We should at least ban the "preemptive" pardon if not all pardons. Pardon means forgiveness for a specific convicted crime, not a means to grant blanket immunity.
There are two types here: (1) Pardons for crimes not yet committed. (2) Pardons for crimes committed, but not yet convicted. The first type will allow the pardoned to commit a crime in the future for free, which obviously should not be allowed. The second should be allowed if we have this pardon system at all.
The second type became a political necessity, for example to protect Liz Cheney from a vengeful administration.
The notion itself that someone needs to be protected by a 'vengeful administration', while judicial system should be not politically affiliated is telling how broken the whole separation of powers is. Everyone who is a ruling party puts candidates they know aligned with their views, resulting in 'just wait until my turn comes and I will do as much as damage as possible' cycle.
> puts candidates they know aligned with their views, resulting in 'just wait until my turn comes and I will do as much as damage as possible' cycle.
There is exactly one party in the US that does this, and it's because they have dedicated themselves to blocking the other party from accomplishing much of anything when they get power.
Hilariously (to me, anyway) — I genuinely don’t know which party you’re talking about. It could truly be either, depending entirely on which party you support.
Waiting for the day when both the Democrats and Republicans are so very obviously shitty to even the most uninformed voter that we get some new thought in office instead of two sides of the same coin that are both beholden to capital and to foreign interests
As long as our voting system is "first past the post", it will be nigh impossible for a third party to make any significant headway. IMO Citizens United and first past the post are the two main issues holding the US back from any kind of significant overhaul or change.
Nearly everyone believes their side is the moral one. Only one side currently refuses to admit the other side might not actually be evil, just foolish.
No. While I don’t like Trump and never did, several of the prosecutions against him were political. By political, I mean they would not have happened if he had not become a politician, in fact, they didn’t until he became one and an unpopular one at that.
> they would not have happened if he had not become a politician
That is a little vague. Some of his crimes only happened because he became a politician, so of course the prosecution would be seen as political in that sense. What I would like to know is which crimes did he commit that were only prosecuted because he was a politician, which would otherwise have been ignored?
One seems to be New York v. Trump, which was a civil lawsuit instead of criminal. The main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans, yet the banks lending the money (mainly Deutsche Bank, if I remember correctly) were sophisticated lenders who were capable of assessing those estimates and the risk of lending. The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals they'd made with Trump. These were all private deals between sophisticated parties who knew what they were doing, and everyone made money. So, no bank suffered harm leading to the charge and no bank lodged any complaint against Trump—the prosecutor went looking for something with which to charge him, and this was the best she could find.
> main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans
> The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals
The first part is either a crime, or it is not, regardless of the second? Suppose I falsely say I am worth millions, and then actually win the lottery. It being true later doesn't change whether it was lie originally.
That's exactly why my first point was that it was a civil lawsuit brought by the Attorney General, not a criminal case: the underlying overstatement of real estate values was not charged as the crime of fraud, which would have required more proof including proof of intent and actual harm—of which the former would have been hard to prove, and the latter did not exist. The District Attorney (who handles criminal matters like fraud) decided there was no criminal case, but the Attorney General took it as a civil matter despite there being no criminal case and nobody unhappy about the deals. It was purely a political prosecution.
Crimes that are not known about are frequently not punished.
Rubbing it in everyone's face is not a great idea.
But, and this is the much more important point you are missing, is the difference between prosecuted for a crime you comitted regardless of how people learnes about it, and using completely unfounded accusations in order to use the prosecution itself as a punishment.
Trump has been prosecuted, several times, for actual crimes he committed. Hilary clinton as an example, had to deal with the obviously fake prosecution attempts of benghazi and email servers.
This is a gigantic and meaningful difference.
Have other people done some of these trump crimes and not gotten prosecuted? Sure, but that's not exactly a good thing.
Directing the doj to manufacture crimes in order to prosecute is much much worse.
A prosecution can be political even if a crime or tort was committed. Our government prosecutes only a small percent of committed crimes.
If Donald Trump had not run for President, or even had just been a normal President, or maybe even if he’d have done everything he did except for cause January 6, he absolutely would never have been prosecuted for this. The justice system was weaponized against him, even if he was actually guilty, which he surely was.
You may be right that they were political in that sense.
But also, they probably should have happened were he not a politician. He's been committing fraud and other white collar crimes for quite a while. Unfortunately, we go far too easy on white collar crime in this country. And he's a master of plausible deniability, where he effectively asks other people to commit crimes on his behalf, but in a plausibly deniable way with no written trail.
> I mean they would not have happened if he had not become a politician
His wife in the 1990s accused him of rape and intended to sue him as part of the divorce proceedings. She changed her words when she obtained a generous divorce settlement, moving from outright rape to "not in the criminal sense, I just felt violated".
That was over 20 years before Trump gained political relevance.
Which of the prosecutions were political hit jobs? Enumerate which of the federal and state crimes that Trump was convicted were actually politcal hit jobs.
Your definition of political ("not happening if he wasn't a politician") is not what that definition is.
(2) Do you mean not yet charged or not yet convicted ?
Because I can get you would want to shield some people from persecutions (just or unjust) from your successor, but I see no reason why you would be able to pardon someone charged but waiting for trial. This makes a mockery of justice, the public can't discover the facts but more importantly: why pardon someone that is still considered innocent ?
> a political necessity, for example to protect Liz Cheney
IANACL but surely there are other ways to protect people from politically motivated prosecutions? E.g. jail anybody attempting to direct the DOJ for personal or political reasons?
The DOJ is part of the executive - so it is fiction that it was ever apolitical. RFK was JFKs brother, do you think they weren't coordinating DOJ's investigations into political opponents? (e.g. Jimmy Hoffa)
Congress created the DOJ, It is their job to police it. They can defund or even eliminate it. That's the check on it.
You don't need to rein in their authority. Congress should have authority to delegate when needed.
What is needed is that voters need to hold congress accountable. People get royally pissed that "Government sucks and doesn't do what it needs to do" and then vote for people who openly say they will make the government suck.
The people who voted for Trump to do exactly what he is doing right now spent the past 50 years voting for Congress people who could legally and democratically do exactly what they wanted and just chose not to do it.
Clinton's admin cut the budget with a bipartisan congress back in the 90s. Suddenly supposedly that can't happen? Maybe that has something to do with the party that has expressly and openly declared bipartisanship to be verboten.
Instead, the voting public seems to be utterly ignorant of how our governments, big and small, work. This is insane, as I know each and every one of these people read the same chapter of a 6th grade Social Studies textbook and other people learned this through childrens songs. There's just no excuse.
Yeah, but it seems those other protections would/could possibly be a coin toss (eg a successful defense in a trial) and quite costly even if they never get to that stage, and you need a bit more certainty than that. Otherwise help can only come from those willing to become martyrs
(3) Morally highly questionable pardons of convicted criminals who committed high crimes. Preferably questioned by a well-functioning ethics commission for things like, well, conflicts of interest, corruption, and the like.
You are asking if it was necessary to protect Liz Cheney? Have you not seen the lengths to which Trump is going to punish Comey? Trump even fired Bondi because she was ineffective in targeting his opponents.
>There's no reason to say that unless you know they're actively committing federal crimes in the present day.
There are reasons. For example, you feel the justice system is going to be misused against them. Protection against future witch hunts basically.
I don't think this is what's happening here, and trump is on record talking very explicitly about weaponising the state against his enemies himself, but it's probably an excuse that will be used.
From what I can gather, Hunter Biden was guilty of tax evasion, possessing a firearm when he shouldn't, and lying about drug use.
He shouldn't have been pardoned, sure, but you cannot possibly believe that's more corrupt than what Trump, his family, and his cronies do on a regular Tuesday afternoon.
Are you for real - apart from almost everything Trump has done? Did you miss how he picked an AG and prevented release of the Trump-Epstein files even though he signed into law a bill requiring full release with only redaction of victims. Did you miss the daily breeches of the emoluments clause?
Did you miss the pardoning of the Jan 6 people who hunted people down, set up a gallows, and those who tried to murder police?
Did you miss Trump sending USA troops into democrat cities to try and intimidate USA citizens, using his militia to murder people in cold blood?
Did you miss all the tariffs used to move the markets so Trump and his cronies could drain money from ordinary folks investments in the markets - he even boasted how rich he'd made his friends. From tariff front-running.
Hunter Biden broke the law, but his crimes look like schoolkid's high-jinks compared to Trump.
How about Trump's alt-coin to take overseas bribes?
Or using the instigation of war to win bets?
There're thousands more such crimes of corruption the Trump regime have done.
> perhaps the greatest example of corruption in us history.
Donald Trump started a war with Iran to distract from the Epstein files, where he is mentioned thousands of times and credibly accused of raping a minor. But yeah, hunter biden. Most corrupt in US history. Sure.
Case law agrees with your reading only in part, namely that the pardon power may be exercised at any time after its commission, that is, not preemptive as in being granted before the act being pardoned has taken place.
However, the broader context reads
The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.
There is no universe where any pardon is abolished unless there is a massive political shakeup. The entrenched political class is terrified of endangering their power and privilege even if individual players are ready to do it.
I've often wondered what would happen if a president explicitly offers to pardon anybody who murders members of Congress. Would they settle on reigning in the pardon power with an amendment?
We're sort of already there. A lot of the Jan 6 rioters were openly trying to murder congressmen. The fact they weren't successful isn't super reassuring.
Nothing would happen, because SCOTUS decided to grant the president immunity for any crime committed in their official function, which would be the case here. It would literally be possible for the president to order congress killed, offer an automatic pardon to anyone carrying out this order, and establish a monarchy.
This single ruling will haunt the United States for the rest of its existence.
Trump was never found immune for that. We was just reelected before the prosecution could run it's course, and the DOJ never prosecutes a sitting president.
Presumably the suit could resume once Trump steps down, but it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
> it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
Oh absolutely not. Any democratic successor that did such a thing would face such an immense backlash from the democratic and centrist voting base that it would effectively throw their entire term away. No, most of the democrats see the pardoning of Nixon as a grave error and want to see justice for what has been done this term.
My wondering is more about how Congress would react, because something like this could conceivably bring together the 75% consensus required for a constitutional amendment.
And I think even this supreme Court would agree that murdering Congress doesn't count as an official act.
It will be interesting to watch what comes next, if there will be next. But people die of natural causes and otherwise anyway.
Will it be the same a-lot-of-empty-talk-from-democrats like after first trump's term, or actually some concrete action? Clearly if next president would be democrat he can do some nice revenge and rebalance, maybe petty but maybe necessary. I would expect republicans do the usual crappy move of sticking with theirs regardless of crimes committed, any actual morals are an afterthought.
Its so weird to watch from outside, illogical, deeply flawed, unfair, and pretty weak system when it comes to handling unscrupulous sociopaths.
All bad is good for some things in hindsight, world desperately needs more decoupling from US. Petrodollars, swift and so on. Compared to this, judging by pure actions, chinese may seem saint in comparison
The Democrats literally tried like 6 different ways to get Trump in jail, and arrested and jailed many of his supporters and even some of his administration. I highly doubt that the majority of the voting public which elected Trump will sit idle for any sort of unjust retribution to the current administration.
This is genuinely hilarious. I guess you haven't been paying attention but "sitting idle during injustice" is all that Trump supporters do.
No, his base is already collapsing. He overextended with Iran, sent gas prices up, and as a direct result has finally started to bleed support from the know-nothings. I doubt Trump himself will ever face justice for his many crimes - he is likely to die of old age first - but the rest of the administration? Knives are out. They'll be back in prison just like happened in 2020 and 2021, and all those "dedicated supporters" will do nothing because the people who form this administration are petty, uninteresting people who were specifically chosen because they are not popular.
I don't agree with your prediction, the interesting thing is now, perhaps, we can actually wager on the outcomes, I wonder if there is anything on prediction markets about administration officials going to jail.
The idea that his support is collapsing is also pretty misstated. Yes, there's a lot of people that don't fully agree with Iran and other things, but that's a far cry from backing his ops.
I also think you are missing the shift in politics at all the lower levels to align with the current administration. Outside of the deepest wealthy Democrat areas, and even in some of those, the general position of local politicians and officials is moving towards the sort of nationalist populist attitude Trump has curated.
The same is also pervasive among state and federal government institutions with limited exception.
And of course that's all only IF Democrats win big in 2028 which is a far from guaranteed outcome.
> I highly doubt that the majority of the voting public which elected Trump will sit idle for any sort of unjust retribution to the current administration.
Is this a threat, or…?
“Let our guy do whatever he wants or we’ll try to murder Congress and fuck up the economy and start some more wars”?
“Don’t you dare jail us for insurrection or we’ll insurrect even harder”?
It's just an assessment of the general political outlook. Anyone that thinks the public would tolerate some sort of widespread anti-Trump retribution is living deep in some sort of bubble. Most likely a small, wealthy, liberal one. They literally tried that last time and it resulted in an even more resounding Trump victory than 2016. The majority of the politically active people align with Trump. The old standby of Democrats win when more people vote is no longer true. The majority of the non-voting public aligns much more strongly with current "conservative" values than anything the left is currently offering.
This is one of those things where I’d love to get on board with the popular view but I haven’t found evidence that anything beyond a sit in was intended and the arguments seem to be floating in air if you follow them down to their root. But I haven’t done that much research so I’d appreciate if you could share what makes you think this, thanks!
I'm a leftist, and a Democrat by necessity (not by choice) and I would be fine if the power of pardon was removed for Presidents who share my ideology. I would rather have working separation of powers and reform the justice system than give one person carte blanche power to nullify it based on their whim.
Not everyone making a political argument is engaging in cynical tribalism. Believe it or not, some people do actually believe in things.
when you have only two choices and you have to be quite insane to choose one of them, you are, for all intents and purposes, forced to choose the other side (same argument works for left and right if you hear someone say they are forced to be what they are politically)
I never claimed that anyone forced me to become a Democrat.
I support them at the national level because they're the least evil of the two and exactly two relevant options available, and the one which at least gives lip service to progressive values. But that is still like supporting Mussolini over Hitler. Locally I vote third party when I have a chance.
And I live in Texas so none of my votes matter anyway.
You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
If I claimed that I had no choice but to become a Republican, I would be justifiably laughed at (even by fellow Republicans). Political views and affiliations are certainly choices.
Anyone can claim that their opinion is the only sane one.
>You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
I explained my choice. Choosing the lesser evil is a choice. I don't think anyone in this thread besides you is getting hung up on this, and I don't know why you're being so aggressively pedantic. It's weird.
My (leftist) opinion is that we don't give enough pardons. By the time people get out of prison, their lives are pretty much wrecked. We should have a lot more clemency and compassion. That's what the pardon is for.
If that means a ton of literal insurrectionists go free, that's fine with me. We elected someone precisely to do that. It's on the voters if we elected someone who was literally treasonous himself.
I hope the insurrectionists take the opportunity to get on with their lives. I gather that quite a few have already been banned for other crimes, and that's too bad.
I don't want prison to be vengeance. I want prison to make us all safer. I'd like the President to take a lot of leeway in finding people who are going to be productive citizens if they were given that gift.
You would probably consider me to your right, but I'm right there with you. Prison should be protective: we lock up people from whom the rest of us will not be safe unless they are segregated. Ideally it is also rehabilitatative, and once (if!) prisoners will be safe and productive members of society there is no point to keeping them locked up.
If there are other methods short of prison that can render law-breakers harmless - such as restrictions on certain activities and occupations - then those should be pursued first.
The ghost of this philosophy, however attenuated, can be seen in systems of pardon and parole.
I acknowledge that a desire for retribution - to punish the evil-doer; make them suffer for what they've done - is a strong impulse (I feel it myself!), deeply imbedded in our tribal psyches, but it should be fought, not indulged.
This seems to me to be the only moral basis for a system of justice and incarceration, though I have no idea how to nudge a society towards this model. Some northern European countries approach it.
(In fact, I may well be nearer to your position than my description implies. I use the term "leftist" because I hate the way the term is applied to anyone who isn't a Republican. My beliefs, in the Clinton/Obama range, are "leftist" only if one is dumb enough to believe what one hears on Fox News.)
You sound like you are advocating for commutation, not pardons. Commutation lowers the penalty given to a criminal by executive decree (which the president can also do) A pardon makes it so the conviction never happened.
No, it doesn’t erase the conviction, it “forgives” you from the perspective of the government. Commutation ends the punitive aspect of the conviction.
I have a somewhat distant relative who was pardoned after being over-prosecuted by a zealous DA. They were a victim of a felony who did something in response that could have been charged as anything from a citation/violation to a felony, the DA’s discretion was to choose the harshest possible resolution.
They still have a hard time getting work because the conviction must be reported.
Thanks, I had misunderstood. It eliminates the legal consequences of conviction (unlike commutation) which is similar in a lot of ways, but it doesn't erase the conviction from the records.
I think they are both generally ok, but also somewhat sketchy. I don't see them as much different from Clinton's pardons, Fords or Andrew Johnson's Christmas day pardons for confederate soldiers.
People in the conservative ecosystem are very much up in arms about the pardon of Hunter Biden.
Like most things in MAGAland, these matters are framed in a certain way, and all nuance is eliminated. The irony of being upset about Biden while being a cheerleader for Don Jr is lost.
I think you totally proved my point. Both conservatives and liberals will almost always look at pardons by a president from their own party much differently than those by a president from the other party.
I don’t think so. I was pretty much raised in a family that was staunch Democrats and in a few cases even party officials at the local level.
I was pretty young and not really caring, but I recall them being unhappy about Clinton’s last minute pardons as they were obviously compromised. I recall conversations about the Gerald Ford pardon of Nixon that happened around the context of Scooter Libby and there was an acceptance that that was more of the grist of politics than anything.
I don’t recall any president in my memory proposing pardons in advance to people blatantly breaking the law. When I was younger, republicans were almost solemnly committed to the “rule of law”. That changed in the last 20 years. This president is very tellingly an admirer of Andrew Jackson, who was in most measurement a disaster, as is this admin.
Personally, I live my life fairly “conservatively”, but have more progressive politics with some “exceptions” for the modern sense of the word. I respect those who disagree with my point of view, but am not tolerant of disdain for the law, basic fairness and society.
It's wild that anyone doesn't know that. It's less surprising than the fact that disallowing someone with 34 felony convictions from being President would also require a Constitutional amendment. Both the pardon power and the qualifications for President are specified by the Constitution, so of course the Constitution must be amended to change them.
From the article you linked, child sacrifice allegations came from an anonymous FBI interview in 2019 and are not confirmed by any credible evidence. There are no cannibalism allegations; the word "cannibal" only appears in innocuous contexts.
So child sacrifice and cannibalism are only technically "in the Epstein files;" there's very little evidence that anyone did those things. For other readers, if you hadn't heard about this, that's probably why.
I am deeply sorry for your experience and I totally understand that it triggers something, but let's be ice cold logical for a moment.
If there is no evidence of a crime, you cannot prosecute someone in a constitutional democracy.
If you could you could just make up any claims and get rid of people you simply despise.
Which happens in various regimes...
So although it's certainly a possibility that such cases happened, as long as there is no evidence that they happened, they didn't for all legal matters.
We are discussing the pardon power, an explicitly anti-democratic measure that is unilateral and unreviewable. The constitution defines a federal republic, not a democracy.
I'm sorry that you experienced that. I understand the importance of listening to abuse victims. However, if child sacrifice did happen, it seems unlikely to ever be proven. I do not think that the case against Epstein or his associates is strengthened by assuming every accusation is true. For people who are not thinking about the subject carefully, learning that some accusations are inflated may cast others into doubt. What is provable is heinous enough.
As long as that ban doesn't go into effect until after the next non-Republican administration. We need to be able to right the scales after MAGA's abuse of power.
I'm thinking of Carter fulfilling a campaign pledge to pardon draft dodgers. Whether you support that or not, he did what he said he was going to do and I'm sure only some of them had actually been charged in any way. I think that's a perfectly fine use for the pardon power.
Some will point to the Hunter Biden pardon. So two things can be true at once here: it was absolutely political prosecution AND Joe Biden was completely selfish with his action. At least do something for the people by, say, pardoning a whole bunch of low level drug offenders and decriminalize cannabis at the Federal level. But no, it was completely self-serving but his brain was pretty much gone by this point.
Here's the problem: Federal prosecutors have a ton of power. Conviction rates are 98-99%. But it goes beyond that. Federal prosecutors will intentionally bankrupt you to force you to take a plea. They might charge you with 15 felonies, 12 of which are basically bogus. You still have to defend those bogus felonies and that costs you money. And as soon as you run out of money, they'll offer you a plea where you're looking at 25 years on the 3 remaining felonies or you can just take 10.
The power imbalance is insane and the wealthy are essentially immune. If a US attorney decides to make an example of you, you're going to have a bad time, regardless of the facts.
Millions were spent dredging up some crimes for Hunter Biden and pretty much all they could come up with was doing crack and filling out a form incorrectly. Do you think anyone else would get that level of attention?
A very recent example of this is the Karen Read trial or, as I call it, the most expensive DUI prosecution in history. If you didn't follow the case, don't worry, there'll be any number of true crime documentaries. Millions were spent prosecuting Karen Read for killing JOhn O'Keefe with a completely ridiculous theory of the case and all sorts of evidence that went missing (including police officers disposing of their cell phones on a military base the day before an electronics preservation order was issued).
I don't know what we do about this power imbalance and selective prosecution.
> Federal prosecutors have a ton of power. Conviction rates are 98-99%.
This always gets thrown around, but the fact is they should be that high. Prosecutors shouldn't bring cases unless they have evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and DOJ prosectors don't (normally) screw around.
When you see lower rates of conviction, as in the current ethically bankrupt administration, it's often malicious prosecution, aka "You'll beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride."
No, the original poster is 100% correct and if anything understating the issue.
US Attorneys are enormously powerful and because federal law is so vague in many ways, attracting their attention is a kiss of death. Most of federal defense work is highly technical and more about managing pleas and the mandatory sentencing guidelines. They agree to punishment and shape the plea deal to some crime that hits the number.
This weird technical approach to “justice” results in bad outcomes in other ways. The famously self-promoting Preet Bharara ended up letting a bunch of people free who quite obviously were taking bribes and fixing bids go free by abusing the “Honest Services” laws, which were subsequently thrown out on appeal.
The current administration is different - their weaponization of the system means that they literally can’t appoint qualified attorneys, who fear disbarment for what they will be directed to do. AUSAs have quit en masse and they are forced to hire toadies from 3rd tier law schools like Liberty University and make weird interim appointments. It’s a great time to be a criminal.
I would be fine if high conviction rates reflected prosecutor's only bringing good cases. It doesn't. It reflects the odds being stacked against you and it being so expensive and high risk to defend yourself.
This high cost and power imbalance is used to force people into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit.
Let me give you an example: 924C enhancements [1]. This is where certain drug or violent crimes being committed with a firearm can add years or even decades to a sentence automatically.
Let's just say you live in a concealed carry state and you have a weapon on you. You're walking home and the police pick you up. You match the description of one of two people who were smoking drugs in an alley as per a 911 call. The other person was already picked up by police. He was unarmed. His story was that you sold him the drugs. He also claims you brandished a pistol.
Was there a drug transaction? Or was this simply two people smoking together? The other person had a small quantity of drugs on him when apprehended.
A 911 call mentioned seeing a weapon drawn. It was dark. You can go through versions of this scenario where you were the other person or it was a case of mistaken identity. Eitehr is bad for you.
What if the other person sold you the drugs and made up this story to avoid a distribution charge? What if as a teenager you had a minor possession charge? What if prosecutors believe the other person and make a deal for a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony?
You have a gun and now 2 witnesses who say you "brandished" the gun. So whatever charge you end up with the "brandishing a firearm" part (under 924(c)) adds 7 years to your sentence to be served consecutively. And they've stopped you with a firearm.
So what was a "he said, she said" situation has now turned into a situation where you could be facing 10 years in jail and defending against that could well cost you $200,000+, which you don't have. Or you can take this plea for 2 years in jail. What do you do?
> I would be fine if high conviction rates reflected prosecutor's only bringing good cases. It doesn't.
There is a huge amount of hand-waving following this assertion without any evidence to back up the claim.
I'm not saying abuse of process doesn't happen, but this is just saying it can and then spelling out a big hypothetical without any proof that this practice is rampant.
It's hard to find quantative data but one clear example is DNA-based exoneration by the Innocence Project [1]
> Among the many insights drawn from these
wrongful convictions is the realization that a guilty plea is
not an uncommon outcome for innocent people who have
been charged with a crime: 11 percent of the DNA exonerees recorded by the Innocence Project pleaded guilty
There's a thing called the Trial Penalty [2]. ~98% of charges result in a guilty plea. If all 100% went to trial the system would collapse. As such, prosecutors coerce plea deals [3]. But the Trial Penalty works pretty much like the example described: if you go to trial, you will be overcharged and face, say, 10-30+ years in jail. Or you can take a plea for 2 years.
This Trial Penalty is made worse with mandatory minimums and add-on charges like I mentioned (ie 924(c)).
This effect has been modeled with maths and game theory to show hoow extreme outcomes cause people to plead guilty more often [4].
This is a well-known problem in criminal justice. You're showing either a complete lack of imagination or simply don't think this will ever be used against you.
> There's a thing called the Trial Penalty [2]. ~98% of charges result in a guilty plea.
The gist of this argument is that there are huge numbers of innocent people railroaded into prison, but in the bigger picture crime is wildly under-punished.
More than half of murderers go free.
More than 98% of rapists never spend a day in prison.
At the end of the day this is all a question of where you stand on Blackstone’s Ratio. In the US, even with the rate of wrongful conviction we may have, we stand solidly opposed to zealous pursuit of justice for the victims of crimes, on the argument that an innocent person might be punished.
> ... but in the bigger picture crime is wildly under-punished.
Um, citation needed.
> More than half of murderers go free.
The burden is on the state to prove their case not on the accused to prove their innocence. If this completely unsubstantiated statistic is true (again, citation needed) why is the state so bad at making their cases?
> More than 98% of rapists never spend a day in prison.
Yes, rape is under-reported, under-charged and rarely results in a conviction. This is true. Society engages in a whole lot of victim blaming with sex crimes.
> we stand solidly opposed to zealous pursuit of justice for the victims of crimes
What? The US has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. If over-policing and wildly capricious sentences (eg 10+ years for cannabis possession) worked, this would be the safest country on earth.
> At least do something for the people by, say, pardoning a whole bunch of low level drug offenders and decriminalize cannabis at the Federal level
In 2022 he pardoned ~6500 people with federal convictions for simple possession of marijuana. That didn't actually release anyone from jail because it turned out everyone in jail with a simple possession conviction was also in there for other crimes but for those for whom it was their only drug offense (both currently in prison or not) it wiped it off their record which would restore eligibility for various things that drug offenders are barred from.
Near the end of his term he commuted the sentences of around 2500 non-violent drug offenders.
