What our Justice System needs is a plea bargain for sanity!
Jul 28, 2015 13:13:47 GMT -6
Nugget, Daitengu, and 4 more like this
Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2015 13:13:47 GMT -6
I read the events surrounding the plea bargain for the woman responsible for two New York maximum security inamtes escaping with some dismay.
This news came out on one wire service just a very short time ago, and it appears she will get 7 years for her part of making the escape possible. Seven years. Is that enough? Well, if we are to take the line of thinking that all life is precious, and the preventable death of anyone is a tragedy, then we can say she is getting off rather light for directly causing the death of one, and near death of the other.
Had she not have assisted, they would not have escaped, hence, a manhunt to run them down would not have taken place, and one would still be incarcerated but alive, while the other would be in the same boat as before without new gunshot wounds to mark the experience.
I believe the problem runs deeper than that though. Seven years is a decent amount of time, if she actually serves anything like the term, anyway. It is how it is reached, which bothers me so much. The rush to plea bargain people who are dead bang guilty, and have earned absolutely no consideration by cooperation or active assistance in getting there, ought to be grounds for removal of prosecutors from office 'for cause'. It shows a profound desire to take the easy path, run the lowest route, and generally avoid actually putting these people to the test of facing the full sentence for what absolutely are full crimes.
Of course, it isn't just this one woman, it is systemic from dope dealers to wall street robber-barons to two bit killers on the street. No one, it seems, but the truly stupid, ignorant or extremely unlucky actually face a true sentence for a real crime. Few, in these deals, even get the stigma of living with the record of what they actually DID, since plea bargains often whitewash the nature of the offense for later casual review by others.
Some suggest that prosecuting people who won't plead guilty to the full, normal and appropriate sentencing their crime has earned would bring the system to a screeching halt for the new volume of cases to handle. To that I say, we either have a SERIOUS problem with too many laws or we have a SERIOUS problem with having the right laws but far too few people to effectively enforce and prosecute them.
Either situation doesn't present 'a challenge to work around', but a fundamental FAILURE of the system. Each from a very different source and cause..but each equal in the profound nature of the failure it seems to result in.
Lets fix it, or do we seek a plea bargain for that, too?
This news came out on one wire service just a very short time ago, and it appears she will get 7 years for her part of making the escape possible. Seven years. Is that enough? Well, if we are to take the line of thinking that all life is precious, and the preventable death of anyone is a tragedy, then we can say she is getting off rather light for directly causing the death of one, and near death of the other.
Had she not have assisted, they would not have escaped, hence, a manhunt to run them down would not have taken place, and one would still be incarcerated but alive, while the other would be in the same boat as before without new gunshot wounds to mark the experience.
I believe the problem runs deeper than that though. Seven years is a decent amount of time, if she actually serves anything like the term, anyway. It is how it is reached, which bothers me so much. The rush to plea bargain people who are dead bang guilty, and have earned absolutely no consideration by cooperation or active assistance in getting there, ought to be grounds for removal of prosecutors from office 'for cause'. It shows a profound desire to take the easy path, run the lowest route, and generally avoid actually putting these people to the test of facing the full sentence for what absolutely are full crimes.
Of course, it isn't just this one woman, it is systemic from dope dealers to wall street robber-barons to two bit killers on the street. No one, it seems, but the truly stupid, ignorant or extremely unlucky actually face a true sentence for a real crime. Few, in these deals, even get the stigma of living with the record of what they actually DID, since plea bargains often whitewash the nature of the offense for later casual review by others.
Some suggest that prosecuting people who won't plead guilty to the full, normal and appropriate sentencing their crime has earned would bring the system to a screeching halt for the new volume of cases to handle. To that I say, we either have a SERIOUS problem with too many laws or we have a SERIOUS problem with having the right laws but far too few people to effectively enforce and prosecute them.
Either situation doesn't present 'a challenge to work around', but a fundamental FAILURE of the system. Each from a very different source and cause..but each equal in the profound nature of the failure it seems to result in.
Lets fix it, or do we seek a plea bargain for that, too?
