Add new comment

In the Pursuit of Justice, Do We Need Trials?

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 2008-03-27 02:52.

Joseph Potter at LewRockwell.com - the sad tale of the death of justice in America told to a class of eighth graders by two defense attorneys. 97% of the cases are settled by plea bargain, largely innocent people agreeing to plead guilty to avoid the risk of a jury finding them guilty of trumped-up charges. The only solution is to convince people to always demand a jury trial, but that is today a very dangerous thing to do. [lew]

Quote:
The answer has to do with the awesome power of the prosecutor's office and the idea of piling criminal counts on top of other criminal counts until any matter could net one untold years in jail. We were told by both attorneys that for centuries on end criminal charges were not arbitrary. We in America would charge a horse thief with theft, but not with conspiracy to steal horses, willful evasion of taxes on stolen horses, cruelty to animals and diminishing the civil rights of horse owners; but this is no longer true.

...

We were told that it is a fiction that the government will not retaliate against you if you demand your constitutional right to a jury trial in a criminal case. That was the most shocking statement of the day to my young charges.

The class and I were left with the distinct impression that the courts were rigged to fill jails and that justice was not on the agenda. When one of the children asked, "how is that fair?"; the answer was that the fair came to town in October and was at the fairgrounds on west Highway 50. This seems to be a well-known joke among lawyers, but it was a real comedown for the children and myself.

1 comment | quote | 220 reads
( categories: Politics )

Reply



The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.


*

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <i> <b> <u>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web and e-mail addresses are automatically converted into links.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • Easily link to terms in various wikis. For help, see interwiki.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • You can use BBCode tags in the text, URLs will be automatically converted to links
More information about formatting options
Verify comment authorship
Captcha Image: you will need to recognize the text in it.
*
Please type in the letters/numbers that are shown in the image above.