> Meanwhile, authorities have offered Smith a plea deal including a $1,000 fine, $1,000 in restitution and three years' probation. She has refused, saying she is innocent.
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
This is nuts. Is it possible US prosecutors give so few shits about justice?
https://arcourts.gov/professional-conduct
https://opinions.arcourts.gov/ark/cr/en/item/1868/index.do#!...
Rule 3.8. Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor.
The prosecutor in a criminal case shall:
(a) refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause;
...
COMMENT
[1] A prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate. This responsibility carries with it specific obligations to see that the defendant is accorded procedural justice and that guilt is decided upon the basis of sufficient evidence. Precisely how far the prosecutor is required to go in this direction is a matter of debate and varies in different jurisdictions. Many jurisdictions have adopted the ABA Standards of Criminal Justice Relating to the Prosecution Function, which in turn are the product of prolonged and careful deliberation by lawyers experienced in both criminal prosecution and defense. Applicable law may require other measures by the prosecutor and knowing disregard of those obligations or a systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion could constitute a violation of Rule 8.4.One complaint may not have a "they're disbarred". It could result in a slap on the wrist and a note in their file. Multiple ones that show a system of abuse of discretion would be a different story - that would be handled by the state bar itself.
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
Am no expert on him, but as we're all talking about here, the legal system is really messed up. Yeah, there are a lot of terrible processes and laws that get in the way of justice, and a lot of the things his office did made a lot of sense.
Probably one of the biggest was the "Elimination of Cash Bail for Low-Level Offenses." The cash bail system for minor crimes really screws poor people, who can't make bail for things like shoplifting, and have to stay in jail until their pre-trial. (it's often something like $1000, which for middle-class people is not a big deal at all). But imagine a teen who had to stay out of school for a month or even two just because they stole something for $20 and his family can't put together $1k. The teen gets behind in class and stops trying, and this becomes the start of getting further and further behind in life. And a similar situation happens with poor working-class people for a minor crime, they can't pay bail, so they are in jail and can't work. They are often fired or just get into debt because they're not drawing a salary.
I don't know about anything about open drug markets, but think overall what the Philly DA seemed sensible (and just looked briefly and it seems like the crime statistics turned out well in Philly, but that could be from a number of things).
Search "Kensington, Philadelphia" on Youtube. Its pretty crazy.
But wondering if that is also just a city thing? LA has Skid Row and just looked it up online, many metros have a Skid-Row type area.
Not saying that lenient crime policies don't make them worse, but it also might just be a feature of cities?
But, agree that we as a country can strengthen to safety net, probably good for us as a whole.
I'll applaud ignoring the open air drug market. It's a symptom, not a cause. The drug *war* is the biggest crime problem in the country.
A symptom of what?
Hamsterdam.
Bioshock -> Libertarians bad
Handmaid's Tale -> Christians bad
The Boys & Marvel -> Corporations and governments are all secret Nazis
Everything else -> Nazis bad
That's all you need, really
That’s why I live hippie liberal voters!
I guess they could be gambling that she can't afford a good lawyer; many people can't.
Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/right-assistance...
>Then the government provides a lawyer; you can't be without counsel even if you can't afford them.
I'd note that many (most?) state jurisdictions (the Federal judiciary has the Federal Defender's Service[0]) require a defendant to be "indigent"[1] before a lawyer is appointed, rather than requiring the defendant to hire a lawyer.
Also, in many jurisdictions, private lawyers are appointed by judges to take on the cases of "indigent" defendants. Often there's little in the way of vetting such lawyers, and the fees paid generally aren't very high -- resulting in subpar lawyers and representation.
Even in places (like NYC[2]) with a more robust public defender system, these lawyers are generally handling dozens of cases at once and don't have the resources of the prosecutor's office (investigators, budgets for forensic testing/analysis, etc.), leaving the defendants' side at a considerable disadvantage.
As such, it's not just saying "I can't afford a lawyer," and Perry Mason rushes to your rescue.
[0] https://www.uscourts.gov/topics/defender-services
[1] Different jurisdictions have different standards for determining if a defendant is "indigent." But many of those won't appoint a lawyer unless you're flat broke. Own a home? Take out a second mortgage. Have a job? You're not indigent. Etc, etc, etc.
[2] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2024/04/08/how-public-defend...
You need evidence from Cash App and likely other third parties like ISPs. You ideally would have an expert to testify about the limitations of the prosecution evidence.
Where can we see their tough-on-innocence statistics?
You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.
It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)
Oh, you mean another innocent person? (Emphais mine)
One reason we're not doing that, I suspect, is that it's hard to figure out what such a reform would look like. What specific additional step could the police have taken to determine that she didn't operate this account, without access to her private knowledge that she's never been to Arkansas and doesn't have the type of phone that was used to create it?
Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?
He was probably guilty of the two counts of aggravated assault, but the prosecution never showed that it wasn't self defense, which is what Arizona required.
The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.
Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.
Also a reminder that in order for a plea to be valid the defendant has to agree/swear on the record that they weren't coerced in anyway way into making the deal (because you can't waive your Constitutional right to trial under coercion). The threat of prosecution/a very harsh sentenced being reduced sure seems like coercion and that plea deals are constitutionally invalid by default.
If you are part of a system and have power in it, you believe the system is good. You believe that everyone else in that system is also good. That's why you have prosecutors and judges just believing the police automatically. Nobody wants to be in a job that ruins innocent people's lives, so everyone must be guilty or the cognitive dissonance will run you out (if the others in power don't first).
This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.
At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.
If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.
It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.
That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.
I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.
Are there absolutely no provisions for an innocent person to claim all the expenses they had to incur ?
The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.
I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.
I completely agree about the realpolitik reasons though. Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well. The real difficulty is trying to make people respect numerically low odds without falling for feel-good nonsense about "those people".
> municipalities paying the full cost of policing
Since we're talking realpolitik, this will never happen. In a first principles sense, it won't because it's unpredictable at the locality level (how do you set tax rates for FY27 without knowing what you'll pay out for this?). In a realpolitik sense, it won't because a) people don't like their taxes going up and would rather bank on it not happening to them, and b) the police will throw a shit fit and refuse to work when they realize they have to consider property damage while doing their jobs, and that the public will be _pissed_ if they crash a cruiser into a parked car while LARPing John Rambo.
> Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well.
Good luck and godspeed. The latest stats say 56% of US adults read at or below a 6th grade level, so say it slow and in monosyllabic words lol
My guess is that it does not.
If "these problems" is the criminals getting away with their crimes? No.
Unfortunately, human nature is such that many peoples' actual priority is venting the intense angry they feel about the real-world crimes.
And for far too many people, harsh punishments inflicted on expendable whipping boys are an all-too-satisfying way of doing that.
It's outright fallacious to want higher convictions (or even just higher arrests), because crimes aren't even being investigated, right? The goal isn't some scalar "number of people convicted" but rather justice in every case. If cases aren't being investigated, that's a specific problem with a specific part of the system, which needs to be addressed specifically. It can't be fixed by tweaking the numbers further down the line, rather that just creates further corruption.
The way I see it, every time the public demands the justice system (prosecutors, police, etc) do their jobs better, the people in the system respond by doing anything but focusing on their jobs. Either raising the false positive rate ("hard on crime"), going on [possibly silent] strike (raising false negative rate), or even rioting to create disorder from whole cloth (then blaming it on the protestors). What is really needed is accountability in general, so that specific wrongs (either way) can be rectified.
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
Would you agree knowledge of the law is a better, if still imperfect, indicator of ability as a judge or prosecutor than being merely appealing to voters?
In any case, I think a competitive exam is better than law school grades. It allows for applicants who didn't do so well in law school but got better later.
So, I think an exam is a bad idea unless it's a pass/fail exam (ie no grades, you either understand the law or you do not) and there should be no meaningful time constraint when completing the exam. That's basically the system in most states today, except the training comes after someone without a law degree is elected.
There are state and federal oversight mechanisms with the power to remove bad judges.
If you believe this is preferable to a system where knowledge is established before appointing the person, then we're not going to have much common ground.
I'd invite you to read https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/... for a look at Louisiana's justice of the peace system, whose justices only need a high-school diploma.
IMO a law degree is the absolute bare minimum for any kind of judicial or prosecutorial role. It's bad enough cops aren't expected to know the law. How can anyone justify a judge with fewer qualifications than a bootcamp grad in a software role?
Also, don't forget JPs mostly handle basic disputes, misdemeanors, and administrative tasks. You probably don't need a law degree to conduct a wedding ceremony or hear a shoplifting case.
Would it surprise you to find out in lots of places the coroner is an elected position open to high school grads?
Of what?
> Who approves the applications?
What's to "approve"?
> Who ensures the process is open?
Put it on a website and in the local paper. Applicants' names, their exam scores, their law school transcripts.
> It always comes down to winners of elections
Sure somewhere in the chain, at the end, there's an elected official. That's democracy.
But elected officials can be required by law to use meritocratic selection criteria to appoint people. Many countries used or still use exams to hire bureaucrats. It's a very old concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_entrance_examina...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
That's fine but a different argument from "it can't be done".
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
The previously-super-illegal pervasive domestic surveillance programs sure don't help things, either. No cost is too high to stop "terror" at home and abroad, amirite? :(
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...
There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.
And if you don't believe me, consider what, "I'll just move, I'll just retain a lawyer, I'll just spend my precious time monitoring my data or hiring someone else to do it for me," as Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards says about the means of the people holding those views. (It's that they can, and intend to, buy their way out of a system stood up by people like them ostensibly to promote accountability and social order.)
These sorts of abuses or dysfunction are rampant in all states. I can't think of a single state that actually has a good system (properly staffed, no overreach, etc).
But they do tend to have better speedy trial definitions and such. Although it seems they are rolling back bail reform (which may have been too lenient, but they didn't find a middle solution). And it seems they still have ex parte protection from abuse orders, which are notoriously abused in divorce cases.
You're right about "continuing to get worse", but our institutions have been failing for more than 20 years. I think it's more like that Hemingway quote about bankruptcy, “Gradually and then suddenly.” in turn, that always makes me think of an exponential growth curve... and I think America, if not the entire world, is headed towards the vertical. Ib other words, when it comes to how dysfunctional our institutions can get, I think we've just begun.
Blue state systems are not better run.
Most definitely are.
I think we would need to quantify "better", but there aren't any states that are good.
While there are definitely issues of pay disparity, there are a lot of criminal law firms employing "former prosecutors". In my conversations with one or two - the pay is better, but the disillusionment and need to railroad defendants got to them.
The OP was asking about if justice is important. It is not (according to Silvergate). Conviction rate is important and prosecution offers deals that essentially cannot be refused in exchange for a guilty plea.
The story sounds like CashApp didn't do proper KYC, so they should be held liable. Also I very much doubt that someone built up a sophisticated operation just for 1 victim, so there must be others. Why doesn't the police connect the dots?
They don't care. My iPhone was stolen. Through a circuitous route, I was able to get the details of the eBay seller, someone who lived near me, and whose listing pages couldn't have been more blatant if it had a neon sign on it: 100+ laptops, mostly Macs, "no chargers, no accessories", often activation locked. Same with phones.
So I went to my PD, with the buyer information, the seller, all of this. Their response:
"Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Huh, "Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Nothing done. As of a year later he was still steadily adding multiple phones and laptops a week to his listings.