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Comment by dguest | Hacker News Reader

You forgot that the prosecution will go over the top on charges, as bargaining chips for a plea deal. None of these would ever stick in a real court, but if you're facing sexual assault charges (and a lifetime on the sex offender registry) for allegedly peeing in a park, pleading guilty to a lesser crime sounds pretty good.

Everyone has a right to a trial by jury in theory, but if you waste the prosecutor's time by exercising it it might just ruin your life.

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> if you're facing sexual assault charges (and a lifetime on the sex offender registry) for allegedly peeing in a park

People repeat this anecdote all the time, but I'd challenge you to find a single person who has ever been put on the sex offender registry for nothing more than public urination. (Let alone being charged with sexual assault, which is nonsensical -- look up how that crime is defined in US law.)

Tarrant County. Mentally ill but competent to stand trial. I’m sure there’s more than one. Source: 1 year in lockup (solitary) with them, often criminal trespass or public urination charges.

Not sure what you mean. Are you referring to a specific case?

This person's source is someone they spent a year in jail with.

Cases this small probably don't get articles written about them often. That's why we have the phrase "falling through the cracks"

I do not think that this person is… all there: https://samhenrycliff.medium.com/when-a-gypsy-woman-loses-he...

> Source: 1 year in lockup (solitary) with them

As someone whose main knowledge of the US prison system is only from TV and not from first person (thankfully), I think I don't understand what "solitary" is. I thought the whole point of it was that the detained person didn't have contact with others?

Being put on the sex offender registry happens after conviction. The comment you are responding to is talking about how unconvictable trumped up charges are used to scare people into taking pleas so your challenge doesn't make sense in context.

OK, I would challenge you to find a single case, reported in the media, in which a defendant took a plea deal rather than face charges that included mandatory sex offender registration for nothing more than public urination. If that has ever happened, surely it would've been reported on at least once, right?

I am uniquely qualified to respond to your question in that over my career I have represented 4,000+ criminal defendants. It is incredibly common for defendants to take lower charges to avoid consequences. This is nearly uniformly true for sex offenses which require registration. While obviously not able to use individual client names, I can guarantee I have personally represented hundreds of defendants who pled to a felony obscenity charge to avoid to avoid registration as a sex offender.

And were any of those for public urination alone, without any obscene intent at all? Just a guy peeing in the bushes because he can't find a bathroom?

My response was to the question about defendants pleading out to a lesser charges to avoid felonies. But, I have pled several defendants to charges based on public urination, both guilty as charged (typically to avoid a Habitual Offender enhancement) and to misdemeanor charges. In my state, Obscenity (which public urination is considered) is not a registration requiring offense, but it is in several other states, like Texas for example.

I'll bite. It's a little bit more, but I knew a 19yo guy who flashed his girlfriend at a public swimming pool and is on the registry for life. Like most people on the registry he'll spend a significant portion of the rest of his life in and out of prison for minor violations of the registry[].

[] e.g., he was driving across country and stopped for a couple of days at a friend's house in Illinois. He was in a traffic stop and while talking to the cop, the cop realized he'd been in Illinois for over 72 hours and was given another prison sentence for failing to register.

It is called the trial tax. If you dare exercise your rights in American you will pay a price for being obstinate. The justification? It costs the Court too much for people to exercise their rights.

https://www.nacdl.org/Media/TrialPenaltyScourgeofAmericanCri...

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