This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.
At many locations, cars at grocery stores get broken into pretty frequently. Yet it's unusual for cops to ever do anything about those cases. That's not due to a lack of evidence, most grocery stores have cameras throughout the lot.
Hell, it's even less of an excuse today due to the amount of surveillance via flock cameras cities have adopted. Yet cops still don't do a thing about this sort of theft.
Reason they get arrested for felony shoplifting is big box stores gift wrap those convictions. They have watched them, tracked exact items they have stolen down to UPC with price, have all the video/spreadsheet and it's all handed to cop/prosecutor on DVD. Those cases are so easy for prosecutor because conviction rate is ~100% and any testifying required is all paid for by big box store.
On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Vast majority of time when shoplifters get arrested, it's because they are still at scene of the "crime". AKA, they enter big box store, facial recognition fires and off duty cop there is notified or cops are called. They show up, take the person into custody and get their gift wrap.
Person stealing the bike is long gone before cops are notified.
Singapore has it figured out but nobody here likes to admit it. Fines are broadly ineffective and imprisonment too costly, when what most people really need is to get get smacked hard with a stick a few times.
The security guards that do the actual detaining are often off-duty LEO picking up extra hours. Even Kroger here has an armed officer at the exit door. So they can legally detain you and even arrest you.
True that they don't care about the bike outside. It's not their property.
That's what Target is there for.
They can initiate a citizen's arrest, which would permit them to detain you But if they are wrong, and you've committed no felony, that guard is civilly and criminally liable for false imprisonment -- a pretty serious charge. Most store security are unwilling to risk their own personal necks to protect the company's interest in $20 of shampoo or whatever.
> (a) Detention. Any merchant who has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed retail theft may detain the person, on or off the premises of a retail mercantile establishment, in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable length of time for all or any of the following purposes:
> (1) To request identification;
> (2) To verify such identification;
> (3) To make reasonable inquiry as to whether such person has in his possession unpurchased merchandise and to make reasonable investigation of the ownership of such merchandise;
> (4) To inform a peace officer of the detention of the person and surrender that person to the custody of a peace officer;
> (5) In the case of a minor, to immediately make a reasonable attempt to inform the parents, guardian or other private person interested in the welfare of that minor and, at the merchant's discretion, a peace officer, of this detention and to surrender custody of such minor to such person.
https://ilga.gov/Documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000...
I found my phone. On my phone, and each and every phone I bothered to try, the IMEI failed checksumming because the last two digits had been transposed. Effect: seller looked "legit" (hah), and I couldn't find the listing by searching my actual IMEI.
What was on his page of listings? 100+ phones, most "activation locked", all "no chargers, cables, accessories.
Same with laptops. "No chargers, no cables, no accessories", many "locked".
All ridiculous prices (like $500 for a 'like new' m3 pro MBP).
Gave this info to the police.
They could not care less.
"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself..." (i.e. even they felt pretty sure it was all stolen).
"Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Could not care less. They had a slam dunk case in mine alone. My phone had been stolen, a police report had been filed with them, and it had shown up in California where someone who bought it on eBay gave them the seller's info, someone who lived near me.
Nope.
Burglary? Theft? Biker robbed at the knife point?
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
You can choose not to exercise any right, that's what makes it a right. Freedom of religion does not imply an obligation to practice religion, freedom of speech does not compel speech, right to bear arms does not imply an obligation to bear arms, etc. Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
If I don't own a gun, I'm not waiving my right to own a gun. Waiving my right would be something like, signing up for a registry which makes it actually illegal for me to own a gun, and I could go to prison if I buy one. I can decide not to exercise my right to life by jumping off a bridge, but I can't generally waive my right to life and make it legal for someone else to kill.
In short: you aren't required to exercise your rights, but someone else isn't allowed to violate them regardless of whether you're exercising them or not.
Regardless of the word you choose to use for it, the point is that a swift and speedy trial is a right you have. There's nothing fundamentally illegal about a long trial taking place, you just can't force it upon someone. Slavery on the otherhand is explicitly forbidden. You can waive your right to freedom all day long, it doesn't make slavery any less illegal.
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
As for permitting someone to kill you, this falls very much into the same category of explicitly forbidden. Murder is illegal, and "he was asking for it" is not a valid defense. On the other hand, something like euthanasia, so long as you're in a jurisdiction that does not consider it murder, is permitted. In neither case is your right to live or lack thereof a question.
I think we should allow people to declare that they will accept a non-speedy trial. But we should allow people to assert their rights at any time even if they have previously declared they will not. It should not be possible to waive your rights in a way that's binding upon you in the future. The combination of these things would mean that effectively the state has to prosecute you within whatever window is defined as "speedy" because otherwise you could wait until that window expires, then say "whups, changed my mind, you violated my right to a speedy trial, I'm going home now."
Obviously this isn't how things actually work. But how things work and how they should work are often pretty distant, especially when it comes to the justice system. I also have major problems with things like plea bargaining and binding arbitration which are other staples of the American system.
Plenty of cults have slaves in the US. But because the are willing, nothing is done about it.
"You know the worst thing about being a slave? They make you work, but they don't pay you or let you go."
"That's the only thing about being a slave!"
So yeah, you can legally be a slave as long as you leave out the one part that makes it slavery.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
And in most of those jurisdictions where it is a possibility, its use is massively less (less than 1% per capita) and also far more regulated, and subject to review. In the US a judge ostensibly has the power of veto over a plea deal, though in practice this is nearly never exercised unless the miscarriage of justice (in either direction) is so egregious that it can't easily be ignored.
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later.
If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison?
Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever.
Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?”
I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases.
False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume.
One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person.
[*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system.
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTesting...
[1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-am... and replicated recently https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/
Tbh, your “people are complicated” stance feels like the position of someone who believes they will never be on the wrong side of situations like these. I hope you never are, but I don’t think it’s a position that is defensible if you’re including people who are in groups likely to be subjected to tests like this (e.g. prison inmates)
Dreddful.
It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.
But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
Claiming that a system's purpose is something it consistently fails to do is absurd. Intentions don't matter, outcomes matter.
This is a pretty basic systems theorist argument, to be honest...
I didn't say that. I said the unintended results are the purpose of a system, not the intent.
Intent - what someone wanted or expected the system to do.
Purpose - what the system does in practice. The reason, or primary function for it.
Some classic examples -- post it notes were intended as a aerospace adhesive, but found their purpose as low tack papers.
If you want a classic systems example, standardized testing is a good example of difference between purpose and intent. It was intended to be a mechanism for measuring schools and ensuring every kid got an equal education. But now its purpose could be described as the metric schools game. It narrows curricula, encourages teaching to the test. Those outcomes are not the original intent. Or even desirable.
So I wasn't being flippant (maybe a little flippant) when I was saying intent and purpose are different.
Other classic examples -- the US senate, social media algorithms, animal bounties (paying people per head bounties on killed rats, frogs, or snakes results in people breeding those animals), war on drugs, zoning laws, etc.
It's very closely related to the idea that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
But one last question to help me understand your position then I’ll leave you alone.
Why do people post this saying as if it has import? What point are they trying to make?
IME I have only ever heard this phrase used as a reaction against single failures as a way of maligning the operators of a system without any associated analysis or consideration of how the system actually works. Do you disagree this is the rhetorical purpose?
This quote says to me that we need to think about outcomes early AND late in the life of designing and operating a system. We have unintended consequences, and when we elect to not (or ineffectually) address the side effects of a system, we are making a choice to adopt the purpose of that system.
It's a way of reminding us that the behavior we ignore is the behavior we accept. That outcomes matter more than intent.
Personally, I think people are too permissive towards mistakes in large systems, categorizing them as "a few bad apples" or "an occasional error". Yes, i deploy this quote when single failings happen, but I also deploy it in broad critique of structural failings. It also prompts thoughts about why -- systems are built on top of systems, on top of systems.
As an example, our Justice system has both specific incidents (e.g. George Floyd) and structural failings (racial bias, high incarceration rates). Those are both cases where I would use this quote. It might seem that a single incident is wrong to deploy this quote, but the George Floyd incident doesn't happen in isolation. We need to look at the whole system. How are police trained? How are Americans trained to interact with police? How does the Justice system interact with minority and poor communities? How do we address mental health in this country? All of those questions are complex and nuanced, and are themselves contributors to the purpose of the police.
So, for me, it's not meant to be quippy or punchy or malignant. It's meant to highlight failures aren't isolated incidents, they are part of a system that is failing to prevent this outcome. Probably for complex reasons, but we as a society are choosing not to address those complex reasons.
In other words, IME, the purpose of the system of the phrase “the purpose of the system” is to cause thought terminating moral superiority, even if _you intend_ for the phrase to highlight complexity and unintended consequences. ;)
Anyways, thanks for the full explanations of your position.
Organizations such as OSF/OSI (Open Society Foundations, not Open Software Foundation) have successfully placed their preferred candidates in positions of power in many major US jurisdictions. If you research, you'll see many cases of OSF DAs prosecuting or not prosecuting based on their political ideology. Many prosecutions are politically motivated, but now we have foundations funding activist candidates who are all pushing the same agenda. The result is diminished trust in government, which the activists will exploit to eventually make things even worse, because "capitalism is not working."
I.e. where i live the city council long ago directed police to stop arresting people for marijuana possession - on the grounds that this is an unjust law and criminalizing it is tying up resources and doing more harm than good, and because the majority of the city’s population supports legalization. City gov doesn’t have the power to change those laws, but they can fix it locally by directing enforcement away from them. A decade later, it was legalized - imo proving that it was the right decision.
This did not “diminish trust” in the gov. In fact, laws that the majority disagree with but stay on the books do far far more damage to the credibility of gov, in my opinion
Gov enforcing laws that the majority of people do not want is a subversion of democracy that alienates people from the idea that gov can be responsive instead of oppressive. I don’t trust a gov that claims to represent the will of the people, but charges people for crimes most don’t see as criminal.
So maybe you trust a gov less when you see laws you want enforced being set aside, but you’re in the minority here. How do i know? Because these DAs are getting elected (not installed) to do this.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/social...
These circumstances are altogether different from a DA making blanket declarations that they will not bring charges for certain crimes. The latter indicates a dereliction of duty. They're not doing their job.
Elections are a dirty business. The candidates who spend the most money are often the winner.
Nefarious foundations donating large sums of money with the intent to install DAs who will subvert justice could be seen as a threat (and a conspiracy) to the US justice system and prosecuted as a crime.
https://www.dailynews.com/2024/11/10/ousted-da-george-gascon...
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
This is true for THC (marijuana) tests that look for metabolites of THC with long half-lives. It takes a very long time for the body to metabolize THC through the different steps and then eliminate those metabolites.
For many of the drugs named in the article their elimination is rapid. For some like fentanyl their concentrations are also low. If someone has an appreciable concentration of fentanyl detectable by a simple test they are very inebriated.
Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?
At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge.
Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.
More quilty verdicts would be made. Regardless of guilt
Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.
>On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[16][104][105] During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.
But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.
The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.
I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.
(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)
Basically, if you inject enough suspicion into any situation, colorimetric tests will eventually lead you to believe that you're in trouble. And then later if you bring the sample to somebody with access to real equipment it often turns out there was no trouble besides the sort you were looking for in the first place.
I honestly think we could save a lot of lives by just putting a gas chromatography machine in the library next to the 3d printers and training people to use it.
If you had a drunk-driver-detection machine that output "positive" 95% of the time when the driver is drunk and output "negative" 100% of the time when the driver is not drunk, and started administering the test to all drivers on a road, the probability that a positive detection is accurate is only 1.96%. That sounds exactly like what was happening: dragnet testing of bird droppings and little old ladies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_2:_D...
If simple statistics are difficult for people to understand, the Base Rate Fallacy is right out.
Furthermore, as Wikipedia article noted, this assumes total testing. I highly doubt cops are walking around and drug test everyone they see.