“If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death”

That should give an incentive to only bring cases that he is pretty sure he can win.

Note the shift here between “costing PROSECUTORS” something and “the STATE is on the hook.” While prosecutors are immune, police are not — but what difference does it make to police, since their bills are covered by the taxpayers anyway?

The Grand jury, the one that hands down the indictment, is SUPPOSED to be the first line of defense for the people. It is time to charge the GJs with the requirement that they are to REALLY evaluate the claim of the government.

All too often government agents lie in order to get indictments. As a lawyer I know says, “In most locales, one can indict a ham sandwich for murder.” If that simple statement is not an indictment of our broken system, nothing is.

I hope everyone here knows that in most states one has no self-incrimination protections from a Grand Jury. You cannot go before them and not answer questions.

There is no such thing at the federal level as immunity. There is no grant to Congress to grant immunity. But then Congress only has the Constitutional authority to exact punishments for about 6 crimes. All the other federal crimes are not Constitutional. Don’t believe me. Go read your Constitution and explain WHY there are specific grants of punishment power if Congress has blanket authority to punish as they new seem to believe they do. And the Courts don’t have the legitimate authority to say Congress has any powers that are not explicitly granted. Grasp how our system was designed to work and you will understand.

On that note…http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/04/david-friedman-and-murray-rothbard-on.html

I would say any time there is police action that causes injury or economic loss (say, the police search your office or home, tearing it all apart), they should automatically be liable for full restitution unless they convict you of a crime serious enough to justify that action.

Likewise, if the police or prosecutors accuse you publicly of any crime, and as a result your boss fires you or your landlord evicts you, you should be entitled to damages for defamation. The government can and should keep the identities of accused persons top-secret until conviction; so long as they don’t, an accusation is as much of a punishment as a conviction, maybe more.

And finally, if some malicious person (say, your angry soon-to-be-ex spouse) makes a false accusation, the law should not be treating the accusation as “privileged speech” — the accuser should be liable for full damages PLUS suffer all the consequences s/he tried to inflict on you. As it stands, the laws regarding domestic violence, rape, and child molestation have set standards of proof so ridiculously low that there is an epidemic of false accusations taking place. Indeed the authors of those bills belong in jail for violating their oaths of office.

Finally, all defendants found innocent should have their lawyer bills paid by the state.

In a really just world, we’d not only get all those reforms, but the officials who committed the abuses would have to pay the damages out of their own personal pockets (taxpayers don’t deserve to have to pay them). Maybe that’s too much to ask for. But at the very least, the damages should come directly out of the prosecutor’s or police department’s current budget — thus impairing their ability to repeat the outrage, and just maybe causing their chief to think about imposing some needed constraints on his subordinates.