New Orleans man locked up nearly 8 years awaiting trial, then case gets tossed

You don’t have to be racist to survive county. You simply stick with your race. There’s a distinction. Yes, if shit pops off and you’re not sticking up for your race, you can get called out. But nobody is asking the 70-year-old with a limp to roll heavy with the woods/kinfolk/whatever. There’s more an element here of getting marked as a bitch: prison, and to a lesser extent county, is a game of respect. Run store and someone steals from you? Handle it or it will be repeated, because they notice you don’t stick up for yourself. The smart ones watch. But the woods weren’t eyeing me when I played my daily game of spades with a kinfolk partner (and still friend). It’s not like that in county. Prison, maybe.

DO behavior is intentional. County belongs to them. Prison belongs to the inmates. This was explained to me as “this is their house. Prison is ours.” The person explaining, our head wood, was looking forward to prison. Life is way different in prison, with mutual respect — again, I’m told. Jail sucks on purpose. If it didn’t suck nobody would care that they ended up there. This is the American approach to corrections, that of deterrence; in other places there is more of a focus on rehabilitation, and you’ll find a much different jail experience.

Jail is a lot more fun when you make it abundantly clear to the DOs that you see through their psychopathy. It’s a control mechanism for those who don’t. Once they figure out it doesn’t work on you and you’ll play their game anyway, you can actually develop a decent rapport with DOs. Just never, ever, ever trust them. I grieved one and he used to pull tricks like calling me out right after a race meeting to make it look like I was a snitch (don’t even THINK about snitching, or enjoy PC). They know the game better than you do, and they’re paid to do it.

Those dry runs were actually nice, I found, because it was a nice break outside. My cell was way better than transfer cells, though, and breaking routine sucks. Doing time is all about routine. By 30 days in, I had a schedule. The next 100 flew. Just keep to yourself, improve yourself during the downtime, get on a schedule, and play the respect game carefully and you’ll be fine. I got marked quickly as the computer nerd, but that also meant I could help people out with their legal stuff. Find a purpose and become useful, and stand up for yourself when needed. Lead with your shoulder and pivot, if it comes to that — I’ve fought more outside than in, though, and most of the violence I experienced was from DOs (tased once because I couldn’t hear orders in the shower, pepper sprayed twice). Help the right people and you’ll have the right friends, which is a big part of survival.

Some parts of your comment confused me, so maybe you can clarify. Murder trial inmates are almost always confined in maximum. Medium is a larger cross section of crimes and classification, and most places call medium “gladiator school” or “gladiator academy” because there’s a lot more freedom than maximum and still some hard hitters. Minimum is like summer camp that you can’t leave, with everybody sitting for DUI or check fraud. Transfer cells mix this classification up, which is probably where you landed with the heavy hitters in that 11 hour room (that sounds like transfer), but a misdemeanor rap almost guarantees you were in minimum. Am I right? Or did you get classified as a hitter and thrown in school?

I can’t speak to the rest of your comment.

Let's pretend for a moment that I'm a relatively competent programmer with small amounts of disposable income to spend on hobbies, such as running algorithms over government datasets. (Okay, that's a weird one -- but I think it's good to apply my craft towards politics.) I know a lot about making computers scan through large sets of data looking for patterns, and some about making websites and whatnot.

I normally don't think technology does much for political problems, but this one legitimately sounds like we should be applying fraud-detection style algorithms to the names that appear in court records, looking for abnormalities. (Heck, we should probably look for all kinds of irregularities, not just in the pattern of names.)

Identifying the problem doesn't magically solve it, but it sounds like being able to assemble subtle cases out of thousands of documents across hundreds of jurisdictions actually would provide utility towards addressing this.

It doesn't stop the corruption directly, but it shines a pretty bright light on it. And it allows groups looking to tackle it head on to focus their efforts on litigating, instead of document finding or figuring out who the culprits are.

I'll never understand why when you are kids and get in trouble, they separate you. When you are an adult criminal, they put you in with other criminals and create more criminals.

Recidivism is high in those types of situations, in addition to how records are never cleared for good behavior. We have a serious corrections problem that does little in the way of correcting by grouping everyone so tight.

If he didn't go in a killer, he sure as hell should be ready to take a life by now. If someone robbed me of 9 years of my life, I'd make it my mission to rob them of any joy in their life.

And I'm willing to bet anything that there is no evidence that prisons actually achieve their stated purpose.

I was abused in prison I'd expect to be able to sue the state for damages. Is there a general exception to the expectation of security for prisoners that means they can't expect the state to protect their well being in there?

No, that would be true if it was just revoking parole on the prior charge (it's kind of odd that that didn't happen, but it's possible that the original sentence ended to soon after the arrest to bother), but this was a new criminal charge which would have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Same for giving a whole new two years after Hurricane Issac.

At some point, particularly for non-violent charges, surely they should have to at least release him until the trial.

The pipeline is based on plea bargains. Wanting a trial shouldn't take 8 years, ever.

> “He could have come home as early as January of 2015,” said defense attorney Martin Regan, whose firm handled the case from the start. “There’s a man who just steadfastly said, 'I don’t care, you can keep me. I’m not guilty, I want a trial.' ”

I am thinking it was strategy to wait it out, perhaps not initially. Or thinking about how he's gonna become a millionaire after suing because of the delays/ loss of right to speedy trial

Smith’s saga behind bars began on Feb. 11, 2010, when State Police and federal drug agents said they discovered baggies of crack cocaine inside a safe in his Carrollton residence.

To me that sounds like he was at the customer end of the distribution, dealing on the street. A potential life sentence for that is bonkers.

(I don't think, from what I know, that distribution of crack would be in that latter group.)

Even the most invasive surveillance system is more humane that the US prison system.

As I see it, we need both a propaganda campaign pointing out how nuts the drug laws are in addition to some recognizable way of incrementally easing the laws and adjusting to it. That’s the rational thing an individual would do anyway; i am more aware than ever you need to parcel these things into 2 year steps for american power transfers between parties.

To the person who downvoted me, this is distinctly less useful than contributing the conversation in a meaningul manner.

That's no excuse for further delay, but explains why he was locked up in the first place.

Pretty sure branding half the US population as irrational isn't going to win you much consensus.

I thought that was intentional :) afaik bail isn't used much outside the US, Canada and UK.

The US for-profit bail industry is the usual case of Americans taking a bad idea to the extreme in the search of a little profit.

The "government" is the taxpayers, basically. I'd rather have all folks involved in ruining that man's life being sued like they should, and having to repay him for the opportunity loss. Taxpayers represent an infinite pocket to steal from, but private citizens don't have as much resources and should be held responsible for their decisions.