https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/
This might have been the Tweet I reposted:
https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644...
https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448
> Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said.
So, they replaced the box you sit in with a box that you pay for and provide no additional services with all the same restrictions. What the fuck is the point of these programs? I can understand wanting to use EM to ensure someone shows up to a trial, but this geofencing stuff is absolute madness. It just reintroduces the problem that made prisons and jails problematic in the first place. If someone is a non-threat enough to let them live in society with a bracelet then let them live.
The judge told me he would not grant my request to leave for food. "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online." he said.
Then when I ordered it online he gave me five months in jail saying he never gave me permission to use the Internet :D
That's textbook entrapment given that collecting an Amazon order, much less the occasionally misplaced one, would require stepping outside of your apartment.
That ankle bracelet works the same way as the smartphones as far as location data. We all have ankle bracelets.
Our cities are concrete surveillance prisons...
It goes on and on and is another failure of the Justice system.
I am dealing with a corrupt Judge as well so I know frustrating it can be.
For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old warrant for something like a missed child support payment (also didn't know), and we were both removed from the car. Mind you, I was not driving, and the car did not belong to me, I was simply a passenger. Cops claim they have cause to search the car, I can't argue otherwise, car gets searched, weed was found, we both get hit with the charge.
I was expected to pay $6000 for possession, spent a week in jail, lost my job, and had to travel 3 hours to the court house to "appear" in front of a judge with no means of getting there because every waking moment needed me to find a job and save any money I had to pay upcoming rent and needs, in addition to paying child support and not missing a payment otherwise I would end up in jail.
That's how quickly this shit escalates, had I not found a ride to get to the court house at least twice, I would've been arrested for bail jumping, and lost my new job, and my apartment.
Apologizes if I'm taking away from your experience, not my intention. I feel like that if others don't come to share similar stories, people are quick to dispel your situation as a one off, and accuse of not being responsible.
I don't say this as any sort of moral or character judgment, but simply to point out that part of the reason this thing is allowed to happen is because the people it's happening to are very rarely sympathetic individuals. They're viewed as bad people and "others" by the majority of the population.
So what's the fix for this? I wish I had an answer, but I don't. Maybe teaching empathy so that the court system starts feeling pressure from the citizens that this isn't ok. Maybe legislation against charge stacking just to elicit plea deals. There's also the very real possibility of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction where DAs don't charge petty crime and people charged with violent crimes are released on signature bonds.
An easy first step would be to increase accessibility to court documents so that journalists and researchers have better means of researching these complex problems. In Illinois for example, the judicial branch is exempt from FOIA. This effectively manifests itself as an informal allowance of judges/prosecutors to get away with a lot of systemic injustices. They get away with it because the means of identifying these systemic problems is through data and records that exist beyond a moat. One existing alternative to FOIA here is the county clerk's in-person system.. but the system times out on half of its searches, is missing tons of docs, painfully slow, etc. Another existing path is through a FOIA to the State's Attorney's office, but they're notoriously slow and I'm amongst the handful of others who are suing for non-responsiveness. A lot of this is made worse by the State's Attorney hashing person and case identifiers to make it effectively impossible to understand how someone's case progressed through the courts, starting from the arrest.
The fear was being jailed too long to respond to potential employers so that I could continue to work. Child support agencies are immediately notified if you've been let go and will hound you on a daily basis to find employment, there are no breaks.
Thankfully I'm in a much better position in life, but I know what it's like if you don't have access to capital to hire a good defense attorney who isn't behind the 8-ball like public defenders always find themselves.
I think it's important to point out that our justice system is so overburdened with cases they have to take deals, and that's just for the side of the system where folks don't have access to capital to hire good attorneys, they get stuck with the even more overburdened public defenders, who don't eve have time to review any of the details of the charge.
Then there's the other side that is well off and can fight their charge with a great attorney, or a team of lawyers, at which point the county/state decides it's not worth the hassle to tie up their DA on this particular case and they provide the defense with an agreeable plea (usually a slap on the wrist to get it wrapped up quick), then proceed with the next one.
As as most faculties in our society, the issue is and always has been an issue of resources. The problem is everything is paywalled to near obscurity, and we kick the can further down the road.
And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson.
If you had ended up in jail the case might have run on for months or years. Once you are inside a jail you lose most contact with your attorney and your support system and you have the lowest priority in the system, so your case is usually just continued each month until the end of time.
Find the wrong cops and you'll end up in jail for months for having some vitamins on you:
All of this should be illegal, debtors prisons by another name is all this is.
"That's a criminal matter - go to the police", say the courts.
"That's a civil matter - go to the courts", say the police.
Morons and Political Hacks[1], the lot of 'em.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747wHope you're doing well.
I'm doing good. Almost all the charges were dismissed a couple of weeks ago. Last ones on appeal now. Hope everything is good with you.
Um, what? You served 5 months in jail for a retweet? Care to elaborate?
Basically judge told me I was allowed to use the Internet while on bail and joked with me that as long as I didn't use it for anything illegal.
Then when I retweeted the article "chaps" above wrote about EM not working etc, and I also tweeted about police misconduct (I was getting arrested every single day), it angered the local Sheriff's dept and they locked me up. The judge then basically made the most strained argument in history that he never gave me permission to use the Internet and that I was a bad person for Tweeting about the police under an assumed name (my Twitter account is also my name??). "Chaps" did his level best to help my lawyer, and we were 110% in the right, but the judge was days away from retirement, so fuck me lol
Send this guy your story, he might be able to help you