The risk is of a judicial system without checks and balances.

When most people can't afford to go to trial (both financially, and because they'd be insane to not take a plea), the checks and balances of the judiciary are, in practice, only available to a privileged few.

When you piss off a cop, get arrested, and are released a few days later, without any charges, you also have exactly zero recourse through those checks and balances.

When you piss off a cop, and he brutalizes you, you may get some recourse (through a lawsuit, unlikely as your case may be), but it does not serve as a deterrent to subsequent police misbehaviour. (As we have seen over the past summer.)

People sue for unlawful arrest and bad police behavior and win all the time. Check out this YouTube channel dedicated to covering just that... https://youtube.com/c/AuditTheAudit

The bar that needs to be met for proving that you were subjected to an 'unlawful arrest' is so incredibly high, it's farcical. Ten times out of ten, you're better off moving on with your life, and forgetting it ever happened.

Are there a lot of minimum wage, single parent type people that do that?

As an upper-middle-class office worker with flexible hours and cash to spare, even pursuing a small-claims case was a major PITA for me. Took a ton of time, effort, and money.

Which existed even when cops were the ones making the arrests.

I'm not sure this point is relevant unless you're implying that because the system is imperfect we should introduce more systems in place that can be just as easily imperfect in the same ways.

The point is that we aren't introducing a new system at all. The system of people being involuntarily committed without a trial already exists.

Nonsense. Since nothing can be perfect then we shall never change anything. Makes sense?

The point though is that change is useless unless it’s change in a good direction. If something is going to be changed, it should be shown to be better in some way.

An article I read recently noted that there were zero arrests in 6 months of health care professionals replacing police officers.

No one would claim that the existing system is perfect, but there is a great deal of difference between the assessment of a physician or magistrate and trial by a jury of one's peers. A jury of twelve is standard; I know of no requirement that twelve physicians deem someone a threat to himself or others. Furthermore, there are stronger protections for habeas corpus than there are for people involuntarily committed. Those who are accused are guaranteed a lawyer; those who are committed have no right to an advocate, which is doubly bad considering that they are often drugged in ways that dull their mental faculties.

The great majority of cases don't go to trial. Instead people are threatened with punishments vastly disproportionate to their purported crimes, and thereby intimidated in to pleading guilty irrespective of their guilt. Defendants without the financial/social resources to mount a solid defense don’t want to take their chances when faced with a 20 year prison term or whatever, not to mention a slow process that leaves their life in limbo for months or years even if they do eventually prevail. A NYT story a few years ago claimed 97% of federal cases and 94% of state cases end via plea bargain.

For those who do go to trial, the right to a lawyer is often pretty weak support. Public defenders are grossly underfunded and overworked, and there is no guarantee that they will be competent or committed to the case.

Going to add to this.

A jury of ones 'peers' is rarely the case either. Yes, they are citizens, but they are rarely of the same background, ethnicity, or social status. They are hand selected by lawyers to remove people that might be sympathetic to your plight.

I've never heard that jurors are the best and brightest among us. Often the highly educated and analytical are removed from jury pool.

That's exactly what a jail is.

Police suspects you have committed a crime, holds you in jail until trial or until you pay bail and may never end up releasing you even if you are innocent.

What’s the difference between a jail and a psych ward again? When I was in one it was functionally indistinguishable from a jail.

There are a large number of people who take a plea just because they can't afford the bail and it would take a year or two to get to trial. Or because lawyers are expensive and it's cheaper to plead guilty than to defend your innocence.

I've recently had an issue with an incompetent trooper (1 successful complaint and one pending) and incompetent magistrate (complaint pending). It will cost between $100 (win) and $650 (lose) to go through the legal process and defend our innocence. It's been more than 6 months too. All this is over "leash law" violation. But it's great to see both the trooper and magistrate commit civil rights violations, and have the civil rights lawyer tell you that they are violations but that the system doesn't care unless you suffer serious financial damages. So much for a justice system.

I once had a cop issue me a moving violation for Jay walking. So I understand that there can be pettiness from certain cops.

But that's a far cry from a cop being violent against someone or killing someone wrongfully. The justice system also acknowledges it cannot right every wrong, but hopefully when there's a major wrong it should be able to right it every time.

I don't believe there's any room for misconduct or gross incompetence. It's one thing to not be able to fix every wrong, it's another when the system itself creates those wrongs.

If you have a trooper lying to a judge or continuing to hold a charge against you they know is false, they should be fired.

If a magistrate doesn't know the basics of the law (like due process and dismissing with prejudice), then how can they be qualified to rule on it?

Some judges are elected; they could easily be grossly unqualified.

Not only are magistrates elected in my state, but they aren't required to have a law degree nor pass the bar. They take a short training course and test. In this case the original magistrate was arrested for gambling with campaign money, perjury, etc. The second magistrate was a retired cop and former police chief. Needless to say he was hostile to the defense the entire time while not questioning anything the trooper said, even stuff that was blatantly false.

Just because it is a far cry from direct violence or murder doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken care of. You can harass folks with "minor" civil rights violations and make life hell for someone. I'd argue that being lenient on "minor" civil rights makes the violent ones more likely because of the lenience towards other ones.

If you want to be in law enforcement, don't commit civil rights violations. Period. You might not be able to right every wrong, but once a wrong comes to light, you can very well do something about it.

This claim disregards those who take a plea deal because they believe they cannot win a federal criminal case, which is a superset of those who are actually innocent of their accused crimes.

Yeah. Oddly enough, the aforementioned “97%” stat brought me to an Innocence Project page[1] which leads with:

> In nearly 11% of the nation’s 349 DNA exoneration cases, innocent people entered guilty pleas.

Obviously a small and biased sample group, but guilty plea ≠ guilty.

[1] https://innocenceproject.org/guilty-plea-campaign-announceme... (2017)