by AC
I started this conversation on another thread, but it’s fairly derailed at this point.
I have nearly completed law school and am going to be taking the Bar soon. Much–no, MOST of what I’ve learned is frightening. Our legal system is so broken that I’m wondering if I’ve wasted my time and money by becoming indoctrinated into it.
That’s not to say it’s utterly useless or that there’s no way to get a just ruling. Rather, the bad rulings seem to far outweigh the good. Our prisons are OVERLOADED with innocent people who confessed to crimes they didn’t commit because federal prosecutors have a 99% success rate and their alternative was a prison sentence ten times longer than the plea deal, or death.
Let’see if I can rephrase that better. Here’s how our criminal system works:
1) People are arrested by the feds for crimes they didn’t commit,
2) and then offered a 1 or 2 year prison sentence as a plea deal for a crime that carries 20 or 30 or more years in jail.
3) They can’t afford a lawyer so the court appoints them one.
4) The shitty court appointed lawyer says “the Feds usually win. The problem is that even if you’re innocent, they’ll manipulate the evidence during the preliminary hearings so the jury will never have the opportunity to learn that you’re innocent. Take the deal. You’ll serve ten months at most and then you’ll be out on parole for 3 or 4 years. You can get on with your life.”
5) The poor person takes the deal, even though they’re innocent, because they don’t want to risk spending the rest of their life in jail.
6) No one told them there are a million ways to violate parole and go back to jail.
7) They end up in jail on a longer term for violating parole for a crime they never committed.
Anyone who tells you our jails aren’t full of innocent people is lying. They are filled to the BRIM with innocents who become indoctrinated into violent gangs while they were there. And no one wants to let them out of jail because they think they’re lifetime criminals now (and some might be).
And then, there’s the 65% of the guilty people there who committed victimless crimes…
So, we have the highest prison population in the world. And I don’t see anyone asking why, or comparing this to other tyrannical regimes where mass incarceration lead to mass death and destruction.
How are we not seeing this? How??? They are incarcerating us and killing us (because people die in jail) at a level that would make Mao Zedong proud!
Right now, more than 2.3 MILLION Americans are incarcerated, most of them minorities or females, and most for victimless crimes, inability to pay court required fees and fines, or for no crime at all.
That’s damn near 1% of our population, meaning that everyone knows someone who is affected by this, or is affected themselves.
Virginia is now in the process of adding even more statutes to their books that will be used to incarcerate even more Americans who would have been considered law abiding citizens the year before but will now be considered criminals.
And civil dialog is what got us here. From Jim Crow laws to the drug war to mandatory minimum sentences to the criminalizing of actions that are merely distasteful (“hate speech,” etc.) we have more criminal statutes than any other nation, and we use them to feed a giant prison slave labor system that is destroying our nation.
Destroying it because:
1) children grow up without parents,
2) people become so damaged they can no longer function in society, and
3) our taxes are robbed for the purposes of creating and feeding this problem instead of providing solutions.
So you recommend dialog. I’M still vested in dialog myself. I don’t want to die in a war. I won’t be around to enjoy the freedom I fought for and possibly my offspring won’t be either. So, I’m REALLY, REALLY vested in a peaceful solution. I want it more than anything. I don’t want to die in a war.
What’s the solution? What dialog do we try that we haven’t tried and failed at already? How do we overcome our rigged political system? How do we get our loved ones out of the gulags? How do we stop the government from taking everything we have including our children if we speak out in dissent over vaccines, or our property if we speak out against unjust taxation? What specifically can we do or say?
Looking for actual alternatives here.
One suggestion was stop paying taxes. I added that sometimes we hold funds in escrow when we want a landlord to fix something. Perhaps the same legal logic would work here.
Another added that the counties that declared themselves 2A sanctuaries could help this effort by withholding their taxes. Now we’re talking.
Another suggested just shutting off Richmond for a week and watch them fold. This is a siege–a war tactic. It would likely lead to violence. However, if everyone were to peacefully camp there, might work 🙂 That’s the difference between a sit in and a siege. Probably would still be ended by government violence though.
Other suggestions? Something that we could float and possibly find commitment to before Monday? Something that has a chance of winning and stopping this assault on freedom and the Constitution?
Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the views of IWB.