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Comment by azrazalea | Hacker News Reader

This happens all the time in the US, especially for poorer/disadvantaged folks. They'll be advised to plead guilty whether they did it or not because they'll be given a lighter punishment + be done with it instead of missing more work going to court and possibly still being found guilty.

Hell I did it and i'm white middle class, but I was actually guilty too so...

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In her case, it seems she would be rejected for a job. Wouldn't it be trivially easy to sue the government/DMV/police for that and win?

If your definition of trivially easy is hiring a lawyer and waiting months or longer for a trial all while having a hard/impossible time to hold a job. You'd still have no guarantee of winning either.

Sadly, suing for the harms caused by someone else's presumption of guilt flips the responsibility around - now you have to do the expensive work of proving they acted harmfully and illegally.

Probably what they did was legal, but even if not it would be the work of months or years and many thousands of dollars to get any kind of compensation.

It's always hard to tell who would win a court case, but it seems to me like she would have lost that case. In general, it's hard to recover damages from honest mistakes, and doubly so when there was a procedure in place, and that procedure was followed.

In addition, driving in the US is a privilege rather than a right, so despite the fact that the majority of the US needs to drive to work, the burden of proof for revoking or suspending a drivers license is relatively low.

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