Comment by benjiro29
16 days ago
* authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation.*
This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
In a lot of cases a carrot is dangled in front of people ... You can wast a lot of time (and money) fighting for your innocent, and take the risk your still going to get convicted.
Or you can take the plea deal, and it absolves us from our mistakes. And you save money because its cheaper then paying all those lawyers and court costs. And your innocent anyway, so that probations has no effect on you.
I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering. A lot of actual innocent people take plea's because its cheaper, then the alternative. And there have been plenty of people innocently convicted (even on shaky evidence), so most people take plea deals and they can move on with their lives.
This results in a culture where investigations are annoying. Where pressure is ramped up again and again to break people into taking plea deals. The biggest issue is, if you actually refuse to take a plea deal, then all resources are put against you to get a actual conviction, even if they know your innocent. "Why did you not just take the plea deal". Well, time to punish you for not taking it. Because repeat after me again, careers are on the line and losing cases hurt those future (potential political) careers.
Its the same why prosecutors fight tooth and nail, even if clear evidence is shows that a person was innocently convicted and spend X years in jail. It not about justice, its about protecting those careers.
The proof of innocents is heavily put on the other party, and it really hits hard on people who do not have the financial means.
I was in a jury pool for a case where the DA was attempting to prosecute petty vandalism to pressure a young adult over a minor crime ($500 worth of graffiti) because they wanted cooperation on another larger crime.
It wasn't going anywhere. When I finally got called up to voir dir I explained that I thought the real crime was sequestering 300 people for a day over $500. I suggested we collect $2 from each person in the jury pool (far less than we paid for parking that day) and cover the alleged damages and not only be done for the day, but have achieved some real measure of justice.
Lets just say the judge didn't agree and I got let out of voir dir.
My experience has been the same. I was on a grand jury, so pre-indictment and no voir dire, and there were many BS cases like this. We returned "no true bill" on all of them, which made me really proud of my randomly-selected neighbors. Cops were trying to railroad so many people over subway fare evasion, upgrading stealing $2.50 from the MTA to felony drug charges. We didn't bite. I did remark that I would just give them the $2.50 rather than ruining some high school student's life. (Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.)
MTA already has a half-price program for low-income people. I agree fare jumpers don't need jail but they need some punishment. Make them clean the station and pick up trash for an hour, right then and there (I'm just spitballing). Otherwise it's unfair to law-abiding people.
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That’s a great idea, just get people to voluntarily sign up to pay for things like that for the criminals. Like you said, take the $2.50 one way several times a day, every day for one person, times however many people do that out of your income since you want to pay for it.
I am no fan of this rotten and illegitimate government or the fake and imitation justice system, but what do you think happens if every thug can just jump fare and get away with it, because if you had $1000 per month taken out of your paycheck every month, in sure you’d be singing a different tune.
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> Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.
Why don’t you just write a check to your transit authority every year then?
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I wouldn’t want to live in a place where crimes below $1,000 go unpunished.
Perhaps there are alternatives other than "small crimes go unpunished" and "people make false admissions of guilt, pressured by the ruinous cost of the justice system, 300 jurors needed for a single trial"
If we've got a Lamborghini justice system, delivering amazing performance to people with a spare $250k and doing nothing for anyone else - some would say that's not the right price/performance trade off.
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I don't like living in a place where wage theft dwarves all other thefts combined, but we put ridiculous resources towards petty crime.
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Im sure you’re familiar with the problem that lower thresholds creates a tool for selective application.
and still. limited resources means some crimes will go unpunished.
let's start with the ones above $1,000 first, hm?
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I wouldn’t want to live in a place where innocent people are forced under threat of financial destruction to make false confessions for crimes they didn’t commit, but here we are.
I don't want to live in a place where a fine of < $1000 causes 100 people to have to take a day off of work only paying them $30 for their time.
I'd be fine with it if crimes with no identifiable victim below $1k went un-punished.
Having society (a group of unrelated jurors) to pay for the crimes of an individual (however minor you perceive them to be) is not justice. That's why you got kicked out.
But they were already paying for the crimes of an individual, in the form of time wasted, and parking fees. Their suggestion was about minimising it.
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$500 was the damages that they were caught doing. Not the total damages they caused. If every "empathetic" person volunteers to pay $2 every time someone wants graffiti on their property removed, regardless of how often graffiti keeps reappearing, then maybe the DA wouldn't feel a need to prosecute.
What? after reading your first sentence many times it’s basically saying you’re of the mind that a criminal very likely has way more crimes that we’ve just haven’t seen so they should be prosecuted heavily for the one we did see just to make sure we get our prosecution-bang for the buck?
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Accused of causing.
I always try to be as bland as possible in voir dir so I can get in and maybe nullify.
Brilliant! I'd get the pay per view just to see the judge's face when you made this proposal. Also you have balls of steel.
Hot take - the criminal should pay the jury if they're clearly guilty and wasting everyone's time. And the judge. And if they resisted arrest, the cost of the extra police work.
That is literally how it works in many places in the USA. They have to pay for the prison stay too.
Jury duty is the single dumbest thing I have ever done in my adult life. Nobody wants to be there, and half the jurors were falling asleep. When we got to the deliberation room, everyone wanted to GTFO as quickly as possible and we just went by our feels. In the end, everyone loses. Millions of dollars wasted... on perception of justice. What a freaking joke.
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Kinda depends what you vandalized
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I stated above, part of a plea requires the defendant to affirm that they were not coerced into the plea, because you can't legally waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion, you would still retain that right if coerced. But how can the Courts accept that a threat of many more years of incarceration over your head is not a threat, and you weren't coerced by that into accepting a lessor plea? Plea deals are constitutionally invalid because they coerce defendants into giving up their constitutional right to trail with the threat of the 'trial tax' (a much much longer sentence if you DO go to court and exercise your Constitutional right).
I've thought about this and I don't understand why we can have plea deals which are so radically different from the potential punishment if found guilty. Like, if the state thinks you did it and offers you a $1000 fine, how is it reasonable to potentially go to jail for 6 years if found guilty?
The state already showed that it believed that the crime was only worth a $1000 fine.
Maybe there should be a rule that whatever plea deal offered should be the maximum punishment possible if you're found guilty.
Because is bullshit so you take the plea. The huge fine is just up crap to force you to plea
Carmen Ortiz, a prosecutor, was accused of driving reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz to his end with her plea-bargain tactics per this article [1][2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260227061241/https://www.forbe...
>They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
This mentality is called "prosecutor disease;"
I once said this to a former Atlanta-area DA (family-of-friend) and his first reaction was fake-revulsion; after I told him of my listenings-to-brothers' own lawfare, he conceded publishing conviction rates probably isn't good PR (but is how it works in their little Bar club).
DA then asked my friend "who is this blue collar guy?!" (when I wasn't around) – unfortunately, much of my insanity checks out...
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>co-founder Aaron Swartz['s crimes]
Which was trying to free pay-walled, publicly-funded scientific journals; today, post-LLM-consumption, his alleged crimes seem so MickeyMouse (i.e: LLMs can reformulate all published text, across platforms, with minimal IP infringement claim).
What an incredible human. SO many young lives have been snuffed-out by Prosecutors' Disease. Wake up you inhumans.
Prosecutors "protecting those careers" is 100% true
Source: I work with a top defense lawyer in Chicago
Absolutely. I actually went to trial many years ago because a DA wouldn't back down, he thought I'd bend. I didn't. We literally had video footage of the culprit, it clearly wasn't me and clearly WAS someone else. The DA waited until the day before we were to pick a jury to drop the charges, just a few days before trial. After, the DA even said to me, "I'm a dangerous man to make an enemy of." I think I was 20, so obviously I was cocky and snapped back "So am I," and stormed off. I not live a thousand miles away from that crappy little town.
I would be interested to know from him why he, personally, felt that you defending your innocence made you his enemy.
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Can the DA's past history be used as evidence in future cases to show they're not credible?
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I'd like to see a three way verdict: guilty/not guilty/innocent.
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
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Should reply "and you have made an enemy today."
Serious question.. when you do get picked up for something like that and you invoke your rights for silence. How do you get council? Do you already have a number, do you already have a relationship with a defense attorney? How do you navigate that?
I am not a lawyer.
The state has to appoint you one if you don't have one. And given that you have to invoke your exercise of your silence anyway, throw it in there. So something like, "I am invoking my right to silence and require an attorney." ought to do it. Having one ready can definitely be helpful. And while a DA is ideal, any lawyer should do, as they'll either be able to do enough work to get you out of there to find a good attorney, or get a real defense criminal attorney involved. If you do have a prior relationship, keep their card in your wallet and point them to that when you invoke your right to silence.
Illinois is one of the most corrupt places in the country for criminal law.
>This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
Is this actually true? The way the techspot article was laid out certainly implies that prosecutors knew about all the contradicting evidence, but they offered a plea deal. However, if you read the article carefully it doesn't mention any interaction with the prosecutors or that the contradicting evidence was presented to them.
>Is this actually true?
Yes.
It's not that hard to imagine that the legal system is set up to protect the comfort and careers of the people who have to be in court every day, and not necessarily the 99% of people who are in there for a handful of days - total, across a lifetime - because they had a bad day or two, or were unlucky, or need help that society is as-yet unequipped to give them. It does not surprise me that the letter and spirit of the law have a tough time surviving the practical realities of being administered, day-in-and-day-out, by fallible and self-interested human beings.
where would the plea deal come from if there was no interaction with the prosecutor's office?
They could have sent her a letter? More importantly it's unclear what the timeline of the events were. All the contradictions could have been discovered after the plea deal was offered.
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Plea bargains should not be allowed. Rewarding someone for not going to trial is equivalent to punishing them for insisting on their ancient legal right to a fair trial. If the prosecution wants to make a deal with someone in exchange for testimony then they can request a lighter sentence after the defendant is found guilty, but they should still be required to prove guilt.
Yes, I know the legal system doesn’t have anywhere near enough resources to take every case to trial. Don’t care. Give the system more resources or prosecute fewer people or some combination of the two.
It's similar to the Iowa courthouse break-in by hired pentesters. They had a contract for the work and very small people in the place where it occurred wouldn't let go. This kind of behavior is shameful and should result in jail time for bad-faith prosecutions.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/how-a...
Podcast eps about it (with the testers):
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/179/
> I forgot the source but the amount of prosecutions that are plea down is staggering.
I'd wager that 99% of the plea deals that occur in the world occur in the US. No other country uses it to the extent we do, and it's not even close. In many countries it's not an available option, or when it is and it's used, its use is heavily regulated and requires (meaningful) oversight by the judge on fairness, likelihood of conviction, etc.
And once you've accepted a plea deal it's not just a matter of making your plea - you also have to sign a whole raft of documents waiving a whole raft of rights, about appealing your conviction, about the right to present evidence in your defense in the future, or to witnesses, you have to sign a statement saying that even if you were to (attempt to) change your plea that it is your acknowledgment, "based on material facts" that the state is in possession of enough evidence to convict you.
>No other country uses it to the extent we do
That is incorrect. Japan has a 99% criminal justice conviction rate because of so many plea deals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...
Huh? This is a wild misstatement. Even your link doesn’t support this, and says that the "most likely reason" for the high rate is that prosecutors have broad discretion over whether to prosecute at all, and credits low prosecution rates and a different way of calculating the rate.
The new system has been in place for less than ten years, only covers a very limited set of crimes and is much more modeled on cooperation than coercion. The Ramseyer and Rasmusen paper reported 99.9% convictions in 1994 (49,598 of 49,643), when the law did not allow plea bargains. The rate was already above 99% long before plea deals existed.
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It sort of makes sense, why would you bring a case to trial that is not complete? A complete case will always win. The trial is the final check if the case is complete.
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See also: settlement in lieu of judgment in civil cases. There is an entire industry (debt collection) built around using the courts as a cudgel to coerce people into settlements for debts that they might not have a legal obligation to pay (because of the debt collectors' poor record-keeping, running afoul of procedural issues or consumer protection laws, etc.). Particularly for smaller amounts, attorneys will not represent consumers for defense, and (no matter what anyone tells you) judges defer to fellow lawyers if the issue goes to trial and a defendant is self-represented. Perversely, it's sometimes in a person's best interests to rack up larger debts, so that their case is worthwhile for an attorney to pick up, at which point they will likely try to negotiate a settlement rather than go to trial.
That is the theme. A jury trial is inherently risky. While conceptually a good idea, you are betting the outcome (and your future) on a bunch of folks without any legal training - and who did not manage to get out of jury duty.
And so the prosecution heaps on threats of years and years of prison time, or "take this little plea bargain". They still get their "conviction."
Plea bargains used to be considered unethical by courts and the Bar in America pre-Civil War.
We have the Reconstructionist South to thank for normalizing turning judges into form stamping Vogons and allowing prosecutors to routinely use a form of blackmail as a normal course of prosecution.
This is partially fixed by making The People of the State of __________ pay for the lawyer of the defendant's choosing. It imposes real costs to the state in these cases.
There's an argument that the cost of prosecution is one reason for the proliferation of offenses and increase in sentence lengths.
Part of that is the de facto extension of a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses in almost every American jurisdiction. If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges. Legislatures are aware of this dynamic and oblige prosecutors with more offenses and more punitive maximum penalties.
Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses. (They're not as common for major offenses, either, but that's a different matter.) Sentences tend to be much shorter and it's a major reason their incarceration rate is so much lower.
I'm not against jury trials. For one thing it'd be better if juries were more local. 100+ years ago in major US cities it was more common for trials to take place within or closer to each neighborhood. Juries were often composed of people from the neighborhood. The consolidation of courts and trials in mega courthouses broke this community link; people from outside a neighborhood are systematically more harsh than they would be if judging their actual neighbors. Not because of favoritism, but because it's easier for them to appreciate the repercussions of an overly punitive system (broken families, destroyed career prospects, etc).
If you want community involvement in even minor crimes, misdemeanor jury trials can still be streamlined. You could do something similar to some European countries where a few lay judges sit alongside the professional judge, or something that used to be more common in the US where a single jury hears multiple cases each day (still a thing for indictments). But such trials would still have to dispense with alot of the procedural rigor to keep things moving along at a rapid clip.
> If the defendant can force a jury trial for a misdemeanor, which is in fact quite costly for prosecutors, then the response is to raise the stakes with felony charges.
I'm not quite understanding this. What is there to be gained by raising the stakes? Doesn't it make defendants even more determined to seek justice?
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> Countries like the UK and France don't have jury trials for minor offenses.
If it leaves you with a criminal conviction, I don't consider it to be "minor".
If the state wants to label me as a criminal, I should get a jury trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_defender_(United_States...
Of course, "of the defendant's choosing" causes all sorts of moral hazard.
The defendant's choosing is so he doesn't get stuck with a [relatively] low paid and overworked public defender. It's so he has the same opportunity to hire the high powered winners on the state's dime and the state has to pay full price that attorney demands. If costs and taxes get too high, people should start voting for more selective prosecution candidates.
The state intends to take [part of] his life away, the state needs to pay for the process.
Easy fix make prosecutors become defense lawyers every second case. Outcomes of both affect careers.
Unfortunately chief public prosecutor is an elected political position.
Chief public defender isn't, and in fact that position doesn't even exist.
So success in defending will never affect political careers.
Did you not consider that they were proposing "change"?
There's probably arguments against the change, I dunno, I haven't thought about it. "You can't change things" isn't one of them.
its sad peoples job security or toxic work culture can cause innocent people to rot in jail. humans really suck at being human.
the app providers dont want to admit fraud is running over their platform. the justice department cant admit any mistakes either.
Its a problem which will only get worse as the economy declines. And as the economy declines, more places get breached because more criminality and at the same time less money to secure things.
I cant see this getting any better which is kind of terrifying.
One more reason i can think of is that if people get super afraid of these problems, then they might even start asking for mass surveilance to help prove their innocense in these kinds of things. Which again is an incentive / reasoning for higher government not to do anything about it, because it creates opportunities where current population sentiment is taking them away...
I remember reading about this story awhile back. Some young twenty something was caught with a small amount (MDMA I think?) and the ADA was pushing for him to take a deal. Before anything was inked or signed - the father of the son has his lawyer draft some legal process to the DEA/DOJ to get what sort of evidence they had on him. The ADA called the father and bitched at him for a solid few minutes about how that action will result in months of them having to do work - and at that point the deal was off and it was retribution time.
It was a very telling experience where doing things our constitution permits is considered a burden on law enforcement and prosecutors.
This is the #1 problem facing the US. Consistent application of the law is only available to those who can pay for it and far too slow even when you can pay.
And the worst part is that once you take the plea deal, you are guilty. Both in perception and by record. So once it comes out that you plead, your employers will fire you. Makes it impossibly hard to find another job as your name comes up as a criminal. What I'm really confused about: Can't they have just checked the victim's bank records? The money would be taken out of the the Cash app and back into their own account. Or, if used for other service, there would be records of where it was spent and you could see the geographic activity.
On an entirely different note. Just wow. I know a lot of people who don't "do online" finance anything. And this kind of stuff is terrifying, because they would not even know that someone else had setup an account using their PII.
The job description of US criminal persecutors is wrong. People there should work into fixing it.
It's not the lawyers but the KPAs. If a prosecutor's promotion is judged based on the number of successful prosecutions, then there's every incentive to prosecute and zero incentive to dismiss charges.
Fixing the system requires changing the incentives. Individuals would adjust accordingly.
Edit: It won't get fixed because ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime. Lawyers had to fight popular sentiment to get rid of the death penalty in most states. Even today, between death and life imprisonment, the former is preferred by the general public.
The prosecutor where I grew up had the cops mad at him too because he would only prosecute if it was a slam dunk win. He didn't want to risk not getting a conviction so many crimes had no action if they didn't have spotless evidence. So somewhat a win, but still not good that known criminals are out and about because the prosecutor didn't want to risk a not-guilty verdict.
The whole system is pretty broken.
> ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime
This behaviour, by Joe Public, is a serious problem, in that it's an emotional response, not a logical one, and absolutely never based on informed debate
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>Even today, between death and life imprisonment, the former is preferred by the general public.
Source?
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It will not be fixed. The lawyers have control of our legal system. They are the politicians and judges. The system is theirs; if we want to change the status quo, it will take nothing less than a bloody revolution.
Politicians being trained lawyers is a good thing - they (supposedly) know the nightmare that is the legal system
To put it into a software developers context - which hopefully makes it easier to understand for some.
The law is legacy code that stretches back a few centuries (literally) that has been written by many many people with little in common, and has active users who must be consulted upon change.
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Or a flood of new lawyers with a basis of Beneficence and ethics, and a knowing willingness to act against maximal short-term self interest. (Though still self profitable, just not maximally)
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Lawyers are the first thing AI should drive out of business.
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Also most of the legislators
Our society is like a beastly machine that feeds on the souls of living beings (Human and animal) in order to keep functioning.
I studied Masters in Criminology and I have to say that Justice is absent from the Criminal 'Justice' system.
It would be an interesting mechanic if the plea deal also altered a ceiling penalty (multiplier maybe?) in the event of a loss for the defendant.
Would be also better if the lawyer on the other side gets some penalty if lies or is misleading and pay to defendants cash
One of these days someone, or some people, will finally lose it and this time hopefully they aim away from the schools.
This shit is why my hippie dippie state where it’s hard to prosecute people is actually a good thing. Sadly, more fenty street walker is a sign that cops aren’t as empowered to deprive random people of rights.
But everyone knee jerks into voting out the cool DA who drops victimless criminal prosecutions because they don’t like a fenty zombie screaming in the streets.
I happen to love my mostly low policed state for this exact reason. They’re almost never there to help you, and mostly just want to fuck you up!
> This is the goal ... They know they are at fault but admitting they made a mistake is damaging to careers.
I iamgine bullshit easy plea deals also get you nice numbers for a "tough of crime" image for political clout even if some of the most vile crimes get some of the lightest sentences imaginable