Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat
globalcitizen.org
globalcitizen.org
In Denmark, you seek compensation after the fact. The exact compensation will depend on several variables, so I cannot give an exact figure. But I did find a case where a man was wrongfully imprisoned for five months, and got 141,000 DKK (~22,000 USD) in compensation. Although, the case noted he had sought 500,000 DKK in compensation.
One problem is to have a successful suit against wrongful imprisonment, you have to prove intent. If somebody accidentally imprisoned you acting in good faith, the idea is that people make mistakes. There is automatic protection built into the system to allow prosecutors and LE to do their jobs. If there wasn't intent but the job they did was sloppy, it becomes a very grey area because then you have to define "sloppy". Everybody's sloppy to some degree or another, so the courts have set a high bar here (IANAL, just what I've read).
The second problem is that laws and punishments are set in isolation, as if they were dealing with an ideal citizen who just broke one law. If you've got a job, a car, and savings and then you forget to pay your car insurance, a hefty fine isn't a big deal. If, however, you're poor and have to drive without insurance just to have a job and eat, then the laws were not set up with you in mind. It's not malice by one person that causes this. It's apathy among dozens of people all with different slices of the problem. It's not clear who would be the person responsible or who would have the supervisory authority over all of these people to prevent it even if the system were in place to find restitution.
I doubt repayment for wrongful imprisonment would make that worse.
1) let you out (drop charges) and expose the public purse to wrongful imprisonment damages,
2) take it to trial and lose, also exposing the public purse to the same damages,
3) take it to trial and win, which is expensive but at least looks good for the prosecutor, or
4) plea you out to a lesser charge, preferably one that carries a penalty of at least as long in jail as you've already served, so as not to expose the public purse to those damages
The last option is probably the best-looking one for a prosecutor. It's cheap, quick, and doesn't look bad for their bosses. I would think we would get more 4s and less 1s than the current system. 1s are good for the accused. 4s are very bad, but not the worst.
Again, I'm not saying reform is impossible, just playing devil's advocate on this particular proposal.
> 2) take it to trial and lose, also exposing the public purse to the same damages,
If a doctor makes a mistake, he or she is liable (in addition to the hospital). In the case of wrongful imprisonment, there should be exposed liability for the officers too. They are the ones who make the judgement call to arrest someone based on the information they have and the threat they perceive. If they fail at that and end up causing a net harm to individuals, they should be bearing (within reasonable limits) responsibility for that.
If the police get a call that someone is being robbed, then pick someone up that matches the description that was jogging along a block away, the person may turn out to just be someone somewhat similar that was jogging. Imposing a penalty on the officers, department, prosecutors, etc for failing to convict this innocent person doesn't seem like something that would particularly improve the course of justice.
Certainly it would be an unfortunate situation, but I'm not sure it should be something actionable without showing the arrest itself was intended to harass them, rather than being a case of reasonable mistaken identity.
In USA, the courts are open for anyone's business. No misdiagnosis is required, merely an unhappy patient (or survivors) and an opportunistic lawyer.
The time I said "your honor, we find for the defendant" as foreperson of a malpractice jury was surprisingly uplifting for me...
The time between arrest and bail hearing max out at a few days. Not great if you're innocent, but much different than the weeks to months before a trial.
If we want to build a town hall, we don't just take the next person that comes along and force them to build the thing that everyone then gets to benefit from--that's what taxes are for.
What if there were a "speedy trial" clock? It ticks down faster (6x) between arrest and arraignment, when the accused is held in jail awaiting their initial hearing. It counts down more slowly (x/6) when the accused is released and preparing for trial. And it counts down at the baseline rate when the accused is arraigned and held in jail awaiting trial. The defense, and only the defense, can request that the time to trial be extended. If the case is dropped unilaterally, or the trial verdict is not guilty, the state is on the hook for the amount of time counted down off the trial clock.
So if the cops arrest you on Friday at 5 PM for the express purpose of keeping you in jail for the maximum amount of time before seeing a judge or magistrate on Monday morning, they piss off the prosecutors, who counted down 2 weeks off their clock for the 2.5 days spent in jail awaiting the initial hearing. And if the judge denies release because the prosecutors claim the accused is a danger or flight risk, they have to back up that assertion by throwing more resources into the pending trial before the clock runs out. Maybe the clock allows 30 days for someone arraigned within hours and held without bail, and 180 days for someone released pending trial.
If you don't want to bind up your court calendar, you release everyone who isn't dangerous, put extra effort into processing those held in jail pending trial--possibly preempting trials on lesser crimes--and try to make more deals when too many trials are running their clocks out at the same time. Prosecutors that lose too many cases to "failure to provide a speedy trial" motions and pay too many of the subsequent false imprisonment claims risk losing their jobs after the next election.
The New York system has a similar clock, but they allow the prosecution to pause it by engaging in dubious and deceptive practices. Not a good model. The problem is that the prosecution side gets no negative feedback for egregiously failing to honor the rights of the accused. They don't get checked when they commit an obvious wrong.
At the least, this would encourage more municipalities to have an on-call weekend magistrate.
I’m sympathetic to the no-cash bail movement, though I’ll admit that there are a lot of edge cases to worry about. Plus, it may unfairly distort the calculation of who truly is a risk to release if you combine it with the possibility of suing for wrongful imprisonment on a not guilty verdict.
This isn't quite correct. They have the ability to hold you for 24 hours without formally arresting/imprisoning you.
The prosecutor would have a 5th option (drop charges and release the person within the first 24 hours). That is more likely than #1 and #2.
> Again, I'm not saying reform is impossible, just playing devil's advocate on this particular proposal.
Understood but a 24 hour hold wouldn't be affected by this proposal as far as I'm aware.
Right now the equation for deciding whether to hold someone in jail is entirely weighted to indiscriminately holding them for an indefinite amount of time. Why? Because it has zero impact on the state. The state finds it a little more convenient to hold them until trial (risk of runaway etc) so they do it for any minuscule reason while the life of the accused is thoroughly fucked.
Wrongful imprisonment compensation re-balances that equation. Now when setting bail instead of only considering runaway risk, they also have to consider the strength of the evidence and severity of the crime and balance it against the risk of losing the case and having to pay out compensation. This is still a little weighted towards the state but is much less one-sided than the current system.
But it is a tricky wicket. You would have to go after the governmental authority, local, state, or federal. Those authorities are usually protected by the ones above them. Assuming you could go after them, their argument will probably be something like "We don't completely control the entire system you are holding us responsible for." This also is controlled by the next level up.
So there are at least two major structural problems: protection by the next level up and dozens of people in various other governmental units contributing to the problem. The social worker hired by the state that says the father who broke a local law is a flight risk is not somebody the local government has any control over. The state or federal government requires that folks like this be an important part of administrating law, yet local governments don't manage them. You end up beating local governments up for nothing -- and the problem doesn't change since they couldn't do anything about it in the first place.
Oddly enough, if you continue to pressure these folks, the only thing they can do is let a bunch of people go, some of which are actually violent folks who need to be locked up. Do that enough and they'll replace your local government with one that doesn't do that.
I really wish this problem was simpler than it appears to be. It's a terrible situation.
That's one thing I don't understand: why isn't violation of Constitutional Rights a crime in itself? I mean, speeding by 10mph on a road with noone around gets you at least a ticket; but violating someone's rights? Nothing. Of course, by definition, this can be done only by government actors, but I still feel that there should be a price to pay even for government actors when they violate the fundamental law of the land.
"A would-be reformer who wants to improve social welfare by changing people's behavior to a better equilibrium must take care to identify a social plan that is in fact a Nash equilibrium, so that nobody can profit by unilaterally deviating from the plan." Meyerson – full quote here: http://www.dustingetz.com/:web-3.0/
If these payouts are large enough they create pressure to both solve systematic problems and to punish individuals who cause abnormally high rates of wrongful imprisonment.
As example of what I'd think of as "unlawful imprisonment" there are problems in the UK with wives brought from countries where women, especially poor women, aren't treated very well - who are sometimes basically used as household slaves. The law against unlawful imprisonment doesn't require that they be chained up or in a locked room or anything, even a strong psychological coercion to remain ("You are my wife! You mustn't leave the home without my express permission") could be enough to make this unlawful.
Or you'll sometimes get people taking the law into their own hands, somebody catches a shoplifter and decides to put him in the walk-in fridge to "teach him a lesson" - that sort of thing. Again, that's a crime.
That's not true at all. Who told you that? Wrongful imprisonment suits generally depend on the state's laws. Some states provide for damages, some (mostly in the East/South) do not. Intent of the prosecutor or police is irrelevant--what matters is that the person wrongfully accused has been shown not to have committed the crime.
Most defendants that win wrongful imprisonment settlements were generally tried by prosecutors utterly convinced that they defendants had actually committed the crime, with no malicious intent.
Several people died, about 10 years ago, between being arrested and arriving in prison. They were entirely healthy before, and showed signs of getting severely beaten. The state refused to even investigate the police officers involved, and none have received any punishment (or even had their names released). Needless to say, and I'm sure completely coincidentally, a judge ruled the "lack of perpetrators" (hah!) prevents the state from getting sued from any wrongdoing.
The Danish government abducts children based on the say-so of a single government employee that isn't even a psychologist (this is policy), then has on several occasions the police beat up parents that attempt to file a complaint.
The Danish government steals Jewellery of immigrants, and has that practice as a policy (there is no other valid word for the practice, despite that it's "legal". It's stealing. No question whatsoever)
Denmark police officers beat up refugees being deported, then brag about it on social media. Needless to say: the state strongly objects to any punishment for these police officers.
Let's just not mention what the Danish state did to Inuit Indians in Greenland, on many, many occassions, including recently.
https://sites.google.com/site/thedanishtrap/best-of-nw-mom
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/denmark-jewe...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/world/europe/denmark-refu...
The thing that you need to understand is that when push comes to shove, Denmark legitimately counts as a country where "this doesn't happen". Where the police behaves really well. That says a lot about how police forces and governments behave, irrespective of where they are and how they legitimize themselves. Denmark may not be the best country on police behavior, but it's probably in the top-10.
Every police force, every government, will abuse any power they have over people for the dumbest of reasons, every time, again and again and again. They must not be given one iota more power than absolutely necessary and need to be thoroughly checked at every turn.
Not exactly any immigrant. Only those that apply for asylum and need the state to provide them with accommodation and living expenses. Further, if they do not consent to the confiscation, the police must refer it to a court, and the court may decide to return the valuables. Also, when/if the asylum application is successful and they become self-sufficient, any remains of the confiscated valuables are returned.
The thinking is that the state should not be able to do it on a whim without consequence of their decisions.
This is one of the many ways that privilege infects our systems.
A few high payouts, and suddenly there's a push to... "protect taxpayers".
Basically, once again highlighting how, in the U.S., "justice" is really about money.
So poor people cannot complain about things like government excess or police brutality, since those complaints get thrown out. Nor can they effectively get police help, except in very severe cases.
But a rich person can drag you in front of a criminal court for not wiping the pavement in front of your apartment often enough.
This is a bail system. The money you put down, you get back if the person gets convicted. Additionally, in some countries the defendant, if convicted, will need to pay your lawyer expenses (again, if they are convicted).
Pretty much all of Europe.
> criminal judge
Almost all of Europe uses civil law, where there is no distinction between civil and criminal courts.
> But a rich person can drag you in front of a criminal court for not wiping the pavement in front of your apartment often enough.
> This is a bail system. The money you put down, you get back if the person gets convicted.
This is far removed from reality as far as I am aware. Please provide sources.
Obviously not true. In fact, this is so obviously wrong I don't know where to start.
Differences between civil and criminal courts:
* different hierarchy
* different powers (criminal court can, say, order imprisonment)
* different judges
* different parties (defendant vs prosecution for criminal, defendant vs complainant for civil court)
* different standards of proof
* different rights (e.g. the right to a jury trial in some countries)
Even this barely scratches the surface of the differences.
> This is far removed from reality as far as I am aware. Please provide sources.
Start reading here, it describes part of the procedure:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partie_civile_en_France
Google suggests this as an English alternative:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230....
(note there is "partie civile" and "action civile". They are NOT the same, aren't directly related. Specifically it is NOT the case that the "partie civile" is the complainant in an "action civile", as one might think. Keep reading)
The procedure is, generally speaking:
1) complain to the police, get a record or the complaint
2) with the record (which is a number), go to an "investigation judge" (no need to prove anything or ...), declare your intent to become "partie civile", register your lawyer, etc. He will tell you the amount of the "bail" for the case (which is going to be ~1000 euro. It differs from case to case, but not much)
3) pay the "bail" to the "griffe" (sort-of-kind-of the secretary of the court, they have an office in every courthouse) and register it
4) take said registration back to the judge you registered with, judge writes an order
5) write the prosecutor to deliver the order of the investigative judge
Now, the prosecutor is forced to bring the case before criminal court within a certain amount of time, and is forced to demand a nonzero punishment for whatever the complaint is (in fact this is one of the ways they get out from under it: they demand ridiculous punishments so the judge will rule against them).
The non-obvious and terrible thing for the victims of this system is misjudging the motivation of the police/prosecution (technically there is a distinction between the police and the people that do this, but it's essentially a different department of the same organization...). You might think the police will try to punish the guilty party, if there is one. That's technically true, but only in the following sense : they will try to get a conviction, and with this procedure REGARDLESS of their judgement there is a guilty party. If they think they can get a conviction, odds are VERY good they'll pursue seriously. Things that do NOT influence whether they pursue (and therefore do not influence whether you get convicted) include reasonableness, whether you're nice to the police, whether there's significant damages, whether anyone else was involved, whether the police promised not to do that (which they do, frankly almost always, then bring the case anyway and get the conviction), ...
An evil way to get ahead in elections in France: use this system to get your niece to complain against your competition, then point out (perfectly accurately) that your opponent is under investigation for terrible crime X. They will go free, eventually (or maybe not), but by that time it has long since stopped mattering.
There are private prosecutions in England, but they almost all happen under the tacit approval of the state, e.g. rather than spend government money prosecuting people who mistreat their pets the government doesn't stop the RSCPA (a charity) from prosecuting them privately with donated money.
If instead a rich person has just decided to try to prosecute someone they don't like, it is almost certain that the state will intervene, and indeed it is legally required to do so once it's told this is going on, by a judge, a newspaper article, a law clerk who realises what's happening, almost anybody.
What will happen is that a very bored junior barrister from the Crown Prosecution Service will show up (this could happen as early as pre-trial discussions), they will inform the court that the CPS would like this case assigned to them, they're privileged to do this without giving any reason. Then, having been granted control of your prosecution, the barrister will inform the judge that they're not offering any evidence, the judge will accordingly declare the defendant isn't guilty as no evidence has been presented against them. You have now spent a lot of money and achieved nothing except to annoy a judge and the prosecutor, which seems like a bad idea.
If you've got a dubious case, maybe the defendant was caught red-handed stealing something from your store and you're trying to prosecute them to ruin their reputation after police decided a formal warning was sufficient - the CPS can demand all your paperwork, take over the case and then having read your evidence decide to take that evidence to court or offer no evidence on the same basis they'd have used if the police sent them the case (a "full code test").
I spoke too broadly - apparently, some countries (including France, Spain, Poland and Italy) do have different courts for civil and criminal matters. Other countries do not (including Germany, Sweden, Hungary and Slovakia) [0].
> https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partie_civile_en_France
> Google suggests this as an English alternative:
> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2230.....
> (note there is "partie civile" and "action civile". They are NOT the same, aren't directly related. Specifically it is NOT the case that the "partie civile" is the complainant in an "action civile", as one might think. Keep reading)
I have only read briefly, but noted two things to start with: the document in English clearly states that it only describes the French system (even though other countries are mentioned at times), and it is also 60 years old. But even so:
> This problem was whether the juge d’instruction was bound to direct his investigations against the individual accused in the plaint, or whether he could exercise discretion as to the persons against whom he proceeded. The question was answered in 1925 in favour of the partie civile. The Chambre criminelle held that the juge d’instruction was not master of the proceedings. He was seised in personam in respect of the person accused and not in rem in respect of the charge as a whole. He was therefore without discretion as to whom he inquired against.
This reads similar to what you are describing about the prosecutor being forced to bring the case forward. However:
> The law of July 2, 1931, was passed in an attempt to remedy some of the foregoing abuses.
> ...
> The purpose of this reform was to avoid the infliction of the moral damage which usually followed merely from being publicly accused of certain crimes. No accusation would now be made unless the juge d'instruction were satisfied that there were adequate grounds for it.
The second-to-last paragraph of your post is also not substantiated by that source.
If this is as common as you claim, it should not be difficult to find recent sources which support it.
0: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_ordinary_courts-18-en.do
Not "some countries" ... All countries have different criminal and civil codes, and therefore courts, and judges, and lawyers, and ... all different. I'm pretty interested which country, exactly, only has a single system across criminal and civil law. Common law has the separation, Napoleonic code has the separation, see next paragraph for explanation why that's pretty much enough to declare it true for the entire world.
> I have only read briefly, but noted two things to start with: the document in English clearly states that it only describes the French system (even though other countries are mentioned at times), and it is also 60 years old. But even so:
I feel like, again, I need to quote a bit, not even of "law 101", but the basic explanation they give when they have someone tour the law faculty. There are 2 modern law "systems" that pretty much all other law is based upon. One is Common law, the other is the law introduced by Napoleon, in 1804, referred to in English as the Napoleonic code, and adopted in all countries he conquered. To a rough approximation you could say that any country that was not a colony of Britain has the Napoleonic code as a legal basis (including countries that claim different for one reason or another, like Saudi Arabia that claims to have Sharia, but upon even cursory examination that will strike you as a very hollow claim)
The "partie civil" process is a part of Napoleonic code (references for this, obviously, are in French legalese).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code (note the separation between civil and criminal courts in a very old document, which is why it's so widely used) and ... given the mistakes you make ... perhaps you might consider speaking with a bit less authority ?
> If this is as common as you claim, it should not be difficult to find recent sources which support it.
And the resources I pointed out do describe this, and yes, I get it. It's law ... the sources where law is condensed are not free, and cannot be linked to, ancient books that do describe it are more-or-less in Google books, but they're still pretty technical and long-winded.
Also, for obvious reasons, most "intro to law" for any particular Napoleonic code is not in English. The good ones are in French.
I know of no other countries that lock up this large a percentage of their population and then still manages to rival major war zones in terms of gun deaths per capita. It's offensive how ridiculously ineffective and cruel the US prison system is.
Here's the fix: abandon slave labor and bring back prisons under local government control fully funded out of tax money. Then allow local politicians to decide what is reasonable to do with that funding. The whole problem is simply that people are profiting from locking people up and bankrolling the whole process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
We have a long way to go as humanity before we can call ourselves an advanced civilization that cares for every being on the planet and the planet itself in a sustainable way.
The system is rigged against the minorities. Look why cannabis was criminalized in the first place - to target blacks and hippies (https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...). As a politician, keep as many of 'em in jails as you can, thus showing the white population you're "tough on crime" and at the same time filling the coffers of your private prison operator friends with state cash for the jailing.
For example, if crack-cocaine carries a high sentence, then why not drop the habit in exchange for powdered cocaine?
If the question is price, then this is really more of a system targeting the poor than one that is against any specific minority group.
Well, if the majority of poor people are blacks (and Latinos), then it certainly is a racist policy to have vastly different sentencing for the drugs for poor and rich people.
The question is purely price, and it's the system targeting drug users of certain class/ethnic groups more than others. If you look at drug law enforcement in the US, it's substantially more punitive towards poor/minority groups.
Citation A: https://www.vera.org/publications/for-the-record-public-heal...
Citation B: http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war
Citation C: https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ACF4F34.pdf
Citation D: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/06/28/the-war-on-...
I can do a the standard English alphabet, the Greek alphabet, simplified Chinese, Japanese kanji and any other alphabets you guys would like me to tack on with sources that state the same thing:
The War On Drugs is a War on Poor People and Minorities.
1. http://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-aff...
2. In a speech at an NAACP convention in Philadelphia in July, Clinton acknowledged that tougher incarceration provisions in the bill were a mistake. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” Clinton said. “And I want to admit it.”
I think this issue has many different angles than just the usual whites vs. minorities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/05/trump-prison...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/680751.The_Marijuana_Con...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/04/obituaries/rev-oberia-dem... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=Pit7gWBM6M0C&pg=PA31&lpg=P... [3] "The Congressional Black Caucus secured a closed-door sit-down meeting with President Nixon in the Cabinet Room. During the session, the group demands more action to stop the flow of narcotics into urban neighborhoods."
"It can't be whites vs blacks, politicians that black people voted for did it too".
When you actually write out your argument it doesn't make any sense. What if they were given two options, both of whom would have continued racist policies? There's also a phenomenon whereby politicians identified with a specific "outsider" group have a lot more pressure (and ability) to defy the interests or stereotypes of that group. H Clinton under a lot more pressure to be hawkish to defy weak women narrative. Obama under a lot more scrutiny about anything that could be seen as a handout to African Americans. Politicians from the left often ripping up regulations, because they sedate the left who would have prevented right candidates from doing it.
Basically, it's way more complicated and your argument doesn't hold water.
The logic behind bail is simple, you either show up to court or lose money that you cannot afford to lose. The incentives make sense at first glance.
It's a pretty long story, but ultimately I paid the last $25 I had in my pocket to a clerk, and was released upon my own recognizance (Personal Recognizance). Ultimately ended up with community service; the case itself was rather interesting because the amount of product in my possession was so low the lab had trouble even verifying there was anything there. Officially charged with possessing 0.02g. You read that right. Less than a 10th of a gram.
For that and a couple of other reasons, I got pretty lucky getting out of there the way I did, and getting back home.
If you have current insurance, but can't find your proof of insurance card during the stop, just say loudly and clearly that you're insured with [YOUR INSURER], take the ticket, and mail a copy of your insurance information to the prosecutor afterward. If the prosecutor won't drop the charge, plead not guilty and request discovery for the squad car camera recording and all the information the cop had available about you or your vehicle from their in-car computer at the time of the stop.
In all likelihood, the cop's in-car computer already showed whether you were truthful about being insured or not, and they just continue to demand paperwork because it's an easy way to issue tickets that usually don't get contested. It's a money game, and it encourages the justice system to prey on those who can least afford to fight back.
There's already a fairly well proven alternative to cash bail used in D.C. and some other jurisdictions: if someone is bailable after assessment for flight risk, etc., they get appropriate conditions for pre-trial monitoring and supervision, as bail terms, with no cash payment.
Citation please?
You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.
6 months in jail for someone who can't afford a $1k bail is the other end of the scale though - surely it cost substantially more than that to keep him in there. I'm pretty certain in the UK we have charities that help people out in such situations, is there no equivalent provision in the US?
He's not punished "more", he's punished equitably. The ultimate goal is not to collect $100, it's for the offender to not reoffend.
Disposable income is an actual objective and important concept, and if you ignore it when handing out financial punishment it just stops being punishment at all for people sufficiently wealthy to not give a single flying fuck.
Having "put the work in to build a successful company" — or just inherited their wealth — should not make one immune to punishment, yet that's exactly what happens with unscaled fixed-amount fines.
> You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.
There's nothing silly about it. If that's a $500 fine for somebody with an income of 7 figures, it's not a punishment at all and completely fail at its purpose of making the offender not reoffend: they could get such a fine every single day and live just fine while an offender on US minimum wage loses two weeks worth of work on a single fine.
If that is the ultimate goal, then fine equitable punishment would include fines targeting versus ability to pay.
However, if the system is simply seeking recompense for an action then it is unfair to place a higher fine on someone simply because they have more money.
For traffic offenses such as speeding, perhaps stopping re-offending is the goal since speeding always carries a higher risk accidentally harming someone else.
For a parking meter offense, I think the goal is simple recompense as if you had put in more money at the outset, you would not have been fined.
The two replies above mine in this thread are talking about speeding offenses, which is the thread of discussion that I am responding to.
I appreciate your trying to bring it back to the original posting, but your reply is a bit too deep within the thread to be effective.
No he's not; you simply can't punish people equitably by financial means. License penalty points, bans, sure, but you just can't equate fines against differing incomes when not all costs and opportunities are relative to income.
I don't agree the ultimate goal is to prevent reoffending either, it's surely to prevent offending, which it failed to do in this case amongst many others.
Also:
"The Testarossa driver was initially fined a little less than $90,000 by the local jurisdiction. That was raised to $145,000 by the next court after the driver claimed diplomatic immunity, saying he is diplomat from the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. That didn't sway the court, which boosted the fine to $290,000."
https://www.wired.com/2010/01/record-speeding-fine-dents-swi...
Because his income isn't anything to do with the offence.
I just think you cannot scale fines in relation to income/lifestyle/anything else financially. You can scale it, but you can't hit people with different incomes, assets, etc. in the same fashion, which ultimately smells of a bad system to me.
The points system seems sufficent to me for most driving offences, beyond costs. But community service, prison time, curfews, anything which is equivalent and not open to manipulation.
if the fine is "one week of income" and you don't want to lose a week then you won't speed
if a speeding ticket was 5 cents everyone would speed every day... and this is the status quo for the rich since the fine is to their income what five cents is to most others
so we fine people enough that it affects them in a proportionate way to make the likelihood of changing their behavior equal, rather than only changing the behavior of the poor
The goal of a speeding ticket is not to collect $50, it is to save lives by detering people from speeding..
It was once, maybe. I wonder how many people are actually turned from minor offenders into full criminals by the current law/jail system. To me it looks like the goal is to operate an artificial selection on the human species to encourage those who help the economy more. That is, legalized Eugenics.
It was for $200 in highschool and it stung.
If i got that same speeding ticket now, it would not sting nearly as much, and i would probably be over it by the time i went to work the next morning.
Or something like that, anyway. Alignment of petty individual goals usually makes more sense than grand conspiracies.
Of course. But I don't think we can sensibly, or ethically, charge him an amount that would. How much would deter him to the same degree? $1m probably wouldn't cut it either.
Instead, surely we should either accept that and charge everyone the same absolute amount or find other more equitable ways of deterring him. License points, driving bans, community service, prison time, anything that isn't just taking obscene amounts of money simply because the guy has worked smart and earns more.
It needs to sting for everyone, not just the poor.
Do you reject higher tax brackets for the wealthy under that same line of reasoning?
Surely wealth is an important factor in deciding what people owe to society
Getting off track here, but I'd rather there were as few tax rates as practical. Perhaps even one under a basic income system. Then the rate is upfront, clear and honest. Not a compounding system of stealth taxes.
Worth noting that wealth is not the same as income, but we tend to tax income rather than wealth, at least until death.
Having to rely on charities to fix problems in our justice system seems completely backwards to me. That's a workaround, not a solution.
And what if he then commits a much more serious offence?
I still think the whole concept is so flawed it's a farce.
If we are trying to use this socialist fine system, then that would necessarily result in shorter jail time for rich people because they are being “harmed” more proportionally.
These scaled punishments are absurd.
"time" is the unit of punishment, as it's more equal than wealth.
We agree that both a rich and poor person should serve the same time in prison for the same crime
Therefore, for a fine, both a rich and a poor person should pay the same fine relative to their earnings per unit of time. i.e., if the fine is $100 for someone making $15,000/year, it should be $100,000 for someone making $15,000,000/year
But what about someone making $150k a year with no assets vs. someone living in a $1.5m property with no job who made $15k last year on $150k of shares?
What about someone with $1.5m in shares who made a $15k loss on them last year? Do they get paid instead of fined?
If flushing toxic waste to a river always resulted in constant fine - for rich companies with big enough waste treatment bills it would be rational (cheaper) to do it and pay the fines.
This would make people equal in front of the law.
Why would being wealthy allow you to break the law more often with less consequences on your wellbeing? See the example of Harvey Weinstein in the article. The dude is rich, so he can get away with it. What do you think of that?
We rarely use financial bail conditions except in the most serious cases. Financial conditions are mainly used where a) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has substantial funds at their disposal and b) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has a significant risk of absconding. It's a likely option if you're accused of robbing a bank or running a major drug dealing operation, but it's far from the default option.
If you're bailed, there will be conditions attached to mitigate the particular risks in your case. You might be required to report to a police station every week or every day to confirm that you're complying with your bail requirements. You might be placed under curfew with an electronic tag. You might be forbidden from going to certain places or speaking to certain people. You might have to surrender your passport. You might be required to live in a bail hostel. The court has to demonstrate that those conditions are proportionate and necessary, and you have the right to appeal their decision.
In Finland, speeding fines are income based to make sure they sting enough to get the drivers to change their habits. It's a bit moot with Gates (he takes a car to a racetrack if he feels like speeding) but it sure would be a useful thing for areas with too many Beemer drivers.
That's an accurate description of the status quo. Just look at Volkswagen. Paid a couple billion in fines, couple of lower level managers serve a little bit of jail time, and the company is back to profitable as if nothing had happened - even though the deaths of thousands of people can be directly attributed to the scandal (per https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/emissionen-die-toerichte-...). The shareholders didn't suffer a dent.
It's similar with banks - when you owe a bank a million $, you have a problem. When you owe a bank a hundred million $, the bank has a problem. The richer you are, the more you can get away with.
(however it's always going to be >$1000 or so, for obvious reasons, including of course in Germany and Scandinavian countries)
(by the way, I hate how tiring it is to see Europeans claim how "socially progressive" and protective of rights the EU governments supposedly are. You have more rights, as a suspect, in the US. Not less. The US, without any doubt, protects the rights of accused person FAR better than ANY European country. Just ask Julian Assange)
¹ Most likely, though nobody can say 100% for sure if it's just a fabrication in the end. But it does all seem rather suspicious.
Note the technique used by the European courts:
> On 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enköping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm,[6][7] jointly went to the Swedish police not seeking to bring charges against Assange but in order to track him down and persuade him to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases after their separate sexual encounters with him.[8] The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take a test, but that their statements would be passed to the prosecutor.[9] Later that day, the duty prosecutor ordered the arrest of Julian Assange on the suspicion of rape and molestation.
So it was the Swedish government, NOT the women, that came up, with very flimsy justification, with the rape charge.
And let's just ask it: if they do that at the request of a (very) far away government, lying about that fact, do you think this is the only time they do such a thing ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...
Since Assange’s entire excuse for his flight from justice is the fear that the whole Swedish and British process has been a pretext for being dragged to the US for an unfair trial, I don't think he'll back you.
Of course, he's also completely nuts. If the US wanted him from the UK, we'd just file charges and seek extradition directly rather than go through some Rube Goldberg Swedish rape charges to get him extradited to a country we have a less-closw relationship with than the UK.
Note: I am NOT suggesting we do this.
Apropos of anything else, no, it is not.
...if you can't bail out, you don't get any REAL credit for the time you have spent locked up when you finally go to court and get sentenced, which really rubs injury into insult and flies 100% into the face of "innocent until proven guilty" bullshit we are all told is the way the system works.
Before everyone goes off on how wrong I am, please hear me out from my POV of over 30 years getting arrested for minor shit all over the US.
For the record, I have probably done time in like...12 different county jails and been through the systems in each of those places, and have been to state prison twice (no bail issues in prisons, so I'll leave them out).
So back to my outrageous assertion...am I really saying that the judge gives you NO CREDIT for being in jail, away from your loved ones, your job (hopefully you had one), and your freedom, for all those weeks that you will wait to see him and have your case disposed of?
Yes that is exactly what I'm saying, and here is why. Let's say 2 people get arrested for, say, felony ketamine possession on Jan 1, 2019.
Richie Rich cries to mommy and get bonded out 10 hours after the arrest, and the bondsman gives him his first court date (there will be many BTW) 5 weeks out on Feb. 3rd.
Joe Street is from out-of-town and the police forget to let him get local numbers from his phone before its stowed away in his property, thus leaving him totally helpless as far as calling anyone because who in in the hell remembers out-of-town numbers these days, right?
[I use this example because this exact situation with the phone happened to me last year here in Vegas]
So Joe is officially fucked. He too gets a court date for Feb 3rd and has to sit in jail until then. Trust me. If you have never been to county jail 5 weeks will feel approximately like 2 full-fucking eternities to you.
You can't believe how bad the food is...how uncomfortable the beds are...how bad your cellmate snores...what assholes the COs are...
And mostly how incredibly shit the phone system is...it's expensive as hell (3 bucks for 15 minutes I've seen) and often the speaker or mics dont work that well due to people smashing it on the wall in frustration.
So you go to court FINALLY Feb 3rd, and there is Richie Rich! Oh man, he sure looks good in his street clothes and all groomed, while you look like pure crap with your ill-fitting jail garb..well at least you will be going home today, you think as you happily sit in the freezing cold holding cell and listen to people right next to each other scream at almost the top-of-their-lungs to just talk about their situation.
Your head is pounding and you have been up since 4am sitting on hard-ass concrete for 5 hours...but HELL YEAH YOU ARE GOING HOME TODAY I'll take whatever probation they give me today..who cares how much I just NEED TO GET THE FUCK OUTTA THIS JAIL!
And then, of course...you never even see the judge. This is "arraignment" dipstick and everyone knows you can't plead at arraignment. Your totally overworked assigned public defender hands you his card and silently signs "call me" because its so fucking loud still.
Then, in horror, you look down at the card and see your next court date is 3/18...HOLY SHIT ANOTHER 6 WEEKS ARE YOU KIDDING???
So I could go on relaying horror after horror, but I will stop here and get to the damn point. At the end, both you and Richie Rich get 3 years felony probation!!
Let that sink in...you have sat in hell for maybe 4 months (sometimes 8 or 9!!) while Richie has been doing his thing in the real world, yet you both end up with the same sentence.
And that's what I mean when I say that you basically get no credit for not being able to bail out. This is a 100% true story and I have seen it play out just like this perhaps a hundred times.
Have you tried not spending three decades committing petty crimes "all over the US?"
As for your original point - credit for time - you get 1.5x for time served. If you're sentenced to prison. If you spend weeks in jail but don't actually get sentenced to prison, there's nothing against which your time can be credited. Nobody's crediting jail time toward probation.
Incarceration and probation are two completely different things, something that everyone knows and cubano's post conveniently ignores until the end. The point of the credit is so that you can spend less time in prison if you've already spent time in jail prior. It is not to get you out of the system faster so a credit toward probationary time doesn't make any sense.
Way to be constructive bro.
Consider also that the US is a bad place for a previously convicted felon to land a decent job, and that poor people, people on probation or parole, and minorities tend to have more negative police contacts, which produce more arrests, which produce more convictions. Think about the number of municipalities that criminalize acts reasonable only for the downtrodden, such as overnight camping on public property within municipal limits. Think about the number of jurisdictions that criminalize loitering and vagrancy to roust undesirables out of their town.
In all likelihood, ancestor poster is not inherently more criminal than other people with no criminal record, but has a much larger enforcement profile due to circumstantial factors. Also, familiarity breeds contempt, and frequent encounters with the justice system lead to disillusionment with its supposed fairness and impartiality. It mainly exists so that the richer can keep the poorer away from their persons, properties, and possessions; and also to perpetuate its own existence.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Flaming someone about their own life story is particularly vicious and not ok here. Please do better.
All these interests are perfectly aligned to lobby and fund campaigns and 'grow their business'. Their presence and funding of DA and judges is a clear conflict of interest. This is basically a synergy of corruption and exploitation.
Corporate drones and funded economists go on about 'freedom' and this is a perfect example of how markets can produce toxic outcomes for individuals. Other developed countries do not mix up private interests and profit motives in their justice system and do not have problems of this scale.
But the worst thing for individuals is once tainted, even wrongly, it becomes difficult to get back to get back to normal life, be it employment, housing or credit.
It doesn't seem like private prisons make any significant portion of the system.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-... [2] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/08/18/what-you-need-...
That this could be reversed inspite of known abuses [2] and serious problems [3] with the private prison system is extremely troubling. Private prison operators are one of the largest lobbying groups and spend more than $45 million a year on lobbying. [4]
There have been a series of serious scandals with private prisons [5], judges [6] and corruption [7] with people sent to prison simply to pad numbers in private prisons. It's unteneble for a civilized society that believes in rule of law to allow justice to be vulgarized in this manner and allow a system known to be corrupt to stand.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justi...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...
[3] http://time.com/5013760/american-private-prisons-donald-trum...
[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-yankovich/be-careful-pr...
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2011/08/12/pennsylv...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html
[7] https://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/judge-who-accepted-private...
The normal process in the US is that an individual's case will be seen by a judge within 24 hours of their detention and the judge will assign bail. Contrary to the media, the defendant is often not even present for this process. They will simply be pulled from their cell or detention area and informed what the judge decided. And in the vast majority of cases this is that the individual is released for 'free', or released on personal recognizance. Even in felony cases some 32% of individuals are released without financial condition. When bail is set, individuals can generally get out for 10% of that amount. In some cases they can do it directly through the court, and that 10% will be refunded once the individual returns to court and completes their trial. If not they can go to bail bondsmen who take the 10% as their profit margin, and pay 100% to the court themselves. The bailbonds companies then get their 100% back from the court once the defendant shows up and completes their trial. This is where modern day 'bounty hunting' can come into play -- the bail bondsmen have a strong incentive to ensure that their clients do not flee.
Bail tends to be set in relation to the criminal record of an individual, the seriousness of an offense, how much of a flight risk they are, and whether or not they're likely to be a danger to themselves or others if released. So for instance of all individuals with no prior convictions 77% are released, 63% of those with misdemeanor priors are released, but only 46% of those with felony priors are released. This is also why there are demographic differences in bails and release rates (age, gender, race, etc). Two individuals may commit the same crime, but when one has a criminal record and the other does not - there will be different outcomes. Articles typically try to spin this as prejudice (as this one did), but it is in no way shape or form prejudicial.
There are also statistics that can be used to, inadvertently, test how reliable detention vs release decisions are. In particular when there are emergency releases (such as because of jail overcrowding) where defendants who would not normally be released, are, about 52% end up being charged with some sort of pretrial misconduct. The rate for those who were intentionally released ranges from 27% to 36% depending on the release type. Anyhow, there's an immense amount of other actual information and data on that paper alone, including things like regression comparison of release rates vs reoffense rates to see if the systems in place are justified or not. And in some cases they are not, in some cases they are. I think it's reasonable to conclude that it's a system that does pretty well, but could be made better.
We already have a legal system that advantages the wealthy ( more money for better lawyers, experts, etc ) over everyone else. But this bail problem is egregious and cruel.
But it isn't the poor who created legal system. It isn't he poor who write laws.
While some innocents may be confined to a jail awaiting trial, I'm sure this is a minority, not the majority. Even then, bail skippers still occur. Let's quit with the "Oh the poor criminal being treated that way" mentality.
No. It's the exact opposite. Until they are proven guilty of a crime, it's a "Oh the poor innocent people being treated that way" mentality, and that is perfectly justifiable. People awaiting trial should only be locked away when there's any actual reason to believe they would disappear or commit a serious crime before their trial.
> What is the alternative then? Let a probable criminal go wander the streets or disappear altogether?
But "letting someone go" is not as bad as it sounds. Keeping them in jail because they can't come up with a few hundred dollars from a predatory storefront bailbonds joint ALSO has problems. If that person had a job, they've now lost it. If they have children, they're now at risk of losing them, and the children face an even more chaotic home life. In addition to that, keeping someone locked up is costly to the state.
Regardless of whether the system respects this- "innocent until proven guilty" is a principle that we should not lose
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-convicti...
Status quo bias is such a huge problem. We think that just because the world (or a country) works a certain way, that it's justified and correct. These are all just mostly arbitrary half-broken systems that have accrued over time, so it pays to look at how things might be different.