Go to Trial - Crash the Justice System

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html?_r=2&src=tp

by donohoe • 14 years ago

291 109 14 years ago

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, this isn't really practical.

- It requires solidarity by criminal defendants, many of whom will go to jail for a long time absent a plea agreement. It is literally, the prisoner's dilemma.

- Absent posting bail, you stay in jail until you go to trial (which can be a long time in a scenario where everyone is in fact going to trial). The "excessive bail" clause of the 8th Amendment, in practice, has been eviscerated. Bail is routinely set so high that the only way it is affordable is to pay a bondsman. This means that it's easy to punish people prior to a trial for exercising their rights. A stay in jail prior to trial can be as or more destructive than being convicted - you likely lose your job, your housing, possibly custody of your children, all without any process.

The judicial system has ~ a thousand years practice at maintaining control and getting the outcomes (overall) that the State desires. It is not a simple matter to "force" it to do anything.

tibbon• 14 years ago

Additionally, this doubts the ability of the US Justice system to keep up if its pushed. Yes, its already pretty slow and inefficient, but most other countries would probably think that it would be impossible to prosecute and detain as many people as the US already does. Just because its hard to imagine scaling the system up even more, doesn't mean they couldn't scale it.

Politics around "we need more jails to keep dangerous criminals away from your children" almost always result in more jails and more prosecution. Logic rarely prevails. I feel confident that the US would just attempt (unfortunately) to double their capacity.

monsterix• 14 years ago

"Logic rarely prevails" --> That comment reminded me of a piece on incarceration:

http://www.pluggd.in/incarceration-the-extreme-end-of-social...

Isn't it surprising that there are so many ideas floating around to disrupt Hollywood, transform other forms of Governance, disrupt traditional business models but no-one talks about forcing change in law/judiciary itself.

At best, a startup would talk about saving a few hundred dollars in legal fees through some free advice/content on Google. Why is this so?

DennisP3• 14 years ago

But it would cost a lot to scale it, so voters would have to accept a lot more taxes and/or debt. Most states are in financial difficulty already.

campnic• 14 years ago

I think this assumes that there is no concerted effort by a group of people to be arrested. If a group of people had this mission in mind and committed a crime to become incarcerated in an already overwhelmed part of the US, wouldn't that be enough to start?

I think the issue is that the word defendant carries a connotation of guilty. Even reading some of the comments on the article, people are saying that people should feel lucky to get a plea deal. Its baffling to me how it can be seen as acceptable to threaten life in prison to get someone to take a guilty plea with probation. As an innocent person I don't think I could risk it with my family hanging on the balance.

mindslight• 14 years ago

Here's a glimpse at a root of the problem:

> Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat).

"eviscerate" it? That surely couldn't happen - courts are bound to reasonable jurisprudence. So clearly we'll either end up directly fixing the problem, or we'll have to modify the constitution, which is serious business, and would clearly have to be done right.

Except we already know what will happen:

> The Supreme Court ruled that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Two unquestionably wrong decisions for the purpose of expedience - what's a third? Of course courts grant themselves ever-more power! But NYT spins it as if this system were actually accountable to the poor soles [sic] caught up in it, perpetuating the false hope that it's possible to swing for the fences and change the government from within its rules.

rprasad7• 14 years ago

The punishment for theft historically was (1) execution, (2) then whipping, the stockades, or some other physical abuse, and (3) more recently, imprisonment. Consequently, in the historical scheme of things, imprisonment is considered humane under the Constitution.

More recent SCOTUS decisions are starting to swing toward more humane imprisonment terms, but it may be a long time before SCOTUS actually rules on this issue. Progress will come from the state and local levels.

DavidWoof• 14 years ago

Sure, it's prisoner's dilemma, but one in which a small number of defectors doesn't affect the outcome, while in classic prisoner's dilemma there's a competition to be the single defector.

In this case, there's no necessary advantage to being an early defector. In fact, the best strategy is to hold out rejecting the plea until the very last minute, forcing the prosecutors to compete in offering better and better deals to handle the disruption. And even late defections serve the purpose of disrupting the system.

So you don't need the complete cooperation that classic prisoner's dilemma requires, but you do need some threshold of cooperation. If you had some high profile support along with significant community pressure, something along the lines of the "stop snitching" campaign, it could probably be done.

DennisP3• 14 years ago

So it's a collective action problem, but not exactly prisoners' dilemma. Collective action problems can sometimes be solved. And there's another factor: everything is local. You don't need collective action across the entire U.S., just within a particular jurisdiction. That starts to make it look more feasible.

You'd start with the most vulnerable jurisdictions...those where the author states it would disrupt the system if only two or three times as many people insisted on a jury trial. From that group, select the places with the populations most annoyed at the system.

Focus there and start heavy promotion. Build a community effort. The very act of doing that will help build community ties, a nice side effect.

Once you succeed in the most vulnerable district, move on to the next. Each success will improve your odds of further success, since it will change people's perceptions of risk.

rmc3• 14 years ago

Ah now, the judicial system is much better now than it was 1,000, 500, or 200 years ago. It's still not great, but it's getter better.

NyxWulf• 14 years ago

This is an interesting idea. It's hard to say how probable it is, because that requires certain tipping point actions to occur like we saw in the Arab Spring to get a mass movement going.

The reality is though that our current system is based on the compliance of the people within the system. When you find a pressure point in the system like this, it's very possible that something will come along and really start to push on it.

Maybe the most realistic way to increase capacity if they did this would be to more efficiently process things going to trial and those who deal. From an efficiency point of view there are many things that could be done to make this process happen much faster, the question is whether or not the Justice System would go for it.

Little's Law shows the overall behavior of a System: I = RT

Where inventory is equal to the arrival rate x time in the system. If the Arrival Rate suddenly doubles, inventory or time in the system must go up, often in non-linear ways. The question is always probability, but if the arrival rate went up, it would certainly shock the system. Whether or not it would crash it is a different question that is much harder to predict, it all depends on the scale and suddenness of the system shock.

jellicle• 14 years ago

But that "inventory" is you, in prison, awaiting trial.

There's a pressure point. But that pushing that pressure point requires many thousands of people to spend many years, each, in prison, losing everything - their career, their home, their children.

Which is why the pressure point has not been pushed. And will not be pushed.

dustingetz• 14 years ago

not really that interesting, this is a prisoner's dilema which is well studied. because the globally optimal strategy is unstable, the equilibrium state is to defect. She's given no indication of a clever way to shift this equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Prisoner.27s_d...

nirvana2• 14 years ago

Hypothesis: A relatively small number of relatively well funded defendants could have a huge impact on the system.

EG: Martha Stewart could have done more good if she'd fought her conviction all the way to the supreme court (even if she lost, she wouldn't have gotten more time.)

Thus an organization whose sole purpose is to underwrite (via providing lawyers or funds for outside lawyers) drug defendants who want to fight their charges could shift the equilibrium state.

Maybe only %10 would take this organization up on the offer, but that could be enough to have a big impact. (Again this is a hypothesis).

rprasad7• 14 years ago

The hypothesis is generally incorrect.

A jam at the appeals level has little-to-no effect on the capacity of lower-level courts. Appeals courts are designed to sift through the masses of cases they receive to pronounce judgement on the lucky few them deem worth their time. More than 90% of appeals are rejected without explanation.

Also, for the nuke option to work, you would need to overwhelm the ability of the local court system to handle all trials in a timely fashion. In a large county (i.e., any mid-to-major American city), this would require hundreds of simultaneous trials for a period of several months.

I noted above that the nuclear option worked in one county; however that only succeeded because massive budget reductions to the local court system artificially reduced the number of available courts. Without the budget reductions, we would not have had near enough simultaneous cases to successfully nuke.

rhizome10• 14 years ago

Thus an organization whose sole purpose is to underwrite (via providing lawyers or funds for outside lawyers) drug defendants who want to fight their charges could shift the equilibrium state.

I'm pretty sure this is already illegal.

rglullis6• 14 years ago

Along these lines, a thought has occurred to me during the whole SOPA/PIPA debate: what if everyone that opposed the bill and has ever shared and/or linked to any copyrighted material went on and confessed the crime, refused to pay any fines and asked to go to jail?

rhizome10• 14 years ago

What does that have to do with anything? You don't get a jury trial if you confess. I mean, you do, but anybody who trods the path you suggest will likely just take whatever sentence is offered. The story hinges on people being accused, indicted.

rglullis6• 14 years ago

I understand that. But my point is more along the lines of "crashing the system" by simply having millions of people going to jail just by having their sentence executed, as the law demands.

rprasad7• 14 years ago

Well, for starters, sharing copyrighted material at the level you are suggesting carries a minor fine. Generally, all the court would do is levy penalties on your failure to pay said fine and then issue a court order docking your wages.

Also, as these are relatively minor offenses, not much court time is actually required to handle these cases. It would be very efficient for the federal government (which has jurisdiction) to handle thousands of these cases in a timely fashion. Consequently, you would need hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people willing to put a crime on their record for this to work.

rglullis6• 14 years ago

For the current laws, I assume you are correct. I was thinking more in terms of what would happen if SOPA actually passed with the three-strikes law and everything.

Anyway, I know that this is the kind of thing that is only an hypothetical. It certainly would take millions of people to actually do some sort of sacrifice. But one could think about it as a true test to reddit: if they managed to do anything like that, no one would accuse them of slacktivism ever again.

rmc3• 14 years ago

"confess the crime"? you mean like go to the police station and confess? They would probably take a statement and not try to bring you to trial. In this particular case, it's people who are already been charged who are considering trying to go to trial.

hardik• 14 years ago

There is something informally called "trial tax" in the American justice system wherein if you decide to go for trial the punishment on guilty verdict is much higher than on plea bargain.

A famous case was that of Vincent Bogan in late 80s who was given a sentence of 75 years in maximum security for three counts of armed robbery (which is quite high for the crime charged) because he refused plea bargain and went for jury trial.

MaysonL• 14 years ago

Told on This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/134/w...

jgfoot• 14 years ago

This completely misses the point. The justice system is already crashing, from being underfunded.

""" “cuts already imposed on the Los Angeles Superior Court, if unabated, will force the closure of over 180 courtrooms and layoffs of more than 1800 employees in the coming years. This is a dramatic reduction in work force and courtrooms. There are approximately 605 courtrooms operating throughout 50 locations in Los Angeles County. The closure of 180 courtrooms includes the closure of nine courthouses. The loss of 1800 employees constitutes a 34 percent reduction in the court’s workforce. The cuts in staff and courtrooms/courthouses (along with the priority given to criminal cases) will result in an increase to the already existing backlog of cases, which, in turn, will slow the movement of virtually all civil cases to a snail’s pace." """ http://www.plljlaw.com/CM/Articles/Court-Budget-Cuts.asp

If you want to crash the justice system, then continue to do what we have been doing: underfund judges, court employees, public defenders, and prosecutors.

rhizome10• 14 years ago

So you're saying the system is already fragile? Fantastic!

icandoitbetter• 14 years ago

I don't see how the author is missing the point because of your claim. If the justice system is already crashing, then massively asking to go to trial would crash it even more.

nirvana2• 14 years ago

Its kinda amazing but this article contains the primary thesis-es of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This brings up some important questions that I think its worth pondering.

Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.")

...and that this control relies on people accepting the easier way out, rather than standing up for their rights. (In Atlas, the alternatives offered the strikers were always easier than striking.)

At the end of the day, the question they both pose is this: If some action really is immoral, is it not immoral for you to support it? If the war on drugs is immoral, is it not immoral for you to pay for it? If you're going to pay your taxes (a practical choice to be sure, even if you feel its immoral) why not match them by supporting organizations working to reform or eliminate the immoral actions those taxes fund? (e.g.: anti-drug war orgs, or a org that underwrites defense attorneys for people charged with drug crimes who want to fight them with a jury trial.)

If you're on a jury, are you going to listen when the judge tells you that you have to convict if you conclude that the person charged did in fact have drugs on them? Or are you going to judge the law (one purpose of the jury) as well as the facts, and stand proud and hang the jury if you're unable to convince them the drug war is immoral? Are you willing to lie on the jury questionnaire in order to get on the jury in the first place (since the questionnaire is designed to weed out people who will be immune to the jury tampering judges regularly engage in with their instructions.)

Or do you recognize this as immoral, but still think that the "justice" system itself IS moral because... its the government?

These are all rhetorical questions. I'm sure my position is obvious by the questions I'm asking, but I'm not looking to debate here, I'm just providing a perspective. And my amusement that the NYT would write a story with such parallels to Atlas Shrugged.

One final parallel is that in Atlas, the system continues to deteriorate, even when most people know its wrong, because most people fool themselves into thinking that injustice is justice. (or are anti-mind, have adopted a philosophy that is against reason.)

So a final question- does an immoral law have any power? Or is it null and void simply because its immoral? (In Maybury v. Madison the supreme court ruled that unconstitutional laws are invalid the day they are signed, no need for supreme court review to invalidate them... yet we had to have a constitutional amendment to create prohibition, but we never had one for the war on drugs...)

If a cop pulls over a driver and then searches his car and finds drugs, and you believe the drug laws are immoral, are you willing to admit that the cop is a criminal? (Or is "just doing your job" an excuse that gets him off the hook?)

If morality is objective, and the "law" he's enforcing is immoral, then the cop is the criminal in this hypothesis. If morality is subjective, then the cop somehow is made moral when doing this, because law somehow conveys morality on otherwise immoral acts. (Again all rhetorical. I'm going to log out now and enjoy my Sunday.)

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I think we're totally on the same page. Sometimes when I talk about 'fixing the system' by 'reinvigorating our institutions' people will ask "Which institutions?" and one of them is the judicial system.

If you combined the author's idea of everyone requesting jury trials, with a widespread outreach and education about jury nullification, it would be a really interesting thing to watch. When the people were speaking directly through the process as to what they the people felt should be illegal and what wasn't.

Yes it would be chaotic, the question though is if we could exit that chaos into a better place.

cynicalkane2• 14 years ago

If everyone requested jury trials the "chaos" won't be some brilliant revolution, the chaos would be everyone wasting their time on the vast majority of cases that are open-and-shut.

The other thing is that jury nullification isn't a "thing". It's not in the law or in the Constitution. The reason that juries can vote their conscience and nullify is a side effect of the sanctity of a jury trial. Juries can also vote based on the latest baseball game results, if they wanted. And judges absolutely have the right to instruct juries not do do this.

I also think you'll find in practice people tend to support the system. Not everyone lives in your ideological pocket of reality, nor is it necessarily right to imagine they will once they are subjected to "widespread outreach and education". Everyone's got their own pet imaginary revolution and I think part of the reason people live in their own little mainstream-ish bubbles of reality isn't foolishness--it's a defense mechanism against every ideologue demanding their attention.

DennisP3• 14 years ago

I just read a good book that advocates jury nullification in non-violent drug cases: Let's Get Free, A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, by former federal prosecutor Paul Butler. In areas hit hard by unjust drug enforcement, it could catch on.

The great thing about jury nullification is that there's no collective action problem. A single juror can make a difference for one case.

So the best approach is probably to pick one vulnerable jurisdiction (with little excess capacity), focus first on jury nullification to reduce the risk of jury trial, then work on reducing plea bargains.

knowtheory• 14 years ago

> Namely, that government creates crimes to control people, ("There is no way to rule an honest man. The only power government has is over criminals. Thus we create more and more laws until every man is a criminal.")

Things like public health directly contravene this concept. There is a collective public good (say vaccination), it only works if some percentage of the population opts in, either through incentive or obligation.

Infants are protected from whooping cough only by our ability to guarantee vaccination of other citizens (since they are protected not by the vaccine itself, but the cocoon effect of having a vaccinated population that is not susceptible to whooping cough).

In other words, governments definitely do have power over honest people.

bo1024• 14 years ago

I prefer to think of it in terms of economics. There aren't honest people and dishonest people; there are incentives and people who respond to them.

The question is what your political and economic system incentivizes. In the face of good incentives, most people are good. In the face of bad incentives, no amount of moral clamoring will save your society.

AdleyEskridge2• 14 years ago

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I don't think there is a single country in the world (free or otherwise) that makes it illegal to abstain from vaccination. If there is such a country, please correct me—I simply couldn't find one after a few minutes of research.

The benefits of vaccination for the receiver of the vaccine are usually enough to entice voluntary vaccination. In fact, I'm sure there are plenty of civic-minded people who get themselves (or their children) vaccinated for the benefit of everyone else, too.

The government would only feel compelled to forcibly vaccinate its citizens if people refused en masse to get vaccinated. And that would likely only happen if the cost/risk benefit ratio for getting vaccinated was (perceived to be) unsatisfactory.

In that case, do you really want to criminalize honest, well-intentioned people who are abstaining? I'd say no—that'll create a bitter backlash, because these people don't feel like they deserve to be criminals. Instead, you'd want to educate those people and explain to them why it is worth it to get vaccinated (alternatively, if the vaccine really is too risky, you'd want to improve the vaccine). When honest, well-intentioned citizens oppose something en masse, simply making them all criminals for the common good is likely to make them oppose you, distrust you, and listen even less to what you have to say.

neilk3• 14 years ago

Ayn Rand doesn't usually admit any precedent for her ideas, but anarchists and some socialists have had a similar diagnosis since the 19th century. For instance, Kropotkin's "Law and Authority", published in 1886.

jbooth• 14 years ago

I think it's less conspiratorial than that. One concept the Ayn Rand fans could do better to consider, in both the private and public sphere, is that of "emergent outcomes".

lisper• 14 years ago

"There is no way to rule an honest man."

I wish that were true, but it's not. Laws are not the only source of unfair leverage. Private enterprise can and does have lots of ways to rule (and screw) even honest people. e.g.:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2011/12/cosmo-and-me-part-3-how-w...

tsunamifury• 14 years ago

Exactly, Rand was a master of telling half-truths. While the quote makes sense on the surface, she gently shuffles aside the many economic ways you can control an honest man (denying him food, resources, housing etc).

chris123• 14 years ago

Interesting book review: NYT: "Ayn Rand’s Revenge": http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html

Helianthus• 14 years ago

The law being objective does not change the fact that the law is _acting_ in this situation and there is no sense in which the cop can be termed a criminal.

That is to say, a cop on a power trip is legal if he doesn't get caught. It is the _law_ that is on a power trip in that case.

We use the word "illegal" to refer both to things that have been punished and things that could be punished.

When the law is corrupt, nominally illegal things become nebulously legal.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Or do you recognize this as immoral, but still think that the "justice" system itself IS moral because... its the government?

What does law have to do with morality? Laws are rules that we as citizens agree to follow (even if we disagree with them) in an effort to produce a cohesive society. We can seek to get laws we disagree with changed, but you cannot advocate a society in which we follow only the laws we like.

(Unless you are disobeying laws as a form of protest, in which case you accept the punishment. That's how civil disobedience works, you can't skip the punishment because you don't like the law.)

TamDenholm• 14 years ago

Wouldn't this be reasonably easy to do if you threw money at the problem?

If a certain person or organisation had a decent chunk of change, they could hire a large law firm to specifically volunteer to take court appointments. Just as most court appointed lawyers advise their clients to plea, the hired lawyers could advise to go to trial and since most people listen to their lawyer, that'd would do it.

Obviously im oversimplifying it here, but surely its just a case of 1) get money, 2) pick a city, 3) hire lawyers, 4) get court appointments, 5) crash the system.

With enough money you could replicate the system elsewhere too.

rprasad7• 14 years ago

Most clients choose not to go to trial, despite their court-appointed lawyer's advice to take it to trial. In SoCal, only about 1 out of every 100 (or more) criminal cases actually goes to trial because the defendants choose not to assert their rights. What's worse, in more than half of these cases, there is a fatal defect in the prosecution's case (usually non-existent evidence of an element of the charge) that would have gotten the case thrown out before trial if only the defendant had not chosen to plead. Frequently, this is because the type of people who rely on court-appointed lawyers are guilty (and freely admit to being guilty), and simply want to reduce the sentencing as much as possible.

Private criminal defense attorneys usually advise their clients to plead, because (1) they make less money overall if the case goes to trial, and (2) their clients usually have too much at stake to risk tossing the dice on a jury. Thus, such cases only go to trial when the DA refuses to accept a reasonable plea bargain.

Also, your reliance on large law firms is misplaced. Most lawyers in law firms, even in the litigation groups, have never gone to trial. Indeed, their closest exposure to trial is usually arguing motions for civil cases, where the procedural and substantive rules are completely different. Life is not like T.V. (Good Wife, I'm looking at you.) The end result would be a lot of inexperienced lawyers making a lot of rookie mistakes. While this could nuke the system, the more likely effect is that the first few defendants would get thoroughly screwed, and the remaining defendants would opt to plea bargain out of ear of getting one of the inexperienced private lawyers.

Finally, with enough money, i.e., the money that would be used to hire the large law firm, you could simply fix the system, at least at the county level.

rprasad7• 14 years ago

I worked for the Public Defender during an election year. The local D.A. was trying to divert attention from a sex scandal and instructed the ADAs not to negotiate down on any crimes so that he could "look tough" on crime. The thinking was that most criminal defendants would cave and he would get a boost with the mostly-conservative voters of the county.

So the lawyers of the Public Defender (and a good portion of the private criminal defense bar) banded together and convinced about a quarter of our clients to go to trial (up from 1 in every 100 or so). I worked in a specialty division (mentally "disordered" defendants) where we got to make the decisions for our clients, and we took almost every case to trial.

We also made sure that every defendant going to trial refused to waive his right to a speedy trial, meaning that cases had to go to trial within about 2-3 months or they would get thrown out.

The consequences? (1) To avoid speedy-trial issues, the D.A.'s office had to transfer cases out to the boonies of our county whereever there were available courtrooms for trials, and ADA's unfamiliar with these cases would take them to trial. They either lost these cases at trial or watched them get thrown out when they could not start on time (frequently, because their expert witnesses could not schedule court appearances on such short notice). (2) A backlog of criminal and MD cases that jammed up the court docket, pushing back other cases (i.e., civil lawsuits) 5 years or more. 2009 to 2010 was not a good time to file a lawsuit in that county. (3) An enraged judiciary that began throwing out criminal cases with wild abandon, including almost all drug possession cases, nonviolent misdemeanors, and lower-level non-violent felonies. (4) The D.A. lost his reelection campaign, by double-digits.

The nuclear option worked, and the next D.A. rescinded the non-negotiation order.

EDIT: I should point out that this worked because massive budget reductions to the court system during this time period artificially reduced the number of courts in the county. Without those budget reductions, we would have needed many more trial-ready cases to nuke the system.

Anechoic• 14 years ago

Who was the DA?

rprasad7• 14 years ago

Let's just say that he was the D.A. of a large, conservative county which is more commonly known for being the epicenter of the housing meltdown.

rhizome10• 14 years ago

I should point out that this worked because massive budget reductions to the court system during this time period artificially reduced the number of courts in the county.

A judicial system that depends on plea bargains to achieve a merely basic Constitutional level of service has already had its budget cut to the bone.

Ralith• 14 years ago

Sounds like you did a great thing. Keep up the good work!

newman314• 14 years ago

I would like to point out that it's horrifying to know that a DA would try to mess with the system just to look good. I know it happens but it should not and points to a broken system of how people are motivated (e.g. look tough fighting crime by issuing ridiculous edict in order to win re-election campaign).

scottdw2• 14 years ago

If there was a sudden dramatic rise in the number of cases approaching trial, the natural response would be to increase the value of plea deals until the number of trials drops to a managable level.

As the supply of plea deals increases, and the demand decreases, their price will drop.

Prosecutors with a large volume of unsold plea deals (a large inventory of pending cases and intense pressure to clear them quickly) will be highly motivated to reduce the sentences offered to criminals.

The net result would likely be smaller sentences, but not a fundamental reform of the justice system.

This is basically a form of strike. Although strikes can improve the wages of workers, they won't fundamentally reform the relationship between a company and it's workers.

No strike by the UAW would ever lead to the creation of something like YCombinator, for example.

The key to fixing problems with our government is to disrupt it. To replace it with something that is "not as good", but "much more accessible" (if you are Exon, the current government is great, because it serves your needs exactly, but if you are a non-violent drug offender it is completely in-accessible to you).

rmc3• 14 years ago

Strike is a good analogy. However the modern labour & trade union movement has succeeded in getting some labour reforms over the last 100 years. Workers now have much more rights (e.g. to not be fired for no reason, mandatory holiday pay, employee tribunals to settle disputes, force majeure, maternity & paternity leave etc.)

rhizome10• 14 years ago

I have to wonder if Obama's prosecution of cannabis cases is merely a strategy to avoid renegotiating the relationship of the Government (or DEA, DoJ, etc.) to its citizens WRT pot.

boredguy8• 14 years ago

Be aware that in a felony plea bargain, you may forever be forfeiting your right to vote. 1 in 40 people in the United States are not allowed to vote because they have lost, either for forever, while in prison, while on parole, or while on probation, their right to vote. Fourteen states (AL, AZ, DE, FL, IA, KY, MD, MS, NE, NV, TN, VA, WA, and WY) eliminate voting for any felony conviction for life. In 31 states, you can't vote while on probation. Only 15 states allow you to vote while on parole. Only Maine and Vermont allow you to vote while a prisoner.

The most comprehensive study on the issue that I'm aware of is still the 1998 Sentencing Project / Human Rights Watch study, but The Sentencing Project provides attention to disenfranchisement issues on their blog.

'98 report: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/File/FVR/fd_losingthevo...

Voting rights blog: http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=133

biafra• 14 years ago

Revoking the right to vote for a felony. What a great democracy you have there!

shingen• 14 years ago

"So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our lives."

Or you could just elect Ron Paul. The powers that be would have to assassinate him to stop him from legalizing most drug use.

kd0amg• 14 years ago

The powers that be would have to assassinate him

Or just ensure that he doesn't get enough cooperation from Congress to change the law.

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

well there is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cldRh1SkRok

but most don't understand that the majority of non-violent drug offenders are not in federal prison. shrug

cgshaw• 14 years ago

I'm an attorney. I did some criminal appointments in the federal system before quitting law to get into entrepreneurship full time. It's tough work and it gave me some pretty amazing insights into the the justice system and the human condition.

In many ways--certainly not all--the plea system benefits the accused. It speeds up the trial, when evidence is lacking the accused tend to get a better result and quite honestly if the evidence is really bad the charges can--and do get dropped. We tend to look at the perverse episodes and not the helpful ones.

That said, myself and just about any attorney I know on either side of the bar feels like you'd rather let hundreds of guilty people go free than put one innocent person in jail.

I hate that criminal law is so politicized. (i.e. you have you be "tough on crime" to be electable or "three strikes rules keep 'bad' guys off the streets." If we can find lawmakers that will fight those mentalities, we will be much better off than trying to halt a justice system that's already terrible underfunded and in the process further hurt the accused, judges, juries, attorneys and citizens in the process.

Collateral charges are awful though. (mentioned briefly in the article--strips rights away of those with felony convictions)

When we take away voting rights, public assistance rights, free speech rights, and others, because someone broke the law (in many cases minor or non-violent felonies) that makes the problem worse because we're silencing folks that could give us insights to make our justice system better. And in most cases further complicating or destroying the support system for people who truly need help. Not to be infantalizing because not everyone needs or wants help, but it just doesn't seem "American" or "fair" to me to kick folks while they are down or prevent them from having a voice in our government or the help that could enable them to get on their feet again.

sedev• 14 years ago

History repeats itself: the tactic being advocated here worked pretty well for the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th century. Their tactic was to provoke authorities into arresting an IWW member (it helped that, then as now, the police are eager to arrest people who are insufficiently deferential, crime or no crime), then bring in hundreds of IWW members and others, flooding the jails. In the jails, they'd have a ready audience of other imprisoned activists to make contact with and could talk about the IWW's goals, tactics, and mission. So they won converts with every round of mass arrests.

lr• 14 years ago

Speaking as someone who was recently a juror on a trial, I can firmly say that the premise of this article is correct. The courts in this country are far, far, far too slow to deal with a mass number of trials. The system would simply collapse if people starting exercising this right.

darasen• 14 years ago

didn't have access to anti-depressants so she became addicted to crack? That is quite a leap.

pseingatl• 14 years ago

The solution lays not with the accused, but their lawyers. The lawyers can simply refuse to defend cases and the system will crash. And no one, no poor defendant, will risk jail. In the 1960's there were "committed" lawyers who took a stand against the Draft, as well as legal organizations that took a stand--the National Lawyers Guild comes to mind. Unfortunately, the idealism of the 1960's turned to drug defense work in the 1970's and by the 1980's the pendulum had swung back and hard. Even if only a small group of lawyers refused to handle cases, such as federal Criminal Justice Act attorneys (18 USC 3006A) the system would not be able to cope. Unfortunately, it's easier to herd cats than to get lawyers to act in unison. But this is a better solution than asking the first few defendants to risk life sentences: no one wants to be the Wildebeest that enters the crocodile-infested river first. But a work stoppage by these lawyers would carry little risk of consequences other than a serious reassessment of the broken US criminal justice system.

Go to Trial - Crash the Justice System

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