Cruel and Unusual: The Story of Leandro Andrade (2003) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Cruel and Unusual: The Story of Leandro Andrade (2003) [pdf]

scholarship.law.duke.edu

42 pointsdictum8 comments

I couldn’t read the whole PDF. It’s just too depressing. The U.S. penal and justice system to me seems like a great big mess full of rage inducing injustices.

But we can't just turn our eyes away.

I donate to the Innocence Project.

Yes. There are several very serious problems with the American justice system:

    - elected state and local prosecutors
      (who feel pressure to resolve cases quickly
      in order to be able to get reelected)
    - appointed federal DAs who use their jobs to
      gain notoriety for subsequent runs for elected
      offices (and therefore feel pressure to resolve
      cases quickly in order to be able to get elected)
    - too many police (thank Bill Clinton for this),
      whose salaries have to be funded somehow and
      which too many cities fund via fine revenue
    - ever-escalating sentencing guidelines (because
      no politician of any party wants to be seen as
      soft on crime)
      (recall that Hillary Clinton was part of this in
      the 90s; this is not a phenomenon limited to
      one party)
    - overload due to criminalization of minor things
      (e.g., marijuana related charges), which leads
      to enormous pressure for plea deals (even
      judges want these so as to reduce their courts'
      load) and puts pressure on jails...
    - ...making jails big business
    - that thoroughly disgusting invention:
      civil asset forfeiture
      (let's hope that the SCOTUS gets to rule that
      unconstitutional soon)
    - defendants are not allowed to press for
      jury nullification
      (for the first 100 years of the Republic it
      was established by the SCOTUS that defendants
      get to, then that got overturned in the late
      1890s)

and many other issues.

Add the fact that there's always poor people to go after who lack education and/or means for obtaining good representation and... these issues add up to a massive injustice system.

It only seems that way to you and other people who feel that way because you only hear about the times when the system fails. Not the vast majority of times when it works.

The vast majority of all criminal court cases end up in plea deals. That was never the norm prior to Prohibition, and, later, the drug war. Judges used to dislike plea deals. Now they need them in order to keep load down.

Plea deals are extremely coercive. It's all too easy for an innocent defendant with marginal resources to take a plea deal because the alternative is worse. Yes, plea deals are a cup half-empty/full thing, but all too often they are coercive rather than a good deal for a guilty defendant.

Lastly, whatever happened to "better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned"?? We absolutely should consider innocent people convictions as a metric that counts for ten times that of guilty people who got less (or no) time than they should have. Do you not agree?

I am in agreement with you. Luckily the majority of people convicted of crimes are actually guilty of what they're convicted of.

Now I don't believe people should be going to jail for petty drug offences, and that drugs in general should be decriminalized, so we can disagree that the laws being used to convict people should be changed, but the vast majority of people being convicted of breaking laws are actually breaking those laws.

Consider the possibility that your assumption about the state of my knowledge on the legal system is incorrect. Assume this. Then present reasons why my disgust is unwarranted. That would be a good starting point for further discussion.

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