>I cant understand why this is not making people want to argue for non rich people to have a decent defence in court.
It's because that would break the system. There are over two million inmates in the United States. There is no known or obvious way to provide a reasonable defense for that many defendants in any cost effective manner.
A single good lawyer gets paid six figures. A criminal trial lasts several years through all the appeals. There are millions of accused. Do the math. It's just not happening.
The only way to fix it is to drastically reduce the number of accused so that each can be allocated more resources. So either we need to develop some magic to drastically reduce the number of crimes people commit, or we need to prosecute drastically fewer criminals, or we need to drastically reduce the number of things common people can be prosecuted for. Make your choice.
What he wrote: at least 95% of the people locked up are guilty of something related to their charges
What you wrote: And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”.
These aren't the same. It's depressing to see someone being misquoted on literally the same page as their original statement, in a discussion about lack of accuracy in legal proceedings.
>The perpetrator of a bail-set crime should not have less practical punishment for the crime simply because they paid their way out of part of the punishment.
Except pretrial detention, which is where bail comes in, is done prior to adjudication (plea bargain, trial, etc.), not after.
As such, the folks we're talking about haven't been convicted of anything. And if, as is supposed to be the case, that one is innocent until proven guilty, you're advocating for innocent people to be punished.
Is that actually your stance on this, or were you not understanding the situation?
> hate to say it, but experience shows rich people play in a different legal system
People have been saying this since the beginning of the case, with the goal posts constantly shifting. Same for Holmes. Do you have any evidence for rich criminals getting significantly shorter sentences in federal prison than others?
> Either a ton of bad guys don't get tried or a ton of innocent people are getting convicted.
You missed a possibility. Maybe they put in sufficient effort during investigation and when deciding whether to prosecute to weed out all the innocent people then and build good cases against the actual bad guys.
Very high conviction rights are symptoms of both puppet criminal justice systems that just convict whoever the state wants convicted and of criminal justice systems that only convict actual bad guys and do a good job of getting wrongly or mistakenly accused innocent people out of the system quickly. You need to look deeper to figure out which kind you are dealing with.
It is when a criminal justice system has a low conviction rate that you can be sure something is wrong.
> It's entirely with regard for justice. That's the goal.
Your ends may be laudable but your means are immoral. The ends do not justify the means.
> You're concerned with conviction of something harmful. The harm they committed was in the other crimes. They should evade punishment for that because they managed to hide it well?
You say they're evading punishment "because they managed to hide it well" but the fact remains that you were never able to prove they actually did anything worthy of being punished for in the first place. Don't you see the obvious error in that? The only thing you actually know is that their financial transactions were not documented to your satisfaction. In effect you're demanding that they prove their innocence, whereas in a just system one is innocent until proven guilty.
>The reason that we should end the "one law for the rich, another for the poor" system we have now is that the system will never get more just unless the people with power have an incentive to make it so.
That only works if the injustice affects sufficiently many affluent people that they act to change it -- and that they act to do more than just solve it solely for the rich. Which is highly unlikely, because those who can't buy their way out of a prosecution with lawyers can buy their way out of it with campaign contributions or outright bribes (but I repeat myself) or calling in favors from politically connected friends, etc.
And even if that wasn't the case, most rich people will never be prosecuted anyway (which is the same reason that most blue collar voters don't vote in anyone who will fix it for their brethren).
But the main reason is that solving it for working class people is hard, because good criminal defense is extraordinarily expensive and indigent defendants themselves can't afford it, but there are so many such defendants that governments can't afford to pay for it on their behalf either. Meanwhile solving it for the rich is easy, because they each have their own money so they just open their wallets and obtain the best justice money can buy.
This is always the problem with the "we'll make the problem worse and then they'll have to fix it" logic. When the problem is extremely hard, making it worse doesn't cause an easy solution to magically appear, it just makes it worse.
> It's a variant of "with great power comes great responsibility".
It's not. The idea that being innocent until proven guilty frees you of responsibility is wrong. They are on separate axis. People get tried and convicted of criminal negligence causing damage, injury, death / manslaughter etc and for that matter all sorts of other criminal acts quite regularly.
Would you say somewhere like the USA where people are usually quite strongly innocent until proven guilty has a problem incarcerating enough people?
Why do people have to go to jail? One of the fortés of our economic system is its tolerance for failure. Stupidity, while a liability in civil court, is not criminally prosecuted.
Fraud, gross negligence, etc. are. The bar for proving guilt of those offences is high. I do not believe that high standard has been met, at least not yet. The situation deserves criminal investigation, perhaps. But jumping to the conclusion of jailing those involved is rash.
> Fair enough. But that doesn’t really change my argument?
I think the point (which bears repeating) is that suspects are not criminals until proven so in a court, and it's important to be careful in our language, especially in our modern times where the court of public opinion operates swiftly and without due process.
> Since it's not obvious that Bob has actually committed a crime, shouldn't there be some mechanism to allow the obvious profits of crime to be confiscated without having to convict Bob? A lot of reasonable people think the answer to that is "yes";
No, those people are absolutely not reasonable! Those people want a magic world where we have crystal balls that tell us exactly who's innocent and guilty. That would certainly be nice, but that's not the world we live in.
It's frustrating when the guilty go free because of the rules we have in place to protect the innocent; but those rules didn't come out of nowhere. They are the result of the hard-won experience of thousands of innocent people being punished. If you remove them then innocent people will be punished again.
> You're making the assumption that Holmes wronged "commoners" with malicious intent.
Nope. I take from the text that prosecutors-and-or-law-itself defend the interests of super rich better than the interests/well-being of commoners.
> I would be very careful before jumping to conclusions and asserting with high confidence that the court verdict is flawed.
Good for you. I'm not saying it is flawed, neither am I passing judgement on who's guilty... I'm saying it seems the whole system is favoring the some over others.
> what actual, specific crime did they commit that warrants a custodial sentence?
As another commenter pointed out:
> Conviction of 3 felonies including conspiracy to defraud the United States and yet no one is going to jail.
Those are crimes punishable by prison sentences, if the judge so chooses to enforce the law. I bet nobody lost their right to vote either, despite the felonies.
Admittedly I am not a lawyer, and I am definitely not an expert on Citizens v. United (which is essential to the arguments being made here), but I still don't believe they couldn't be put in jail - all it would take is for the judge to have a motivation to do so.
Correct, but you shouldn't go to jail for immoral behaviour.
> It's perfectly reasonable to see all the facts, many of which aren't permitted to be considered by a jury, and then say, "wow,these laws are messed up, they let the powerful people get away with crimes. We should change that and hold them accountable."
The IRS does this, and it's horrible, but the accountability comes in the form of an increased tax obligation and not jail time.
Going to jail for doing something that was legal, but has become illegal after the fact, isn't something that benefits anyone but the ruling class, and isn't something that I would advocate for.
> There are not two systems of justice — one for the wealthy and one for the poor
Would be nice if they would say this when a poor person, because they cannot afford a team of lawyers, gets a completely over the top punishment on shoddy evidence.
>Cooperative people accused of non-violent crimes should NEVER be taken into custody until proven guilty in a court with fair trial.
Uh, so if someone set fire to a bunch of homes in a neighborhood, and there's video of them doing it, but they did it knowing the homes were empty, they should just be left free until the trial is over? I'm sorry but I feel like a lot of online comments on criminal justice are very shortsighted
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