PIMA had an interview with a sheriff recently. The figure that stood out to me was when he said it takes an average of 1.8 years for people in his jail to finally get to trial.
1.8 years in jail before they even decide if you're guilty. Hard to even imagine.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/chicagos-renegade-sheriff-w...
This is an outrage.
If I have 366 people in jail today awaiting trial and I try one case a day on average, it would be a year before you get to the last person.
Yes, the problem is alleviated with more judges, more lawyers, and more juries, but that's the problem. Those resources are not infinite.
You also have the issue that in order to guarantee a trial as soon as all non-people concerns are resolved, you'll need judges and lawyers doing nothing. Once you're at 100% capacity, any additional case has to wait. And the length of the wait is indeterminate.
The real problem, people-wise, is juries. Juries are selected from the community at large. They're vetted and questioned. This takes time. And not for the criminals, but for the juries themselves. You could easily wind up with essentially professional juries, which runs counter to the idea of "jury of your peers".
And beyond that, all these cases need to be tried somewhere.
And yes, the entire system is messed up. These people are being treated as definitely guilty when their status is in question. Sometimes for offenses that would not even require the level of incarceration they are at. You'll spend 15 months in jail awaiting trial for an offense that carries a 6 month maximum sentence. And even if they release you after 6 months because it would be cruel to incarcerate you "temporarily" for longer than the sentence to determine if you should even be incarcerated, it's not like you can get that 6 months back if you're not proven guilty. (Because the court doesn't prove you're innocent, just that it can't prove you're guilty, which is different.)
But your last sentence comes back around to the problem of there not being enough capacity for these people. ASAP could very well be a year and a half.
The system defers to assuming guilt because of fear. If you defer to assuming no guilt and you're wrong, you could be wrong in a very bad way. If you lock up an innocent man for 10 years, people will shake their heads and say "What a shame." If you let a murderer free while awaiting trial and they kill someone else, you are going to get absolutely fucked.
And while the chance of the second is pretty low, it's not a chance any of them want to take. It's Pascal wager, but for crime. And we know crime and criminals exist.
It’s not a gray area.
The status is changed upon conviction and only upon conviction.
De jure at least.
Not defacto as you went on to discuss.
They are technically innocent. That is the central assumption in any good justice system.
>>>But your last sentence comes back around to the problem of there not being enough capacity for these people. ASAP could very well be a year and a half.
I don't think anyone would consider that reasonable if they were in custody. Let's say you were charged with something (that you didn't do, let's say) - what would you consider a fair amount of time before a trial?
And presumption of innocence is a matter during the trial.
Police can and have diverted, detained, and otherwise interfered with people who have committed no crime. All I will say is that it's a complex situation and that while keeping people in jail for over a year before we even get to the trial to determine their status is not what we should be doing, the complete opposite of not detaining anyone seems equally bad in a completely different way.
It should not be just a matter for the trial! It should be treated as actually true from the first time an officer interacts with a suspect.
>>Police can and have diverted, detained, and otherwise interfered with people who have committed no crime
Yep, and we need to push back against that in a much stronger way, police have far too broad powers to detain with no consequences.
In both cases, I'd be prevented from executing perfectly legal actions even though I've personally committed on crime. Because ultimately, the difference between that and being jailed awaiting a trial is a matter of degree.
And most of our ideals are far loftier than the reality of how we implement them.
And I think they should be. We should aspire to be better and to look for ways to be better. But we must also contend with reality. And when ideals and reality are in conflict, reality is going to win. Until we find out how to better adapt to reality or to adapt our ideals to reality.
For example, many matters which would've been settled rapidly 50 years ago are delayed because each time the judge schedules a subsequent hearing, it is put at the end of an already extensive schedule. Because the docket of each judge is so full, a follow-up hearing for a respondant which would've come 3-4 days or maybe a week later in the past is now booked weeks or months down the road. I don't refer to the time delays which are intended to accommodate preparation of defense or to provide discovery. Totally perfunctory appearances can be spread out over weeks or months.
The system has also failed to grown or adapt to accommodate the significant growth in chargeable offenses. Many more things are a criminal matter now than were 70 years ago.
There’s a 700k to one mismatch and too much power in the hands of too few people.
There would be a lot more room for more political parties too, breaking up the duopoly can only be good regardless of your leanings.
The tents are too broad.
Interesting to think about.
I believe this distortion is because small crimes like being caught with a joint are causing our jails and legal systems to become overloaded. The solution is not to grow the justice system but rather to make sure we don't overload it with laws & violations that are unimportant.
Law itself has expanded significantly. There are now many more crimes a person can be accused of.
This is particularly evident in drug prohibition: possibly being in possession of a very small object (that isn't claimed by another person to be missing or stolen) is an incredibly low bar for crime accusation. An accusation of "sale or distribution" is even easier to construct!
And we can see the result: 26% of arrests are for drug related crimes[1]. These cases aren't just being thrown out, either: 46% of prisoners in federal prison are there for drug related crimes[1]. That means their cases must have added to the number of trials other prisoners have to wait in line for. A high conviction rate also motivates law enforcement to pursue more of these arrests.
By decriminalizing drug use, we could factor out a quarter of all arrests! That would surely present a significant decrease in wait times for trial.
Are drug related crimes really so serious that we should continue to pursue them, even when that pursuit overwhelms the entire justice system? That seems incredibly irresponsible to me.
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-related-crime-statistic...