
Cruel and Unusual: The Story of Leandro Andrade (2003) [pdf] - dictum
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=2404&context=faculty_scholarship
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yequalsx
I couldn’t read the whole PDF. It’s just too depressing. The U.S. penal and
justice system to me seems like a great big mess full of rage inducing
injustices.

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meri_dian
It only seems that way to you and other people who feel that way because you
only hear about the times when the system fails. Not the vast majority of
times when it works.

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cryptonector
The vast majority of all criminal court cases end up in plea deals. That was
never the norm prior to Prohibition, and, later, the drug war. Judges used to
dislike plea deals. Now they need them in order to keep load down.

Plea deals are extremely coercive. It's all too easy for an innocent defendant
with marginal resources to take a plea deal because the alternative is worse.
Yes, plea deals are a cup half-empty/full thing, but all too often they are
coercive rather than a good deal for a guilty defendant.

Lastly, whatever happened to "better ten guilty men go free than one innocent
man be imprisoned"?? We absolutely should consider innocent people convictions
as a metric that counts for ten times that of guilty people who got less (or
no) time than they should have. Do you not agree?

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meri_dian
I am in agreement with you. Luckily the majority of people convicted of crimes
are actually guilty of what they're convicted of.

Now I don't believe people should be going to jail for petty drug offences,
and that drugs in general should be decriminalized, so we can disagree that
the laws being used to convict people should be changed, but the vast majority
of people being convicted of breaking laws are actually breaking those laws.

