Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?
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In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
Probably, but why should that matter?
>If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped
So you mean that charges that don't matter are often pressed anyway, because prosecutors have a cheat code to short circuit the long and arduous process of trial which is supposed to be long and arduous? No thanks.
If they could prosecute fewer cases, then they would pick the ones that mattered. Last time I did grand jury duty, it was 40 cases every day, most of them bullshit drug possession charges.
Or maybe, maybe they really do have so many important cases that this would become a problem. Then it should become a problem, so the public is forced to realize it must fund a more robust judicial system that can handle that high load. Either way, I do not want prosecutors using plea deals. And you shouldn't either.
>"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
There was a slow day at the grand jury, and the assistant DA was talking to us jurors. Claimed that our small city had about 4000 cases per year, and only 30 or so ever went to trial. How can justice be served if that's the case? He certainly thought that he was doing justice, but some of those people were just pleading out so that they could put an end to the nonsense, and not out of any true guilt. Whether they were forced to go to trial so that they would be then compelled to assert their (true) innocence, or whether the prosecutor would just stop making up bullshit charges, we'd all be better off. He genuinely thought of trials as some sort of fun distraction instead of what it really was... the entire point of his job. It was fucked up.
The trouble with our world isn't that there aren't solutions, it's that when someone proposes them, they sound outlandish to people who subconsciously want the problems to persist.
Not to mention lawyer fees would go up 10x or 100x for any simple thing.
Want to get charged $10k for a speeding ticket? This is how it happens.
Possibly. But if they're denying justice because "it would cost too much to do it correctly", then maybe the taxpayers just have to pony up more cash.
But it's also possibly the case that they don't need more courts, they just have to stop focusing on bullshit drug charges that absolutely no one gives a shit about. If drug addicts want to commit slow suicide doing the stuff, let them. If you want to instead focus on the drug dealers, there are simple policies that would put street dealers out of business instantly.
Your objections don't really line up with your goals, no matter what your goals happen to be. Think about it all a bit more carefully.