Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System
March 13th, 2012Good luck with that.
Via: New York Times:
AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”
…
I launched, predictably, into a lecture about what prosecutors would do to people if they actually tried to stand up for their rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right to be informed of charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy jury trial, to cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of counsel.
But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.
“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.
If you could get people to do this (insist on a jury trial) and at the same time do some heavy “Fully Informed Jury” pamphleteering you might make a dent.
Probably the most practical way to approach the problem would be to get someone into the head of a Public Defender’s office who would change the policy from perpetual plea bargaining to actual jury trials.
You cannot enjoy constitutional rights in an equity court.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LxY_H5V0Kw&feature=player_embedded
I think juries are probably heavily stacked with government workers, probably pulled from the halls of the courthouse due to shortage of regular folk showing up. Either that and/or old retired people that just want to “get” someone, and put ’em away. You also have the witless, who just do what they’re told. Any of these ‘types’ virtually guarantee guilty pleas.
I am old & retired, but working for liberty. Some of the witless can’t do what they are told.
Words are used as weapons of mass delusion.
When you start studying the system, you quickly learn it is full of traps. Separating from the system is a daunting task.
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