Everyone Against Us (2023)
chicagomag.com
chicagomag.com
Augustin Toscano has so far spent 14 years in pretrial detention without conviction and no sign of trial in the near future. He is not an outlier. There are dozens near or over a decade inside CCJ.
According to [1] the average pre-trial detention in Cook County was 51 days in 2017-2019 and 76 in 2020-2021. Searching for Agustín Toscano I see many references to him being the detainee with the longest pre-trial period, so I think he actually is a pretty dramatic outlier. Though it is true that according to [2] there are at least two other people on murder charges with similarly long pre-trial detention periods.
Which is not to say that it isn't horrible to be even a few weeks in pre-trial detention let alone 51 days, but I don't think 14 years is a particularly regular occurrence.
1. https://loyolaccj.org/blog/pfa-jail 2. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/12/31/stalled-justice-sl...
So, we dug into the stats. Turns out those stats are heavily skewed by recording the vast majority of criminal defendants who bond out in the first 24, 48 hours. Certainly within 7 days. A lot of people (in the past) were cycled through the doors on petty traffic offenses, trespassing, drunkeness etc. This hides the thousands who end up stuck for months and years inside the jail.
The ACLU has a nice FAQ on the evils of "cash bail" here [0].
> [Public Defenders] try to establish trust by being part psychologist, part medic, part cleric.
Now I kind of want to see a TTRPG based on legal practice.
> As a way around the constitutional requirement that they get warrants to search houses, the police were claiming that they were simply walking down the hallway when they looked in the window of our client’s apartment and saw him weighing and packaging cocaine in plain view. They also claimed that he was doing this with his apartment door open, so they hadn’t needed a forced entry.
> [...] We went to the [Chicago Housing Authority] management offices, where they had records of giving Deuce citations for repeatedly covering up windows. We also talked to the maintenance man who had been assigned to repair Deuce’s door after his arrest. The maintenance crew had taken pictures that clearly showed damage to the doorjamb, backing up Deuce’s claim that the door had been kicked in.
It's infuriating that this kind of "are the police total liars" testing is so necessary in the first place.
> [Case where young man violently attacked by gang and chased into his grandmother's house uses a legally-owned gun to scare them away from the door] I begged for the mercy of a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The state flatly refused. [...] As clearly sympathetic as the judge was [...] prosecutors got their pound of flesh in the form of another young Black man with a felony conviction that will follow him for the rest of his life.
> As fate would have it, almost immediately after that case [...] Tank Johnson, who played for the Bears, caught a UUW of his own. [...] Since judges have no authority to control charges being filed or withdrawn, there was nothing to be done from the bench when a deal was reached for a reduction of Johnson’s charge from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Quite a contrast, and it's a kind of screwy thing that I bet most people instinctively expect should no be happening.
State laws say that the case should be dismissed, and that the debt collector can refile and actually serve me. Not a single attorney I've talked to (if they'll talk to me at all) has said that a judge will actually do that, though. Screw what the law says; evidently, they have the leeway - and generally do rule - to simply say that showing up to defend against the case cures the service issues.
It's all been a bit of a revelation. I call bullshit on judges who say that their hands are tied by the law. What's actually happened is that quasi-legal judicial norms have developed over time, and what they're afraid to go against are those. It is, of course, pure happenstance that they feel obligated to throw the book at criminal defendants pleading sympathy (because otherwise they'd be getting in the way of the careers of fellow legal professionals, the prosecutors) while ignoring civil defendants begging for their constitutional right to due process be affirmed (because otherwise they'd be getting in the way of the livelihood of fellow legal professionals, the debt collectors).
The only thing keeping this industry from raining down a torrent of borderline fraudulent cases (or at least procedurally-suspect cases) is probably the fact that the public would close these loopholes if they knew they existed. They rely on the sentiment that they're just going after deadbeats with legitimate grievances, instead of sticking their hands into the pockets of two-and-a-half generations of underpaid workers who are perennially hit with economic crises.
Ironically, the statute of limitations (on debts, not FDCPA claims) is part of what encourages this bad behavior; debt buyers would rather file on time and ask for forgiveness of their procedural oversight, than file past the statute of limitations and hand the alleged debtor a prima facie meritorious defense. The problem is that judges let them get away with it. And so goes the legitimacy of the rule of law for a vast swathe of the nation, for the sake of a few Benjamins paid out to people who didn't even own the debt in the first place. But then, they did get away with it with houses 20 years ago.
There's nothing evil about it in principle. Securing someone's presence at trial requires that they lose something if they fail to show. When judges set bail so high that people cannot afford it out of pocket, they are at fault. Not the concept of cash bail. If bail were set at amounts people could afford, they do not lose the money... it is returned when they show for trial regardless of the verdict.
Our constitution actually has an amendment, in the Bill of Rights no less, forbidding excessive bail. Has no one ever heard of it?
The judges do this shit for many reasons. For one, when someone should not be remanded on bail because they are a danger to society, judges will often set the bail at eleventy zillion dollars, knowing that they won't be able to post bail. But in doing so, they slowly erode psychological norms among their colleagues as to what is excessive. The presence of a bail bond industry, and the lobbying of bail bondsmen only makes it worse. Most of the people you know actually believe that all bail money is forfeited because of bail bonding.
The only solution needed is means-testing bail amounts.
Why can't they just deny bail in such cases? Is it local laws that forbid them from doing so? In which case, it seems that the ability to set a ridiculously high bail is a net benefit to society.
There were also hundreds of minor shoplifting and other petty cases with bail set at $250 or less who had been locked in the jail for months since they could not afford to bond out.
And yes, the 8th Amend. forbids excessive bail too.
Nobody cared enough.
Also, even if a defendant was adequately means-tested it doesn't mean they can access their wealth from within jail. Really hard to get your Charles Schwab 2FA codes inside a cell.
You say "required", immediately followed by "not complied". These two concepts are mutually exclusive. If one requires it, compliance is not optional, if one allows non-compliance, then there is no requirement. Illinois may have mentally retarded legislators, or lunatic judges, or both. The latter is especially possible if judges are willing to do no bail, after having done constitutionally impermissible excessive bail. In any event, those judges could be impeached, one after another, and if the judges attempted to fight being impeached through procedure, executed for literal crimes against humanity.
>Also, even if a defendant was adequately means-tested it doesn't mean they can access their wealth from within jail. Really hard to get your Charles Schwab 2FA codes inside a cell.
While you might be correct in principle, I suspect that the sorts of people being arrested don't actually have a Charles Schwab 2FA codes. If this turns out to be a problem (which I doubt), there are practical solutions that could be implemented. Sheriffs' deputies can be sent along with the defendant to retrieve said wealth or whatever.
"The job of a judge is to arrest the poor, free the rich and carve some sweet nepotism for his/her relatives".
"From a judge's head, a politician's mouth and a baby's but you should always expect the same thing".
Many people think it's to keep us safe from "dangerous drugs", but it's designed to create crime and control. It's heartbreaking and we could collectively end it if enough people woke up to the fact that its a cancer on society.
> Our client didn’t deny he was packaging cocaine at his kitchen table, but he insisted that he was not doing it brazenly in the open; that not only had he covered his windows with taped-up sheets and garbage bags, but he had closed and locked his door, as you might expect for someone engaged in illegal activities. We went to the CHA management offices, where they had records of giving Deuce citations for repeatedly covering up windows. We also talked to the maintenance man who had been assigned to repair Deuce’s door after his arrest. The maintenance crew had taken pictures that clearly showed damage to the doorjamb, backing up Deuce’s claim that the door had been kicked in.
> We proved that the search and arrest were done in violation of the Constitution, and so the evidence collected during the arrest could not be used at trial. The charges had to be dropped.
TLDR: our client was guilty as sin. He admitted it. He was caught red-handed. He still got off scot-free.
Not arguing against any of the above. But this example hilariously contradicts the claim that "the system is stacked against the accused"
If the cops can violate those rights at will, lie through their teeth to cover it up, and get away with it, then nobody has any rights.
In a perfect system the police would be punished, either civilly or criminally, for their wrongdoing, but a prosecutor will almost never bring a case against a cop who has brought them juicy evidence. It would be career suicide. So here we are.
How does it contradict that? It sounds like you're saying "The system is, in fact, stacked in favour of the accused", but I'm not seeing that here.
In principle, the system _should_ be stacked in favour of the accused - it's a high bar to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred, using only legally obtained evidence. But the examples from the article seem to suggest that in most cases, police and prosecutors have it much easier than that.
What do you think is more likely: cops fudging facts on reports super frequently because it works, or PDs and their shared investigator having time to run down every report for each of their clients and courts accepting the findings?