Tribunal - Cardassian courts and our own

[GreyICE]

So in Tribunal, we got a look at the Cardassian justice system. And boy, it's awful. The public defender has tried thousands of cases, and never a one has been found not guilty. What a mockery of justice. Fortunately we live in a free society... that basically does the same thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html

One in forty cases for a public defender go to trial. Now most are indeed open-and-shut cases. But a legal review found that the number that should be going to trial (there's significant questions about the evidence) was one to two in ten - public defenders have a case load three to ten times higher than they should have, and have tiny amounts of time to devote to even crimes like murder. The easiest way is to make them take a plea bargain. You can say that if they go to trial they'll be convicted despite the evidence. Is that true? If you're one of the 2.5% who actually goes to trial? Of that minuscule 2.5%, 87% will result in convictions at a federal level: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-federal-criminal-defendants-go-to-trial-and-most-who-do-are-found-guilty/

There are judges who go years between seeing someone found not guilty. Years. This has an entire skewing effect on their presumptions. When you go 2-3 years of guilty verdicts, you come to expect them, and hurry the results towards the conclusion. A trial isn't something you do because you're interested in finding the truth. It's something that happens because the accused is too stupid to admit their guilt and throw themselves on the mercy of the court. In fact despite having the highest incarceration rate in the world, every European country - every single one - spends more on public defenders than we do: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/public-defenders-gideon-supreme-court-charts/


Of course you can reassure yourself this shows the system works! If you're accused, you must be guilty. Our courts are too good to make mistakes. Accusation equals guilt, open and shut, if it wasn't, then the prosecutor wouldn't prosecute it. Of course you know what's coming:

Man identified by one employee, found guilty. Fingerprint evidence frees him - after 17 years https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/royal-clark-jr-freed-innocent-jail-exonerated-armed-robbery-louisiana-fingerprints-a8982246.html

36 years, same deal. Rape, victim identified him, fingerprints said otherwise: https://www.eastidahonews.com/2020/05/a-wrongfully-convicted-man-freed-after-36-years-is-now-an-americas-got-talent-favorite/

29 years on death row: https://www.forensicmag.com/561847-DNA-Evidence-Sets-Man-Free-After-29-Years-on-Death-Row/

15 years, DNA evidence: https://www.wsls.com/news/national/2020/02/13/california-man-exonerated-in-1985-slaying-thanks-to-new-dna/

8 1/2 years, DNA evidence https://abcnews.go.com/US/dna-evidence-exonerates-york-city-man-1985-sex/story?id=68592919

And so on and so forth. The Innocence project is committed to finding these cases, and has found many. Undoubtedly many more remain out there. And in each of these cases, the evidence that the conviction was based on does not seem to be "beyond a reasonable doubt." A single eyewitness, multiple times. In at least one case, the police coerced the eyewitness to finger the innocent man: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/eyewitness-police-framed-nypd


In all of these cases, you look at the original evidence, and you can't see any indication that "beyond a reasonable doubt" was applied. It seems like the entire thing was a show, drawn to its inevitable conclusion. The evidence only a prop for the inevitable conviction.

I'd offer that the biggest difference between Cardassian justice and American justice is bumpy forehead ridges.

Note: Since Avery motherfucking Brooks directed this, you bet your ass he knew that this was he American legal system for many.

[Steve]

Honestly, I'd say the biggest difference is that in our system, this is a bug (albeit a big, bad one), but in the Cardassian system, it's a feature.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Remember Chuck was saying in the Discovery review how judges start streamlining sending people from preliminary to court or something?

[GreyICE]

Remember Chuck was saying in the Discovery review how judges start streamlining sending people from preliminary to court or something?

Yup, Grand Juries. And why shouldn't they bypass them. If I told you that Grand Juries indicted 99.99% of the people who came before them, it sounds like I'm exaggerating for effect, right? "99.99% of the time that's true!"

It's actually 99.993%: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/24/the-single-chart-that-shows-that-grand-juries-indict-99-99-percent-of-the-time/

11 out of 162,500 prosecuted federal cases involved Grand Juries stopping indictment. I mean hell, why wouldn't you streamline past this process, it's clearly a waste of time for everyone involved. The person who said "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if that's what you wanted" was a New York judge. He wasn't talking out of his ass, that was his on-the-job experience. As bad of a check as our legal system is to stopping unjust prosecutions, grand juries have no role whatsoever.


It's a rabbit hole once you dive into it, and it really doesn't make us safer. One of the great promises, the "social contract" if you will, is that if you don't commit any crimes, you won't be punished like a criminal. But if underprivileged people have a belief that the system is that way - especially if it's a well founded belief - then the only advantage to not committing crimes is a lower chance of being accused of committing crimes. And if police pre-emptively stop you or round you up or interact with you, even that goes out the window, and the only thing that might stop you from committing crimes is your own conscience.

"My conscience" can start to look really weak when your buddy got punched in the face, handcuffed, and left in jail from friday to monday (a common police tactic, as the '24 hours to charge someone' doesn't count weekends) and lost their job for not showing up to work for two days. Or that was you, and you're now out of a job. And hell, that's not even reaching the levels of charging, that's someone who interacted with the legal system and got off lightly.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

And what's worse is that that .003% is Wilson Fisk.

Really though, Daredevil season 3 is the only exposure I have to the idea of a grand jury. Heard the term plenty, but was never familiar with it.

It seems like a rather truncated version of a trial lol. I'm pressed to wonder how it doesn't undercut everything we know about innocence until proven guilty.

[GreyICE]

And what's worse is that that .003% is Wilson Fisk.

Really though, Daredevil season 3 is the only exposure I have to the idea of a grand jury. Heard the term plenty, but was never familiar with it.

It seems like a rather truncated version of a trial lol. I'm pressed to wonder how it doesn't undercut everything we know about innocence until proven guilty.

The original purpose was VERY useful. They were essentially a "citizen's commission." Any citizen could bring a matter before the court, large or small. In early America there wasn't really a police force of any sort, so the grand jury could do investigations and often did a lot of what we'd consider police work. Citizens could bring bills of indictment, and if the Grand Jury agreed there was a reason to indict, they could indict (creating a trial). When people talk about scrapping the police entirely, they're usually talking about returning to something like the original American Grand Jury - a citizens group that can investigate, empower and charge governments to do tasks, and start off trials.

They were so useful that they were enshrined in the constitution. They were exactly the sort of citizen government the founding fathers envisioned.

The earliest "police forces" were groups of slave catchers in the south. Dealing with the underground railroad and the "problem" of escaped slaves required rather more effort than a part-time citizen's commission could put in, and slave owners didn't love the idea of bringing the issue of "recapturing my slave" in front of a citizens court. After all, the slaves were their property, and they saw no need to convince 23 people of the rightness of this, or the need to shoot slaves and ordinary citizens who ran the underground railroad. After all, a grand jury might balk at authorizing them to shoot to kill when dealing with a white man who was helping slave families escape to the north. They might ask pesky "excessive force" questions. They might even start to develop a distaste for slavery, who knows what citizens might do if you give them power.

Eventually the needs of major cities evolved beyond the capacities of the grand jury, and the slave catchers of the south became their own forces after the civil war (now police - and definitely tasked with keeping the ex-slaves in their place). And grand juries slowly devolved into jokes, as the idea of ordinary citizens telling the government what to do was lost.

So yeah, there's some depressing history for you.

[TGLS]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in-the-united-states/

[GreyICE]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in-the-united-states/

Yup, as Snopes said, a mixture. That's what I was alluding to with this line:

Eventually the needs of major cities evolved beyond the capacities of the grand jury

Grand juries and reactive policing work great in towns of 200-1000, not so much in a major city. And as Snopes points out, I failed to note the union-busting and anti-labor expansions of police powers and force sizes. So that's my bad, but I was looking more at grand juries and less at the very flawed origins of our modern police (which have stubbornly failed to move beyond them)

[Rocketboy1313]

I generally like my info to also be of the tainment variety, so here is some material from John Oliver on the role of Prosecutors.
https://youtu.be/ET_b78GSBUs

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Well I know that tipping is pretty directly born out of the sudden conditions of emancipated slavery.