly finding evidence of such and then working tirelessly to get him released). But not once was a person acquitted and then shown to be innocent, to remind anybody of why the hell we do trials at all instead of just throwing people in prison on the prosecutor’s say-so.
I’d bet money that this is one of the single biggest causes for the accused = guilty mentality, and why I utterly detest these types of shows nowadays.
I’d bet money that this is one of the single biggest causes for the accused = guilty mentality, and why I utterly detest these types of shows nowadays.
Might be a chicken/egg argument. Being accused has always been good enough to ruin someone’s reputation.
And I can remember at least one Law & Order that dealt with an innocent man who’d been sent to prison. Unfortunately, upon release, he began killing the victims of his arresting officers other cases for revenge his years of been raped and beaten in prison, before being killed himself by police. Not sure what the message is supposed to be there. :) I’d like to think it was a swipe at how bad the prison system is, something like “Yeah, we screwed up, but once you’re in the system, you become too dangerous to let out.”
Or at least pass more legislation to produce more crimes andf criminals and then pass legislation to “save” the people from the evils.
Tiocfaidh ar la!