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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocence-is-irrelevant/534171/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/...e-dark-about-evidence-until-its-too-late.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/the-bail-trap.html
John Oliver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5mwymTIJU

(This post inspired by the Economist's video on the Japanese justice system as discussed in another thread, as well as recent articles in the news media.)

Over 97% of felony convictions in the US occur through plea bargains, not court trials. In many of these cases, the defendant is first jailed (without bond or with an impossible bond) for weeks or months in dirty and dangerous conditions. Often, the defendant is not even presented the gathered evidence -- even exculpatory evidence that proves the defendant's innocence -- until the trial itself.

In most of the country, a suspect can be held for months (sometimes decades) in jail unless bond is available and posted. In practice, for anyone that's not wealthy, bail is impossible (e.g., bail for smashing a car's windows was set at $500K for a Baltimore teen at the Freddie Gray protests; but even for misdemeanors like possession of drug paraphernalia, the less affluent often can't scrape together $1000 in cash). So the accused rots in jail for a few months (sometimes close to a year), then is approached with an offer from the prosecution -- plead guilty and walk (with time served and/or a monetary fine) or wait months more for a court date. In the meantime, the defendant has lost his/her job, his/her children, and his/her home, regardless of guilt or evidence.

Ideally, plea bargains work like this: Defendants for whom there is clear evidence of guilt accept responsibility for their actions; in exchange, they get leniency. A time-consuming and costly trial is avoided, and everybody benefits. But in recent decades, American legislators have criminalized so many behaviors that police are arresting millions of people annually—almost 11 million in 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available. Taking to trial even a significant proportion of those who are charged would grind proceedings to a halt. According to Stephanos Bibas, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the criminal-justice system has become a ”capacious, onerous machinery that sweeps everyone in," and plea bargains, with their swift finality, are what keep that machinery running smoothly.

Because of plea bargains, the system can quickly handle the criminal cases of millions of Americans each year, involving everything from petty violations to violent crimes. But plea bargains make it easy for prosecutors to convict defendants who may not be guilty, who don't present a danger to society, or whose ”crime" may primarily be a matter of suffering from poverty, mental illness, or addiction. And plea bargains are intrinsically tied up with race, of course, especially in our era of mass incarceration.
...

Police officers have wide discretion in deciding whether a person is breaking the law, and they sometimes arrest people for such offenses as sleeping in public and sitting too long on a bench. One case involved a woman whose crime seemed to have been, in the words of the officer who filed the report, ”walking down the road around 1:30 a.m." with ”no legitimate reason." Casey told me before this meeting that she hoped to get all such cases dismissed. ”Walking down the street!" she said. ”Imagine if it was you."

In September 2013, a fight broke out on the sidewalk outside the Bronx nightclub where Aaron Cedres worked as a bouncer. It was a confusing scrum of about a dozen people, and one man suffered a broken jaw and deep slashes to his head and back.

A month later, Mr. Cedres — then a 25-year-old father with no criminal record — was charged with gang assault, which carried the prospect of 25 years in prison. Cameras had been posted outside the club, and the prosecutor said the tapes looked bad for Mr. Cedres, his lawyer recalled.

Mr. Cedres was offered a plea deal: five years behind bars. He insisted that he had thrown one punch to help break up two men, and he urged his lawyer to get the footage.

But Mr. Cedres was up against entrenched legal practices. New York is one of 10 states where prosecutors can wait until just before trial to turn over witness names and statements and other key evidence known as discovery, which backs up criminal charges. It is a strategic advantage that critics call unfair and unnecessary.

Tomlin broke off to go inside the store and buy a soda. The clerk wrapped it in a paper bag and handed him a straw. Back outside, as the conversation wound down, one of the officers called the men over. He asked one of Tomlin's friends if he was carrying anything he shouldn't; he frisked him. Then he turned to Tomlin, who was holding his bagged soda and straw. ‘‘He thought it was a beer,'' Tomlin guesses. ‘‘He opens the bag up, it was a soda. He says, ‘What you got in the other hand?' I says, ‘I got a straw that I'm about to use for the soda.' '' The officer asked Tomlin if he had anything on him that he shouldn't. ‘‘I says, ‘No, you can check me, I don't have nothing on me.' He checks me. He's going all through my socks and everything.'' The next thing Tomlin knew, he says, he was getting handcuffed. ‘‘I said, ‘Officer, what am I getting locked up for?' He says, ‘Drug paraphernalia.' I says, ‘Drug paraphernalia?' He opens up his hand and shows me the straw.''
...

Still awaiting a trial, Tomlin returned to Rikers and quickly got into trouble with a group of younger inmates while on the phone with his aunt. ‘‘A young guy tells me, ‘Yo, pop, you gotta get off the phone,' '' he said. ‘‘I said, ‘I'm in the middle of an important call.' He wanted me to just hang up.'' Tomlin quickly realized he'd made a mistake. That evening, in the shower, he was jumped by a group of young men. ‘‘Most of the punches went to the side of my head and my eye,'' he said. ‘‘I was tussling one and had to worry about the other three, there was blows coming from everywhere.'' Punched, kicked and stomped, Tomlin received medical attention, his face monstrously misshapen, his left eye swollen shut. ‘‘You'd think I was Frankenstein's brother or something,'' he said.

Tomlin's eye was still swollen shut on Dec. 10, three weeks after his arrest, when he returned to court. At this hearing, prosecutors handed over a report from the police laboratory, which had tested the drinking straw. At the top of the report, in bold, underlined capital letters, were the words ‘‘No Controlled Substance Identified, Notify District Attorney.''

The report had been faxed to the district attorney on Nov. 25, the same day as Tomlin's last court hearing and days before his beating. The key to his freedom had been sitting unexamined. Conceding that the case had unraveled, the prosecutor asked that the charges be dismissed. ‘‘The judge says, ‘Mr. Tomlin, this is your lucky day, you're going home,' '' Tomlin recalls. ‘‘I just left the courtroom, signed some papers and that was it.''

 

[Late Flag]

Agreed. Too many things are criminalized in the US, and nearly all of them are due to the war on drugs, with the war on terror being a distant second. This gives prosecutors far too much power.

 

[Tuck]

WDF at that drinking straw story.

 

[krazen]

There's so much fail in these articles I can't even start. Ill start with the easiest; tone of the most infuriating parts of the current justice system is that if the players (the police, the prosecutors) know and have PROOF of innocence its way too easy for them to game the system.

Cops can just arrest them for bullshit and even if it's found out it's bullshit later there's no blowback.

And there's plenty of ways a prosecutor can hide evidence that can free a suspect and deny their legal team access to it

 

[RS4-]

Fuck the system.
Fuck cops.

 

[YesThatGuy]

This is way to control people. That's it.

Healthcare, education, policing, all designed to keep the population scared and in control.

The us really learned from those 'communist'/far-right dictatorships (often named the first but in reality the second, and so sponsored by the us).

 

[GoldenEye 007]

Yeah this has been well known. Pleas used to take advantage of poor people and more specifically minorities.

It's the American way. The whole system is broken.