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Comment by conover | Hacker News Reader

It's unclear to me how these situations are not a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

United States v. Salerno: "the government's proposed conditions of release or detention not be 'excessive' in light of the perceived evil."

Stack v. Boyle: "excessive" is "a figure higher than is reasonably calculated" to ensure appearance

I guess it's easy to beat up people who don't have the means to defend themselves. Someone should start an Occupy Justice movement and have everyone request jury trials to cause a system crash.

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One of the many problems here is that the public has little sympathy for defendants, and most talk about the 'justice system' is basically a competition to see who can rail agaist criminals the most. The facts that the false conviction rate is quite high, and that the vast majority of cases (>90%) do not go to trial at all are completely missed by the citizenry who simply do not care to learn about the system they are upholding.

There also seems to be a widespread belief that everyone who has "brushes with the law" is guilty of something, even if it wasn't the thing the cops picked them up for or the DA charged them with. I think the prevalence of "beating the system" stories in popular media helps fuel this perception.

You want to see the system change? Get the police to start arresting middle-class white people who can afford bail and lawyers on these trivial charges. If it started impacting people who weren't already poor, there'd be change, pronto.

Unfortunately, the middle class people charged under the current system either do not have enough money to defend against the charges, or would bankrupt their families by doing so. Only the rich can afford to defend in the current system, the poor and middle classes are forced to settle and serve jail time, (though all are subject to the very real possibilty of a false conviction followed by a very long sentence anyway,) as is indicated by the >90% settlement rate of criminal cases.

What they lack in financial means, they have in social connections. If 20% of upper and middle-class white America was subjected to the same kind of treatment by law enforcement as poor whites and minorities, there would be an uproar. The phones would ring off of the hooks at DA's and Police Chiefs' offices until things changed.

This makes me wonder whether a possible solution path could be to bring a case about this to the Supreme Court.

The problem is not that the supreme court has never ruled on anything like this, it's that all a supreme court ruling does is to give you something that a good lawyer can refer to in your court case.

Being in the criminal justice system is incredibly expensive and high risk, and as an individual, allowing your case to go to the supreme court requires continually losing it.

A supreme court ruling that doesn't find bails themselves unconstitutional would not help.

If they find bails unconstitutional, then the bail laws are void.

If they only find certain practices wrong, then you need to prove to a court, possibly on appeal, that the conditions from the supreme court judgement hold in your case. So you need a lawyer and some time, post-arraignment... You'll have the joy of having your bail found illegal after 2+ weeks in jail.

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