I've always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that "the state" has an overwhelming advantage in terms of resources and manpower.
From the letter:
> we live in a society with adversarial court and criminal justice processes I've also assumed that our system of government and burden of proof in criminal cases is also designed to make it harder for the prosecution than for the defendant.
Perhaps this is another case where I'm wrong, but I alway assumed that this was by design. The prosecution has a much higher burden of than the defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/crains-forum-safer-chicago/c...
PS Very cute username!
"They killed two people, and they also put a gun to a young mother with a 2-month-old, they put a gun to her head as well," said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.
Here's a guy in Harris county that's committed multiple capital murders and bonded out each time:
https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/capital-murder-suspe...
That is psychopathy in the justice system.
If the prosecution believes the accused is a danger to society, they should argue for remanding on those grounds, not ask for bails which have no actual relation to the accused’s likelihood of showing up.
The prosecution should have asked for higher bail if he was further threat to society or a flight risk not because the crimes were heinous, if they failed to prove it, that is on them.
Far too easily we judge people as a society quickly and usually with strong racial bias.
1% of America is incarcerated far higher than any other developed economy. I don’t think we are predisposed to crime more than others perhaps we need to think how we ended up here ?
[1] he probably did I am not arguing the facts of the case, keep in mind unlike civil cases where balance of probabilities is the deciding factor in criminal cases beyond reasonable doubt
If he is a risk to society that won't change however much money he pays. A millionaire murderer isn't less dangerous than a minimum wage one.
Judges are allowed to deny bail based on dangerousness. That's the appropriate tool here, not setting a high dollar number.
No. Bail shouldn't ever be excessive... if it's purpose is to ensure that they show for trial, then it can only be so high that the defendant should work towards avoiding forfeit. By definition, it must be affordable to them, if only barely so.
It shouldn't be used to keep someone detained. In such cases, prosecutors should have the balls to demand they not be offered bail, and judges the same to withhold it.
Every time a judge sets some ridiculous bail (I think I've personally heard amounts approaching eight digits and this for non-billionaires), it further conditions everyone including the public that high amounts are justifiable, it normalizes it.
Given our reliance on the parasitic bail bonding industry, it turns these amounts into either a pre-conviction fine, buying their way out of detainment, or judicial/prosecutorial incompetence masquerading as prudence.
Perhaps bail should be denied then as courts have the power to do , but setting it high is not that different from denying .
Your implied timeline is wrong here. The two (alleged) murders happened in May and June 2021. He was arrested for the first in October 2021 and posted bond in November 2021. Then he was arrested for the second - which happened before the first bond, remember - in December 2021 and posted the bond for that in March 2022. At no time (that we know of) did he commit murder whilst out on bond.
"Bond reform so no one stays in jail"
if every american suspected of shooting someone is held in jail rather than released, we have just removed the most likely population of people who cause future shootings. from the safety of the publics perspective, now the surviving victims/witnesses are more likely to be victims of more crimes because the suspected violent attackers are back on the street.
i dont really think there is room for debate on the "truthyness" of his statement, as if we kept more people in jail, less people would be out in public able to commit crime. how much is a good question tho.
[1] https://theappeal.org/bail-reform-embraced-by-cook-county-st...
so usually its after a new crime is commited, the police stories read like:
"X suspected of serious crime violated his electoronic home monitoring Y amount of times, we rearrested him during the act of a seperate crime"
if both options arent funded/run appropriatly public safety is harmed either way
Your assumption is contingent on the accuracy of the accusations to begin with, and doesn't account for deadweight loss, so this isn't straightforward. This deadweight loss also isn't going to be shouldered by just anybody, but especially the justice system itself. Especially considering the alternative being proposed here is not "total unconditional freedom" but "freedom unless imprisoned for violating bail conditions, and $$$ for the justice system if such a violation occurs". You can make bail conditions quite onerous if you want to but still cheaper than jail cells.
If on account of not making bail we have to put somebody in prison, police may be directed to make less arrests, DAs may be motivated to bring forward less charges, Judges may be inclined to give people lighter sentences, and parole boards may be motivated to release people earlier, as this will free up the limited resource of jail cells.
Politics is about perception, and whether or not a well-identified paper finds a causal link from bond policies to crime is kind of neither here nor there. His anecdotal evidence (gunfire within earshot, drug-dealing behind his house) suffices for him. It's really hard to argue with that kind of reasoning by pointing to abstractions, i.e. a statistical model.
Basically when I see even faint signs of folks' favoring more authoritarian policies (e.g. being "tough on crime,") I want us to notice those signs, and think hard about how to keep that instinct from getting a full head of steam.
If there’s a workable progressive solution to degraded qualify of life due to crime, including nonviolent crime—where is it working? SF? Portland? Chicago? DC? NYC?
It’s not like there are republicans in any of these places, so what’s the issue?
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
Here's a workable solution: stop spending over 3x what China does on "defense" and maintaining military bases all over the world and spend that money on homelessness, education, infrastructure, and jobs programs to get our middle class back.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/us-debt-to-gdp/
especially when you look at it from the perspective of the drastically lower taxes rates of the 80s.
One problem is the richer you are the easier it is to flee the problems and let someone else clean up the mess. But it cant be government or cost any taxes...
I don’t know if progressive policies are the answer to everything, but we’ve steadily been throwing money in the other direction so consider whether that strategy is a failure.
I specifically did not say to vote more, but that an election is not enough. It takes constant public pressure, and of course good strategy to effect change. Even if Lightfoot really did want to reform the CPD, it’s too powerful to face without a collective effort focused on small, achievable policy to start. I respect the outsiders, but she was not very political. Maybe Johnson, as a former organizer, will do better.
Wonderful logic.
One side is 'tough on crime', the other is 'tough on speech'. As a disillusioned lefty, and thankfully not in the US, one of these scares me more than the other.
That wording implies that these were crimes committed while electronic monitoring was in place. However, you shared a graphic that shows that more people who already committed crimes were being given electronic monitoring. Nothing you posted supports the idea that people on monitoring are committing crimes.
To me, this sounds like the precursor for a planned political career wherever he's moving to. Chicago is the icon for terrible awful no-good very bad liberal crime policies in popular conservative politics and an Illinois prosecutor who's moving because they just can't take it anymore would be optimally positioned to capitalize on that. Ah, politics.
Of course a career prosecutor would see a ‘crime problem’ as a result of insufficient prosecution.
Crime is complex, but largely related to poverty and economic opportunity. The interventions that are likely to matter most are so far outside this person’s perspective, that they are unable to see how modest judicial reform is merely the nearest corner of the iceberg.
You can look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., sort by the homicide rate and almost all of the top 50 voted Democrat in the 2020 election. Not Tulsa or Oklahoma City, not Mobile. Eyeballing it, I don't see any other cities that voted Republican.
High homicide rates are a blue city thing, almost exclusively.
I'm happy to look at pre and post policy implementation compared with similar entities, taking national and regional trends into account. Anything else is posturing.
I am immediately questioning this depiction that public defenders and prosecutors are on even footing. It’s been well known public defenders are forced to take up an unreasonable number of cases where the prosecution decides to hand over the evidence to be debated about— the prosecution is supposed to hand over everything, but there’s been multiple cases of prosecutors happenstancely not handing over evidence that would prove innocence and then not losing their jobs for doing so!