Comment by godwinson__4-8
17 hours ago
"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers.
It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psychology show how much peer pressure and other factors extrinsic to the law come into play.
Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Law is the mask of power. By all means defend and assert your rights, but understand the costs. I find people are under such illusions about how cruel the American justice system is that this leads them to make foolish decisions. Do not underestimate the adversarial nature of the justice system, nor the accompanying incentives agents of the state who are on the other side of you have to lie.
As a convicted felon for the last 25 years without a single incident since I was released. I tell everyone I know to never trust a single thing anyone says if there is any chance you are being looked at for criminal charges. It's "I want a lawyer" and nothing else. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP, don't call me, your parents, someone to bail you out. Call a mother fucking lawyer. Because once you get your sleeve caught up in the gears of the system and you dont rip free fast enough, it's over. Once the system turns on you, your entire life will never be same. It will effect more aspects of your life than you can imagine. The system will chew you up. It never forgets. It's incapable of forgiveness.
This is the most logical comment in the entire thread. The only thing to say is "I want a lawyer". Although in this case, he repeatedly said that and wasn't given one. Which just shows that the state can do whatever they'd like, even if it's "unconstitutional". They have a monopoly on violence.
I've been thrown in immigration jail as US citizen. They will not provide or allow you access to a lawyer and you won't see a judge to determine if they have PC to hold you. You just sit there until they decide to eject you. Nothing else to be done and no one to contact, plus most of the other prisoners cannot speak English.
CBP via a bunch of crazy court cases, basically operates outside constitutional constraints. This is also why DHS has been used as private army by POTUS (snatching up people in unmarked vans in Portland for instance) because they can be ordered essentially directly by POTUS and not have to worry about the constitution.
> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%.
This is a misunderstood statistic.
Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it.
This leads to a contradictory set of complaints that the legal system lets too many people go or doesn't have enough teeth.
True, although many prosecutors do also try to put their thumb on the scale when possible.
For comparison, Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, but defers prosecution in 60% of cases. And police aren’t arresting or even attempting to enforce the law for every crime. Citizens complain that petty crime laws aren’t being enforced enough, leading to a rise in things like graffiti, litter, and traffic violations (the “bosozoku” motorcycle gangs are having a resurgence). But if you do face prosecution, there is enormous pressure to sign a confession and avoid trial, as a conviction at trial may be punished more harshly. Very similar in some respects.
>Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.
Given the incarceration rates compared to average western standards, that's a moot point. Even if they selectively pursue, they do pursue a hell of a lot, and they do get a hell of a lot of convictions - relatively. Factor in the severity of the convictions, also much worse compared to average western standards even for the same offenses, and it's an ever worse picture.
> Given the incarceration rates...
I don't think you make anything moot by compounding more regional stats. Some countries have more crime, they underinvest in rehabilitation, addiction treatment, and social diversion programmes. Shock horror: jobless, homeless addicts commit crimes. The US also has a land border with long land borders.
That is all to say, comparing apples and margaritas doesn't do what you think it does.
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"also much worse …"
Why is convicting and sentencing criminals a bad thing?
> Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.
The problem with this theory is that it ignores the incentives on the other side in a criminal case. When you get charged with something, the prosecutor offers you a deal and that deal is almost invariably a significantly lower penalty than what happens if you go to court and get convicted. The plea deal is a lesser charge, if you demand a trial then they throw the book at you, stack charges and ask for more severe penalties for each one.
With the result that if someone actually did it, demanding a trial instead of pleading guilty for a lesser sentence has a large negative expected value. Which in turn implies that it doesn't make sense to do unless you think there is a high probability you can win, for example because you know you didn't do it. The coercive force is so large that it can cause innocent people to plead guilty, since even a 10% chance of losing can screw up your whole life when it means a 10x higher penalty.
And yet > 90% of the people who thought their chances of being acquitted were high enough to be worth taking a much large sentence on conviction, still get convicted. Which seems suspicious.
What youre saying is true, but the reality is that the number of people actually affected by it is vanishingly small. Of course its not vanishing if youre that person affected, but as far as the system goes, its negligible.
The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case. The prevalence of plea deals is just a performance optimization on top of that fact - most people are guilty at that stage and we'll let you off a little easier if you avoid the time and cost of a trial.
Innocent people are coerced to plead guilty, but you also have to realize the number of "innocent people pleading guilty" also contains guilty people who convinced lay people, who never saw or reviewed the evidence, they were innocent. As a prosecutor during a plea negotiation I once almost dismissed a charge against a girl who convinced me that she was innocent until I actually looked a security tape before signing the dismissal. She was 100% guilty. This is another interesting point about how busy prosecutors are - i didnt even bother to review the evidence against her before offering her a plea deal.
All this to say, if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person. Yes, there's at least one normal person out there who was coerced, but they're the exception that proves the rule.
Courts need more funding, laws need to be relaxed and fine tuned, we need to stop the school to prison pipeline, but even with all those problems the system works pretty damn well.
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I don't think it's so much a "misunderstood" statistic as much as a number that people (like the commenter you are replying to) deliberately trot out to use as evidence for their position because they are depending on most people being statistically illiterate.
To be clear, I totally agree with your points, I just think this is more of a case of "lying with statistics" than being a misunderstanding.
I think in this case Hanlon’s Razor very much applies.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
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I think you forgot something even more basic. Federal prosecutors handle federal crimes and the vast majority of those require extensive investigations to gather evidence before you can even initiate a court case.
The most classic case of federal offense is tax fraud. You can't record tax fraud on a camera or believe the witnesses, you actually need to look at the balance sheet and contracts of the company and make sure there is actually a crime to prosecute.
They never pursue court trials, because it's too much work. But they'll pursue plea deals, because there's this gigantic pipeline and everyone in it (including public defenders) is on the same team: Team Make Him Plead.
Because of this, no true justice is possible. Trials don't just try the defendants, it forces the prosecutor to prove that there really was a case and that they weren't just trying to bully someone who felt it was hopeless and would rather get out of pre-trial jail early. It forces the cops to actually make a fucking case, rather than rely on horseshit to lock someone away that can't bond out.
And no reform is possible. If you explain any of this to someone who actually understands it, they panic and say "but the prosecutors wouldn't even be able to bring 1/50th of those cases to trial, the system would overload" as if that were a bad thing that they couldn't. In the same way that you're not caught in a traffic jam but rather you are traffic, you're not caught up in these problems... your apathy, your ignorance, your rejection of boat-rocking, in short you are the problem.
> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%
Prosecutors pick their cases. Defense doesn't. The cases that aren't 90%+ sure aren't charged.
Yes.
Prosecutors will often lower charges to ones where it can be tried without a jury too
And this is as it should be.
no way!
it should be about 50% conviction rate so that juries dont go in with non-evidence that the case is good because the feds thought it should go to court
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Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?
I've been on jury duty several times and in each time the entire jury pool was dismissed an hour or so into the morning, with "all cases have been settled". As I was leaving, the official said, "see how efficient we are now?". I replied, "The guillotine is efficient, but it's not justice." Look into Aaron Swartz. The % of cases that go to trial is very small, in no small part because plea bargaining is no bargain at all. "Plead guilty and we'll do the minimum (whether you're actually guilty or not), or go to trial and we will seek the maximum sentence, which could be 30 years in prison. What's your answer?"
You're begging OP's question.
How so?
OP is strongly implying that the 90% success rate for prosecutors is due to the courts being stacked against the defense. IMO that is where the logical fallacy is. Since prosecutors have wide latitude in deciding which cases to charge in the first place, it is very possible that the high success rate is due to prosecutors only charging cases where the accused actually committed the crimes being charged. Indeed, for the ~10% of cases where the accused is not found guilty, about 8% are due to the government dropping the case - only 1% are the jury acquitting the defendant outright. Thus, it would appear from that data that when the prosecution sees they are not likely to win a case, they drop it.
I'm making no argument that the courts or law are "fair", I'm just making the argument that quoting the 90% number is in no way evidence that courts are inherently biased towards the prosecution.
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I think it’s a valid question as far as what the nature of that success rate is.
Some of us report for jury duty just itching to nullify something. Don't you? Checks and balances...
Nullify if necessary, more likely duty to justice as best as I can come to understand it.
We should all know it though!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.
Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.
The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.
I just served on a jury and in our case, the cop was a lying scumbag, the prosecutor's expert witnesses were people milking the taxpayers to provide the evaluations that the state wanted to hear for thousands of dollars per hour, the defense's expert witnesses copy-and-pasted an evaluation from another client but didn't bother to proofread before the prosecutor brought up that they had the wrong name in the text, and the defendant raped and molested multiple kids below the age of 8, some still in diapers.
I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity.
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That is horrible but robbing a liquor store dressed as a clown is pretty funny (in my head probably not irl)
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Some people suck. Some of the people who suck are poor and physically violent, some are rich and politically and economically violent.
There's a kind of fog of incomprehension over indirect crimes which makes them much easier to get away with.
People still die though.
I don't understand the jury system. If your server is down you don't grab randos from the street to fix it.
Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.
A jury system is an anachronistic relic.
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I went itching to nullify injustices - I left wanting to reintroduce the death penalty for petty crimes.
Exactly. People complain police dont prevent crime, but dont realize that is not their purpose. The police exist to protect the government, not the people.
The police are there to enforce laws, but enforce it by punishment, rather than prevention. The potential deterrence effect still applies, as people do get discouraged from crimes by the mere presence of the police. However, there is zero legal duty for the police to protect someone who is currently under attack from a criminal.
> However, there is zero legal duty for the police to protect someone who is currently under attack from a criminal.
That has to be incorrect, by the time someone is under actual attack from a criminal that criminal will have allready comitted crimes that the police can and have to punish for, i.e. Threat of Force with a Lethal weapon or sth like that.
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Police don't prevent crime, they arrest and charge people for committing crime.
Arresting people because they might/could commit a crime would be a bad route to go down.
> The police exist to protect the government, not the people.
The police exist to protect the rule of the land. The military exists to protect the government.
Which part of the government protects the people?
None of it
The part that is afraid of not getting voted in next election. As long as they make the voting ticket a two party/person race and ensure that their voters believe the opposition is the literal devil, then they don't have to be too afraid
Luckily that has never happened /s
It is not surprising. They just don’t go to court unless they think they have enough evidence for a conviction. In a perfect world the conviction rate would be 100% because in a perfect world the prosecutor would drop the case before if they don’t have enough evidence.
> Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.
>Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz
He killed himself before the trial even began. I think he would have won the case if he actually went through it.
Maybe that's why "they" killed him?
Josh Greenberg from Grooveshark died of unknown cause in 2015 after taking a settlement rather than going to trial. He wiped all the music (did he really need to do that?) and then gave up all the software. The service may well have been seen as a massive cost center during its life and the death was a message or warning. I don't know. Business is war, isn't it? - quite literally.
One person's savior can become another person's scapegoat or witch. Even all three.
Personally, I would be suspicious of any death around a high profile trial - at least as a possibility. Greenberg introduced a 'tipjar' eventually to compensate artists but I think he would've been better off making a swapping service where users can trade their own CD-ripped or purchased files for another person's. Just like swapping physical CDs or LPs. So 1-to-1 personal distribution rather than Grooveshark's 1-to-many public distribution without the required licenses. An escrow service for file-swapping.
Sort of unrelated, though.
To me, litigation may be an incredibly dangerous route to justice. "Winning at all costs" may mean stopping a case going to trial in the first place. Judges can also end up the biggest losers too. Justice always gets served - but whose justice?
If it’s a malicious prosecution by the country/state then Jury is your best best over a Judge.
There is a reason that Elon Musks companies and others put a ‘you agree to not have a jury trial…’ clause in their terms as Judges are easier to influence - when a legal case is filed it’s allocated to a judge and certain cases will go strategically to a Judges with certain bias
> Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.
> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
But that's good no? People who got out never would have taken it seriously.
I sat on a jury trial and was highly impressed with how seriously my fellow jurors took it - especially the presumption of innocence. When they started to go down some incorrect logical path, someone would step up and correct it.
Not to mention the public defender ripped apart the DA's case. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.
> Prosecutors have high success rates.
You're forgetting that the prosecutors don't bring cases they think they're going to lose to trial, they either drop the charges or try a plea deal. So you'd entirely expect the success rate to be high.
There is no law. There is only power, and the will to use it. Remember and internalize this at all times.
> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
It’s not even just who couldn’t get out of it. It’s filtered for people who answer honestly. I was disqualified for a grand jury because the judge asked me if I would believe the testimony of police officers as truthful and I said it would depend on the police officer.
The system already had their hands forced on accepting that some cops lie with Brady disclosures but the fact that I didn’t just naively accept police testimony meant I was an unscramble juror.
Even if you’re a true believer in the system you won’t be allowed to participate because you didn’t lie.
Yeah, but without a jury O.J. Simpson never would've walked out of court a free man.
For example in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail, even if they were defending themselves or responding to a potential threat. A jury could show compassion or empathy. Judges are extremely stoic in that regard.
This reference from Germany indicates that self-defense is lawful even if it ends the attacker's life, as long as the violence is not excessive for the situation.
https://se-legal.de/services/criminal-defense-lawyer/self-de...
They'll always rule that the violence was excessive. They'll say you could've slapped him in the face or disarmed the attacker.
The only ones getting a free pass are criminals. When they shoot and kill each other judges usually rule that it was self-defense. Ordinary people...no such luck.
Besides in Europe you always have to use physical violence to kill someone because firearms are illegal.
> in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail
Please cite the european law that states this.
There's no specific law, but a judge will always jail you for manslaughter.
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The well-known country of Europe with its single set of laws? That Europe?
Self-defence can be a valid justification for manslaughter, at least in the UK.