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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
My only real take on this is that I wish Republican politicians talking about Trump's civil liberties had the same energy for the rest of us.
"He was convicted on the testimony of a felon! Who only turned on him for a plea deal!" Cry me a river dickhead. This is a routine dance across the country in courtrooms from coast to coast. When a normal citizen's defense attorney tries that, the prosecutor gets up and gives the same line about "I wish I had nicer witnesses, but the defendant hangs out with felons, so felons are the people who know what happened." Every damn day. Trump has a very limited ability to gain credibility by accusing his lawyer he chose of being a slimeball.
Prosecutorial overreach has impacted thousands of Americans, where's this energy for them? Where was Mike Johnson when Aaron Swartz was hounded to death? When Assange was pinned on bullshit charges? When our prisons were filling up with people who plead down to felonies when cops lied about having witnesses, and prosecutors told them to take this deal or risk dying in prison?
Don't take your political movement that's spent decades building a state with the power to imprison citizens on a whim, and get all shocked Pikachu when one of your oxes gets gored.
Oh please. Your contention is that our prisons are full of innocent people, imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, as a result solely of lies told by police? What percentage of incarcerated people do you think can accurately be described this way?
Plea bargaining constitutes something like 98% of convictions, even though it's a hilariously flagrant infringement of the Sixth Amendment. America mostly doesn't have trials.
Our local lefty defense lawyer has pointed out before that a completely negligible number of people facing charges are innocent.
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Yes, obviously I’m aware of that. What I’m disputing is that any significant number of the people taking those plea bargains are innocent, or that their “civil liberties are being violated” by lying cops trying to railroad them.
Their civil liberties are being violated by being pushed through a system that de-facto requires them to confess without trial, regardless of whether they are actually guilty or not.
I expect a not-insignificant amount of people were in fact innocent though. I was arrested for trespassing once, and urged to take a plea deal because they had video footage of me committing the crime. I knew they didn’t because I never committed the crime, but I was under enough pressure that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in my shoes took the plea deal anyway.
There are many issues with the criminal justice system. Excessive leniency for actual criminals can be true at the same time as corrupt, aggressive prosecution against innocents. It’s the core of the whole idea of anarchotyranny.
Nobody is forced to take a plea deal. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question - as in, there’s no murky questions of intent, evidence that could be interpreted either way, etc. - taking a plea deal strikes me as a very poor choice. The fact is that the vast majority of people who take plea deals do so because they are in fact guilty, or at least they’re adjacent enough to a crime that a reasonable jury could assess them as guilty.
Why? It sounds like you didn’t take a plea deal because you were certain there was no evidence of your guilt. Why would someone in that type of situation take a plea deal, short of being a person who lacks good judgment?
"If you're not guilty you have nothing to fear from the system, even though they have already proved their lack of scruples by pressuring you."
"If you're innocent you have nothing to hide."
"Comrade Stalin, there must have been a mistake!"
How does that indicate a lack of scruples on the justice system’s part? If they believe that you’re guilty, and that getting you to take a plea deal is a more reliable way to ensure that you’re punished rather than risking the possibility that a sympathetic/gullible jury makes a poor choice, it’s entirely reasonable for them to lean on you to take the plea deal. This isn’t unscrupulous at all.
This but unironically.
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This is most people in stressful situations.
Depends on the details. For example, I once took a deal to have something I didn’t do negotiated down to a fine. If I had been found guilty in court, 1/2 year in prison was the minimum. This seems to me like demanding money with the threat of prison if I exercise my rights.
Even if I had been found innocent, I likely would have been jailed for an unspecified amount of time, which would have been a larger hassle, and more costly, than the fine anyway.
Additionally, things which are a poor choice but alleviating in-the-moment stressors basically make up half the economy, and most people partake in them. The government should not be participating in such predatory behavior against its own citizens.
This describes effectively 0 cases. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question. Any situation where you don’t have video evidence of you being somewhere other than the crime scene comes down to he-said-she-said, but one of you is a cop.
For example, in my trespassing case: - I was found on the sidewalk adjacent to the property I was supposedly trespassing on (I was going for a walk for no particular reason, far from my home)
All this in a case where I was 100% factually innocent. The fact there even was a camera on the building is what saved me, or else I might have actually ended up in prison. This isn’t the only instance either. There have been at least 4 times in my relatively short life that I have been falsely accused by police, and one of those led to an arrest. I’m fairly good at navigating those situations, but there are many who I’m sure would fair worse
I have made it well into my thirties without ever being arrested nor ever even receiving so much as a traffic ticket. I live my life in an upstanding manner and do not involve myself in situations that could lead to me being suspected of criminal activity. The two times in my life that I’ve been questioned by police officers, I calmly and respectfully explained what was happening and allowed them full leeway to obtain all the information they needed in order to ascertain my innocence, after which they let me go on my way without issue.
I had been seen peering through the slots in the walls surrounding the property (it was a cool building and I am a curious soul).
This is shady behavior. When taken in combination with the fact that you had visible scrapes on both your body and clothing consistent with having hopped a wall, I think it’s entirely reasonable and proper for the police to have arrested you and assumed your guilt.
I think you should probably consider making better decisions and acting less shady/suspicious.
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Reminder that the USA has the largest incarcerated population in the world. Beating out even China and other such jail happy and/or third world nations.
In fact, at its height the USA has a greater prison population, at times, than the USSR under Stalin and GULAG. No, not just in raw numbers because the USA is bigger. In per capita rates too.
If you really believe there are no significant innocent people caught between the cracks of the system. That such an idea is an impossibility. Would you bite the bullet and say the same of the Stalin's prison state? Or is it that Americans are just sooo much more criminal than Soviets or really anyone else.
What percentage of the population in the USSR or China is African?
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How so? We live in an era wherein technological advances such as DNA testing, GPS tracking, and ubiquitous video surveillance have made the ascertainment of guilt trivially easy for most crimes. Certainly there exist crimes for which those technologies are insufficient for adjudicating guilt - for example, “date rape” where the physical evidence will allow for multiple competing interpretations based on testimony and subjective judgment - but such crimes comprise a very small percentage of what people in the U.S. are imprisoned for.
The problem with the gulags wasn’t how many people were imprisoned; it’s what they were imprisoned for. Large numbers of Soviet prisoners were there because they criticized the government. That’s bad, and appears not to bear much resemblance at all to the American justice system. To the extent that the gulag system included a very large number of non-political prisoners - murderers, burglars, fraudsters, etc. - that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome of how large the Soviet population was.
Yes, this is just manifestly true. America has a very large criminal underclass - mostly, but not entirely, non-white. Demographically alone, our country is so radically different from China and Europe to make such comparisons functionally meaningless. If anything our country has an underincarceration problem, wherein large numbers of individuals with long criminal records are out walking among us, instead of in prison or in the grave where they belong. If you’re freaked out by how large our carceral system is, you should join me in supporting a considerable expansion of the death penalty and its efficient usage.
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I mean, I'm quite confident that Americans are much more criminal than Chinese.
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Doesn't the US also have a much bigger problem with violence? I seem to recall lots of complaints about high gun violence rates. The correlation we want is between crime and prison.
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf
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My impression is that cops usually pick minor criminals and use pressure and lies to inflate their charges. Just because it's not an angel who's going to prison doesn't mean it should be happening.
These minor criminals usually accept the plea deal offered to them and go to prison on minor charges. The real problem is that the police go after easy crimes and famously refuse to investigate other minor crimes like shoplifting.
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What is the impression based on?
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