Donald Trump tweeted this morning about his nondisclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels: “These agreements are … very common among celebrities and people of wealth.”
He said today: “Billionaires like Donald Trump have access to armies of lawyers while average Americans frequently don’t even have access to one. People like Rudy Giuliani say they care about law and order, but if citizens don’t have access to legal power, you have endemic lawlessness.”
The first part of the report “documents how the vast public is excluded from legal power in the United States:
“…in the broken criminal justice system: how public defenders are grossly underfunded and understaffed — a contributing factor to prosecutorial abuses and our ballooning prison system.
“…in the inaccessible civil justice system: how 86 percent of the civil legal needs of the poor go unmet; how America ranks 50th of 66 wealthy countries in terms of ‘the ability of people to obtain legal counsel.’
‘…in the indentured political system: how public interest lobbyists are outnumbered 34-to-1 by corporate interest lobbyists in D.C.; how tort law and antitrust law are crippled by corporate interest lawyers; and how the John M. Olin Foundation paid Harvard Law School $18 million to teach what they have admitted is ‘conservative constitutional law.'”
The report also notes: “Researchers estimate that $20-50 billion in wages are stolen from American workers by their employers annually. Yet only a small fraction, a little less than $1 billion, of that stolen property is recovered each year in civil suits or by state and federal enforcement. If American workers had anywhere close to the legal power that their employers do, we would not be witnessing such a corporate crime wave.”
Big institutions hate to admit when they are wrong. Big government is as bad as big business. But when the criminal justice system balks at admitting error, the very soul of our society bleeds.
Once a jury proclaims a guilty verdict, it is a steep climb to convince an appellate court to either dismiss the conviction and the charges, or at least to order a new and fairer trial.
And after one appeal, the climb is even steeper to convince a court to revisit a case. This is what the courts call “finality.” What’s done is done is the sacred concept. And finality too often stands in the way of truth and justice.
The prosecution of James Rodwell for murder, and his life sentence (now in its 36th year), recently the subject of a dramatic true crime story by Boston Globereporter Maria Cramer, is an example of a case that will not go away; too many people remain disturbed by the outcome.
I am one of those people. So is Rodwell’s current lawyer, Boston’s Veronica White, quoted by Cramer as saying, “I will keep fighting for Jimmy for the rest of my life.” Yes, the case is that compelling.
But this instinct that drives people to persevere when the system misfires, is countered by the system’s self-protective reflex that makes it difficult to get judges to take a second, third or fourth look into a case, even when new and powerful evidence of a severe miscarriage of justice surfaces.
'They said that all they were going to do was delete the photos from the phone, so I blindly signed a paper allowing them to access it.'
One might argue that a sexual predator deserves such a fate. But Austin isn't a sexual predator. He didn't assault anyone, or send child porn. By one important measure, he is a child himself: the age of consent in Wisconsin is 18, which means Austin is technically under-age, just like the girlfriend he is accused of exploiting.
But Wisconsin's sex offender laws contain a curious quirk: 17-year-olds can be charged as adults—even though the law considers them to be children and incapable of consenting to sex. It's an absurd contradiction that calls to mind the prosecution of North Carolina 17-year-old Cormega Copening, who faced third-degree sexual exploitation charges for taking inappropriate photos of a minor. The teen was charged as an adult, even though he was one of the minors in question—some of the pictures were ones Copening had taken of himself.
Austin's situation is worse. Much worse.
That's because Wisconsin's laws are actually more punitive than North Carolina's. In many U.S. jurisdictions, the law permits consensual relationships with underage teens if the perpetrator is no more than four years older than the other person: this category of exceptions is typically called the "Romeo and Juliet" law—a foreboding tribute to the most well-known underage couple in English literature.
i believe one of the core issues we see today is that we have aggressive law makers churning out a lot of rules and regs
there are several reasons for this (we can discuss that as well)
but they're somewhat disconnected from the application (the enforcers on the ground) and the results
police are told to do "your job" which is practically impossible considering all of the rules they're expected to enforce
the sheer number/volume is tremendous not to mention the unintended consequences
where is the accountability?
the process for diagnosis and corrections?
================================================================================== silvergate has a new book coming out in december i think with ideas to turn this obvious disaster around
Few people understand the price of overregulation like Harvey Silverglate. Over his long career as an attorney and journalist, Silverglate has seen a rising bureaucratic class enact hundreds of thousands of federal regulations and vaguely-worded statutes. The result has been the criminalization of everyday life. From university campuses to corporate boardrooms, ever more citizens are facing severe punishments for behavior that was once considered harmless.
Silverglate himself has been repeatedly pursued by the FBI, only to see the investigations come to nothing.
But the longtime civil libertarian is optimistic for change. Now that the regulatory state has grown so complex that powerful people are getting tripped up in their own rules, Silverglate thinks reform is possible. Regarding the trial of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell for the vague charge of honest services fraud, he said: "People who wouldn't agree on what day of the week this is, agreed that the Department of Justice was becoming almost a terrorist organization with respect to state, local, and even federal public officials. That's what causes change: the people in power begin to get hurt by their own system."
Three Felonies a Day is the story of how citizens from all walks of life—doctors, accountants, businessmen,politicalactivists, and others—have found themselves the targets of federal prosecutions, despite sensibly believingthatthey did nothing wrong, broke no laws, and harmed not a single person. From the perspective of both a legal practitioner who has represented the wrongfully-accused, and of a legal observer who has written about these trends for the past four decades, Three Felonies a Daybrings home how individual liberty is threatened by zealous crusades from the Department of Justice. Even the most intelligent and informed citizen (including lawyers and judges, for that matter) cannot predict with any reasonable assurance whether a wide range of seemingly ordinary activities might be regarded by federal prosecutors as felonies.
More Black Men in Prison Today Than Enslaved in 1850
More black men are in prison than enslaved during 1850.
ColorLines' Thoai Lu is reporting that the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that as of 2008, there were more than 846,000 black men in prison, making up 40.2 percent of all inmates in the system. The article highlights a recent talk given by author Michelle Alexander, who puts those numbers in context. Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, told an audience at the Pasadena Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, "More African-American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began."
Alexander argues that prisons have become the latest form of economic and social disenfranchisement for young people of color, particularly black men. In it, she grapples with a central question: If crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows, then why have rates of incarcerated men of color skyrocketed over the past 30 years? The "war on drugs," which focuses primarily on communities of color, is the answer, although multiple studies have proved that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or higher than blacks. Despite this data, four of five black youths in some inner-city communities can expect to be incarcerated in their lifetimes.
Alexander discusses how convicted felons are subject to forms of discrimination reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. This includes being denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits, much like their parents or grandparents.
Alexander raises a pressing issue as states like Florida move to privatize prison systems and strip convicted felons of the right to vote even after completing their sentences. The only thing sadder than having more men in prison now than in slavery during 1850 is that many don't understand that slavery is still legal within the prison system. Indeed, it is the only place where slavery is still legal in the United States. It is clear that our community is in trouble. What are we going to do about it?
