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Plea bargaining constitutes something like 98% of convictions, even though it's a hilariously flagrant infringement of the Sixth Amendment. America mostly doesn't have trials.
Our local lefty defense lawyer has pointed out before that a completely negligible number of people facing charges are innocent.
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Yes, obviously I’m aware of that. What I’m disputing is that any significant number of the people taking those plea bargains are innocent, or that their “civil liberties are being violated” by lying cops trying to railroad them.
Their civil liberties are being violated by being pushed through a system that de-facto requires them to confess without trial, regardless of whether they are actually guilty or not.
I expect a not-insignificant amount of people were in fact innocent though. I was arrested for trespassing once, and urged to take a plea deal because they had video footage of me committing the crime. I knew they didn’t because I never committed the crime, but I was under enough pressure that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in my shoes took the plea deal anyway.
There are many issues with the criminal justice system. Excessive leniency for actual criminals can be true at the same time as corrupt, aggressive prosecution against innocents. It’s the core of the whole idea of anarchotyranny.
Nobody is forced to take a plea deal. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question - as in, there’s no murky questions of intent, evidence that could be interpreted either way, etc. - taking a plea deal strikes me as a very poor choice. The fact is that the vast majority of people who take plea deals do so because they are in fact guilty, or at least they’re adjacent enough to a crime that a reasonable jury could assess them as guilty.
Why? It sounds like you didn’t take a plea deal because you were certain there was no evidence of your guilt. Why would someone in that type of situation take a plea deal, short of being a person who lacks good judgment?
"If you're not guilty you have nothing to fear from the system, even though they have already proved their lack of scruples by pressuring you."
"If you're innocent you have nothing to hide."
"Comrade Stalin, there must have been a mistake!"
How does that indicate a lack of scruples on the justice system’s part? If they believe that you’re guilty, and that getting you to take a plea deal is a more reliable way to ensure that you’re punished rather than risking the possibility that a sympathetic/gullible jury makes a poor choice, it’s entirely reasonable for them to lean on you to take the plea deal. This isn’t unscrupulous at all.
This but unironically.
By that logic if I believe I'm not guilty, it's not unscrupulous at all to kill the cops and try to get away with it, or at least ensure I'm imprisoned for a good reason.
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This is most people in stressful situations.
Depends on the details. For example, I once took a deal to have something I didn’t do negotiated down to a fine. If I had been found guilty in court, 1/2 year in prison was the minimum. This seems to me like demanding money with the threat of prison if I exercise my rights.
Even if I had been found innocent, I likely would have been jailed for an unspecified amount of time, which would have been a larger hassle, and more costly, than the fine anyway.
Additionally, things which are a poor choice but alleviating in-the-moment stressors basically make up half the economy, and most people partake in them. The government should not be participating in such predatory behavior against its own citizens.
This describes effectively 0 cases. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question. Any situation where you don’t have video evidence of you being somewhere other than the crime scene comes down to he-said-she-said, but one of you is a cop.
For example, in my trespassing case: - I was found on the sidewalk adjacent to the property I was supposedly trespassing on (I was going for a walk for no particular reason, far from my home)
All this in a case where I was 100% factually innocent. The fact there even was a camera on the building is what saved me, or else I might have actually ended up in prison. This isn’t the only instance either. There have been at least 4 times in my relatively short life that I have been falsely accused by police, and one of those led to an arrest. I’m fairly good at navigating those situations, but there are many who I’m sure would fair worse
I have made it well into my thirties without ever being arrested nor ever even receiving so much as a traffic ticket. I live my life in an upstanding manner and do not involve myself in situations that could lead to me being suspected of criminal activity. The two times in my life that I’ve been questioned by police officers, I calmly and respectfully explained what was happening and allowed them full leeway to obtain all the information they needed in order to ascertain my innocence, after which they let me go on my way without issue.
I had been seen peering through the slots in the walls surrounding the property (it was a cool building and I am a curious soul).
This is shady behavior. When taken in combination with the fact that you had visible scrapes on both your body and clothing consistent with having hopped a wall, I think it’s entirely reasonable and proper for the police to have arrested you and assumed your guilt.
I think you should probably consider making better decisions and acting less shady/suspicious.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
In no way was it intended to be! I was responding only to @FiveHourMarathon’s specific point. I have always found Trump highly unsavory, and the boundless charisma everyone assures me he possesses is totally lost on me. I agree that Trump is an unscrupulous, unethical, slimy individual, and that he has almost certainly been involved in illicit/illegal activity at various points in his career.
However, the defense of Trump I will make is this: by dint of the fact that he is a politically influential figure with the genuine potential to harm the ruling regime and the individuals within it, he is inherently in a different class of person than the vast majority of normal run-of-the-mill individuals. The probability of him being targeted with arbitrary and unjust criminal proceedings is astronomically higher than the odds of any commenter on this site suffering a similar fate. It’s a concern for him in a way that is just obviously isn’t for the average person, because the government doesn’t really get anything out of persecuting some random Joe Schmo, due to the incentive structures in place.
The Founding Fathers, due to their status as political dissidents/revolutionaries, were acutely cognizant of the possibility of targeted political lawfare and unjust imprisonment by authorities. Many of the specific freedoms enumerated in the Bill Of Rights are expressly designed to guard against this particular scenario, and are more of an unnecessary nuisance in other more mundane criminal proceedings for non-politicized crimes. While I understand and appreciate why these liberties were held to be so important by those men in that particular context, I think that we simply do not live within a context wherein the likelihood of the justice system plucking up random innocent people and vindictively lying about them is worth considering for most people.
In the very limited contexts in which that probability is higher - for example, the context of a powerful and wealth political candidate widely reviled by authorities with direct control over criminal proceedings - I think we can afford to at least be more vigilant about those liberties than we would when considering the trial of DeVontavious the car thief, with four prior convictions for car theft, in his newest trial for car theft.
Isn't Trump's higher likelihood of targeting more than compensated for by his vastly larger resources to defend himself?
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I’ll continue following the law, but to place the onus of “don’t be suspicious” while following the law onto the citizenry is exactly the sort of infringement on rights that I’m talking about. The state has no right to arrest citizens for doing things that aren’t illegal, even if they look bad. If staring through a wall is arrestable, make it a crime.
There’s so much low hanging fruit for police to deal with it’s absurd that this should even be an issue. This was in a major city where I saw shoplifting on a daily basis! A car in front of me got shot up in a drive-by shooting! Entire sections of the city were defacto no-go zones! The fact they took time to arrest me, at the time college student working two jobs, was absurd.
Sounds terrible. I’ve been ticketed for things as simple as picking up a rock in the wrong jurisdiction. I can’t imagine how little you must do for this to be possible.
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