“In the absence of more effective judicial scrutiny, the government will always use the excuse of war to take authoritarian measures that no other excuse could hope to justify.”
- Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free
The Biden Administration’s new Attorney General, Merrick Garland, vowed to combat domestic terrorism following the January 6 mêlée, where citizens had gathered to question the integrity of the 2020 election. Using the event to launch his domestic war against political opponents, the Justice Department sent FBI agents to hunt down non-violent protesters in their neighborhoods, even though many had been escorted into the Capitol by police officers themselves. Some were even jailed in solitary confinement, held as political prisoners for nothing more than petty (and questionable) misdemeanor charges. In fact, by November 2021, 650 citizens would be arrested, all without trial, as the Biden regime turned the international War on Terror against America for the crime of inciting freedom.
Using terms like “domestic terrorists” and “enemy combatants”, justice officials are essentially charging protesters for their material support of a candidate that they simply don’t like. Then by exploiting buzzwords like “War on Terror” and “National Security”, bureaucrats work around the Constitution to implement authoritarian measures, almost without question. In fact, we’ve seen these tactics before, whether the war was on drugs or crime; with each resulting in an increasing loss of liberty to the American public.
To ensure these freedoms, our Founders designed the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution to guarantee a citizen’s right to legal process. The Sixth Amendment then ensures every criminal defendant the right to a lawyer and a speedy public trial with an impartial jury. While not included in the Constitution, a presumption of innocence is bestowed on the accused, placing a legal burden on the state to prove otherwise.
The US legal system is designed as an adversarial system where two sides present their case before an impartial judge or jury. Yet, since the imposition of mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines took effect in the 1970s and 1980s, over 70 percent of the 2.2 million convicts in American jails have been convicted as a result of plea bargaining, that is without a trial. Another 500,000 are jailed without convictions, simply because they can’t afford bail.
In Jed S. Rakoff’s 2021 book, “Why the Innocent Plead Guilty, and the Guilty Go Free”, Rakoff, a federal trial judge, examines the dysfunctional legal system and how it is failing our Constitutional rights. Mass incarcerations, a troubling result of mandatory minimums, have resulted in the imprisonment of a growing number of non-violent, and often victimless crimes. While white-collar crimes of the wealthy and connected are increasingly dismissed with fines, the ordinary man, and minorities, in particular, are losing their basic rights of “innocent until proven guilty” without trial. Rakoff ends any such delusion for those who expect to get a fair shake if they should ever have the misfortune of finding themselves in a courtroom.
With twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world jailed in the US, mass incarcerations are largely the result of earlier legislation that looked to address the problem of increasing drug-related crimes. Instead, nearly 90 percent of drug arrests and charges are for simple drug offenses. In most of these drug-related charges, because of higher penalties and mandatory minimums, judges have been removed, and there is little consideration for the individual merits of each case.
Perhaps the most egregious result of mandatory minimums is the absence of litigation for most defendants. With prosecutors handing down indictments, which often systematically determine their sentencing, there is little to no judicial oversight. Now, 97 percent of federal criminal charges are settled by plea bargaining, where prosecutors threaten to charge the suspect with the highest offense and then offer a lesser charge in exchange for a plea bargain. Defendants are then pressured to plea down to avoid potential higher consequences in the event they lose. Thus, an increasing number of innocent citizens choose this option to avoid even worse outcomes.
As a result, there is a general loss of faith in the judicial system. Add to that the uneven resources that prosecutors have with nearly unlimited budgets in which to try their cases, against defendants whose own attorneys have limited access to everything from police reports to forensic testing and even their client themselves.
By early 2022, January 6 defendants were slowly being coerced into plea deals for misdemeanors like parading and trespassing, against threats of additional charges. Just as the International War Terror justified unconstitutional acts by governments on enemies abroad, we are now watching as innocent people are targeted here on American soil. Believing that justice will be enforced is a critical element of freedom. And a system that fails to deliver deserves to reap the turmoil it is sowing.
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