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Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if things could go a little faster. 3 years are a significant percentage of the average remaining life of an adult. The onus should be on the legal system to hurry up a little and streamline the process; these 3 years are quite unpleasant if you are accused of a crime, and have to wait and prepare for a trial, no? If you are guilty the time should be counted as served sentence (maybe at 50%), the innocent should be compensated for unreasonable extra waiting time.

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It would be great if these things were faster - in fact, we cared so much to make it so that it's included as part of our 6th amendment. In practice, it's almost exclusively not the case, even if higher profile cases. Two bits of personal anecdata, a death of a friend's brother due to fentanyl lead to the arrest of a drug dealer (with priors, and found in possession of illegal weapons). Open and closed case, right? Still took a year. Similarly, the exact same thing happened to my brother's friend - three years on, the trial just concluded. Several bigger cases in my area, the Rittenhouse and more recently Brooks cases also took a year.

I'm not sure what you mean with your second half though, are you suggesting detaining people during this period and pro-rating their sentence and/or paying them? Or are you saying that they should wait outside of jail, but still have it counted towards their sentence? I don't quite follow exactly. Edit: seems the latter. I'm not sure my opinion, having a case looming over you seems potentially difficult, especially if you're later found innocent, but should the government (/citizens) foot the bill for that?

It's mostly a thought experiment but the general idea is to

- consider the actual effects on someone to be involved in a legal process; for lawyers it's just a workday but for people it's heavy to be accused of a crime and to wait for something awful (jail) to happen.

- define some time reasonable time constraints for everything, in order to give some incentives for the process to speed up. Prosecutors could be measured by how efficient cases go, and paying out some money could be an option.

That danger with that is prosecutors rushing cases through, messing something up, and letting the defendant go free on a technicality.

Or steam rolling cases and imprisoning defendants who are innocent.

The latter isn’t rare already, wait until some prosecutor has to get a few fast cases done so their bosses don’t cut their pay check.

I think living wherever you want and spending millions of other people's dollars for three years is not 50% as bad as being in prison. It's better than most innocent people get to do out of prison.

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