...the primary effect of which is that fewer than 4% of criminal cases go to trial, and our prison, parole, and probation systems are full of people who pled to crimes they did not commit, and poison trees of evidence are intentionally and ruthlessly planted without challenge or consideration by a jurist.
It unquestionably does - it turns out destroying your job prospects for life, removing a major contributor to a household for years, and destroying family relations in the process lends itself to continuing having strife in your life, or having strife when you previously had none
> The majority of cases don’t go to trial because the majority of cases are hopeless for the defendants.
...but are the lion's share of these hopeless on the basis of the evidence, combined with a fair process and a just, civically-informed legal framework?
A person who is searched pursuant to a prompted canine indication, and found to be in possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine has a "hopeless" case, but they have committed no offense to society that I can recognize, and their inclination to plea to a lesser charge means that the particulars of the search will never be heard by a jurist.
> Law-abiding citizens wouldn’t have a 50% recidivism rate.
This seems like a testable hypothesis, albeit only after a successful completion of the abolitionist movement. I'll bet that, in a society focused on restorative justice and no dependence on a slave economy dressed up as incarceration, that nobody will have a 50% recidivism rate.
> While it’s admirable to push back against the state, not all defendants earn our sympathy in their plight.
Agreed, of course. But there's no justice in taking even the worst in society forcing them to be laborers to make Starbucks packaging. Let's remove the incentive structure first, and decide how to distribute our sympathies second.
The estimated innocent population is around 9%. A far cry from the majority. This is just populist trash.
Now if you want to make a majority claim about those incarcerated being incarcerated for something which a rich person would go free, that’s something else
...of course not. But dramatically less chargeable conduct, dramatically more robust protections against search and seizure, and the complete removal of the slave labor incentive inherent in prisons might just remove it without further ado.
This is going to be hard to sell. "dramatically" sounds like >50%, and I assume not just old laws on the books that aren't in-forced. So you want to remove >50% of chargeable offenses? What else besides drugs?
