What If Criminal Justice Reform

What if we actually enact criminal justice reform?

Would we have a system that didn’t ruin lives for relatively minor mistakes?  Would we spend less tax dollars caging fewer humans “to make them better?”  Would we be better of?

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Politicians seem to think so. Or at least they’ve said as much through the last election cycle.  Whether it be genuine belief or riding the rising tide of the concerns of their constituents, everybody from former prosecutors who did nothing to change the criminal justice problem from the inside to born-billionaires who took on the cause prior to election (despite not having previously used any of their billions to make a difference in the past) are trying (or at least pretending) to make the criminal justice system a little more hospitable.

The politicians are throwing out all sorts of neither new nor novel reform. “We need to overhaul the bond system.”  “We can decriminalize cannabis possession.” “We should eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing.”

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The Real Reason the Chicago Gun Ban Isn’t Working (and other secrets THEY don’t want you to know about the “Gun Free City”).

Guns aren’t banned in Chicago.

If you actually paid attention to second amendment law (or ran a google search, or did 30 seconds of fact checking) you’d know that.

Chicago isn’t a gun free city. Chicago has never been a gun free city.

Continue reading “The Real Reason the Chicago Gun Ban Isn’t Working (and other secrets THEY don’t want you to know about the “Gun Free City”).”

Q & A With an Experienced Criminal Law Attorney.

Q: The policeman never read me my rights. Will they drop my case?

A: No.

Q: If the victim or police man don’t show up on the first court date will they drop my case?

A: No.

Q: Can we tell the judge that the victim wants to drop the charges so he can dismiss the case?

A: No.

Q: I made some “mistakes” in the report I wrote for the police. Can we call them and change it?

Continue reading “Q & A With an Experienced Criminal Law Attorney.”

Guilt Brokering.

The courtroom definition of guilt is whatever a judge or jury says it is- as long as it’s proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Guilt”  according to the dictionary is “the fact of having committed a breach of conduct especially violating law and involving a penalty.”

The key distinction from the courtroom version being the removal of the word “fact” and replacing with proof of the matter only “beyond a reasonable doubt”- something, quite obviously, less than having proven an actual fact.

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Taking a knee.

According to twitter today El Presidente is trying to pressure NFL owners to prevent their players from “taking a knee” during the anthem. NFL commissioner Roger Goddell has penned a letter to NFL owners telling them the players should stand.

I’m sure it’s just an odd coincidence those two things happened within hours of each other. Sometimes things fall out of the sky like that.

Just like the coincidences I see in court. Like, the one where all the clients I’ve ever represented who got pulled over for minor traffic offenses but ended up laying on the deck with tazer electrodes stuck in their skin were African American.

Just an odd coincidence as well. I’m sure that, in the tens of thousands of cases I’ve touched, if a white guy ever stayed on the cell phone after Continue reading “Taking a knee.”