–Leslie < Fish

I don’t know what reality the Supremes live in but it surely is not this one!

But the bigger issue is never the evil of any particular person, procedure, or law. It is in how the system responds to such evils. When a system does its damnedest to hide the evils within, when it refuses to correct those evils it cannot evade acknowledging, the system itself is evil. No amount of effort to correct particular evils can do anything to change an evil system to a good system. Such efforts are not merely futile, they divert those who care from addressing the evil system itself.

Focus on the system itself, figure out ways to purge it of its evil, and such evils as mandatory minimums will go away with the evil of the system. But focus on mandatory minimums (or any other particular evil) and, even if you manage to get rid of them, you’ll merely find that the system has generated new evils that are as bad or worse than the evil you vanquished.

After the Tonya Craft acquittal, I talked to an official with the Georgia State Bar about the conduct and actions of the prosecutors. She told me pretty much that the bar let prosecutors do whatever they wanted, and if they lied, suborned perjury and broke all or most of the rules of conduct, that was just fine with her.

By closing the door of redress to ordinary citizens actually wronged by prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, the Supreme Court put the processes of discipline into the hands of the peers of prosecutors and judges. Guess what? People in that system look out for one another.

And I should feel bad for this guy?

Rational people will read what I typed, of course.

@24 – A good description of Japan’s legal system.

Leon, in his haste to show how suprerior he is to us dumb Americans, rather stupidly failed to notice that this post is about US Attorneys, who are in fact appointed, and not elected. Never let a bout of xenophobia get in the way of the truth, however.

—

This is why I don’t buy the argument about how “the legal system is adversarial by design, and competition ensures that the right side wins.” It conjures up sportsmanlike images, a professional basketball game. If so, in this game:
1. There are still 10 players on the court; 8 from the home team, 2 from the visitors
2. The home team’s center is also the referee
3. The visitors must score in a regulation basketball hoop, set at 15 feet rather than 10. The home team scores in any of 3 hockey nets set at ground level around the court.
4. During each game, the home team will receive one dozen “Get Out Of Penalty Free” cards, plus one additional card per minute of play. Upon being called for any foul, they may use one card and resume play without penalty. They also have the option to use two, and transfer the penalty to the visitors.
5. The penalty for all visitor fouls (or those transferred to them) will consist of 3 free throws by the home team, and automatic home team possession.
6. The penalty for all non-transferred home team fouls will be a 1-yard penalty, and home team possession (whether or not they were on offense or defense at the time of the foul).
7. Gameplay ends at the discretion of the home team – at any point after the 2-minute mark, they may elect to end the game. There is no maximum game duration.

When prosecutors have the right to chase any case they want, they’ll do this. When they are professionals, following a set of rules on bringing charges – which they have to prove to a magistrate or judge they have followed…

Mandatory minimums give prosecutors a very heavy hammer to hold over the head of defendants. Defendants take the plea, resulting in more people in prison, and NO NEED for the prosecution to prove a damned thing. If we could remove this handy-dandy tool for the prosecution, they would have to work a lot harder and they would probably be taken to trial more often. It wouldn’t fix everything, granted.

There is any number of things wrong with the system but when there is that much wrong with the system, the system itself IS broken. Otherwise, I agree with you: government doesn’t care about principle.

The US justice system has taken the pages straight from the Soviet playbook from the use of coerced plea deals to the staging of show-trials.

Comrade Stalin would be envious of the US justice system as even at the height of his depraved tyrannical power the Soviet gulag archipelago imprisoned 1.3 million human beings (1953) compared to the US gulag archipelago imprisoning 2.3 million human beings (2011, Local 735,000, State 1.4 million, Federal 220,000).

The fundamental problem with the criminal justice system isn’t in the system itself; the problem is that it is a part of a government that has long since ceased to care about principle and which has no goal other than serving itself. Unless the government is brought to heel, fixing specific government abuses will be about as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Until we get rid of mandatory minimum sentences, the prosecutor holds all the cards and the defense attorney has little power.

I thought it was “bad money drives good money out of the system” because people hoard the good money, thereby removing it from circulation.

I was trying (and eventually failed) to prove a legal point that could have helped my petition and chanced to read a few cases on kidnapping. After awhile, it sunk in on me that what I was alleged to have done *was not a kidnapping*.

Well, being in prison I had lots of time on my hands. So, I read *every last kidnapping case in LexisNexis*. Sure enough, not only was I correct in my conclusion, but a couple of courts had issued directly relevant rulings that said that the allegations of my case would not support a kidnapping charge.

Well, I Am Not A Lawyer, and I’m sure that any legal types reading this are likely to pooh-pooh my conclusion as the wishful thinking of a disappointed habeas corpus petitioner.

Well, poo on you! I *do* have a lawyer who agrees with me: my per–uh–prosecutor.

The prosecutor in my case said, in a letter she wrote to my lawyer, that the allegations of my case would not support a kidnapping charge. I have that letter.

She said this just about a week before she agreed to let me plead guilty to kidnapping. Why did she do that about-face? Because in that week I decided that, regardless of my lawyer’s advice, I would not plead guilty to a sexual offense. So, the two of them (I assume) cooked up the idea of a kidnapping plea. They could tell me that my actions were a kidnapping and I would have no way to know any better. And they could count on the court to not look too closely at the law if both lawyers told it that I had committed a kidnapping. Right on both points, unfortunately.

I passed that to the courts, too. The courts didn’t care, any more than they cared about my lawyer’s failure to investigate.

And this time the Supreme Court was one of the criminals.

(Normally, the Supremes can dodge doing justice by refusing to look at a case. However, my case was in an odd legal position in which I could, and did, require a Justice to issue a ruling. Justice Ginsburg first denied my application. I passed it to Thomas, who passed it to the whole court, which then denied my application. So, in this case, I know for a fact that at least five Supreme Court “Justices” ignored the law in order to subvert justice.)

Not “(Good money drives bad money out of circulation if the two have the same face value)”

but

“(Bad money drives good money out of circulation if the two have the same face value)”

I’m sure it is just a typo. Anyone who calls out Gresham’s Law probably knows what it says :-).

llater,

llamas

Think of it as a form of Gresham’s Law (Good money drives bad money out of circulation if the two have the same face value) in the “justice” system.

With examples like Nifong out there it’s really hard to argue against what your saying.
But my personal experience has been more of blind plodding procedure, the conveyor belt/wood chipper of ‘justice’ and good intentions, bad actions, and rationalizations after the fact than blind psychotic ambition.