Unless you’re Wealthy, Then you’re Free to Go
by BB Curtis
There’s an intrinsic truth to the fact that the law is not fair and that our justice system is broken. It incorporates a glaring systemic issue: Without wealth, one cannot expect justice. In addition, this is not something new. Here’s part of an article published in 1994 with a quote from a book published in 1978.
Nationwide, no one seems to have made a systematic study of the finances of the executed, or of the 2,700 condemned prisoners. But veteran practitioners and scholars agreed they’d never heard of a wealthy person on Death Row.
“I don’t know of any affluent people who have been sentenced to death,” said Walter Berns, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and author of the 1978 book “For Capital Punishment.”
“The death penalty is for poor people,” said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and a defense lawyer in capital cases for 15 years.
From <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-11-mn-37106-story.html>
Most people on death row were assigned public defenders, defined as
a lawyer usually holding public office whose duty is to defend accused persons unable to pay for legal assistance
From <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public%20defender>
Think this through. Who’s in the courtroom, especially prior to the jury trial — all pre-trial mumbo jumbo and jury selection take place among state or local government employees and the accused. Where do you see representation for the accused in these scenes? There isn’t any. All the people in the room are paid state or local government employees. The media has already turned the public against the accused before anything even gets started, now he/she is in a roomful of people who don’t really give a damn. Remember that many local judges are elected. DAs are elected. Public defenders may aspire to becoming judges or DAs. They want, for the record, news that shows them to be effective at being hard on crime so they can be elected again or to prop up their run for higher office or begin running for office. Putting the bad guys in prison even if they aren’t bad guys buys votes.
Food for additional thought, the state has all the resources. They have the police. They have private detectives. They have staff to investigate and research for them. What does the accused have? Chances are, the accused is sitting in jail without bail, or sitting in jail because they can’t raise bail. If lucky, they have a couple of family members who might be able to help them with research and some of the types of proof that might show things like statements and pay records that show that, at the time of the crime, the accused was on the job and in an office with 200 witnesses among the company’s staff to back it up to say nothing of a few security camera archives. Let’s just start with one I know on a personal level concerning a bank robbery for which a man is serving a long sentence but was at work at the time. I became aware of the situation through one of his family members who did the research, got the necessary documentation of proof, and took it to the public defender. It is exactly what I described about the accused being on the job in an office with other people at the time of the crime. This proof never came up in court. It is not in the court records anywhere. He’s been in prison for over 11 years now. This is NOT an isolated case. The state COULD have looked to see where the accused was at the time of the robbery. Maybe they did and didn’t want to use the evidence that proved innocence – you can fill in the blanks for reasons why. Or maybe they didn’t. (Don’t believe what you see on TV police shows. Seldom does anyone go looking for evidence. The police don’t ask you where you were at the time of the crime. They try to get a confession and then let the DA go from there. It’s not in the DA’s best interest to find people innocent.) BTW, there’s video from the bank of who really committed the crime, but it also never found its way to court.
In the process of going to trial comes plea bargains. They are both popular and ruin 100% of the lives of those who indulge in them.
According to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, “The overwhelming majority (90 to 95 percent) of cases result in plea bargaining.”
From <https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plea_bargain>
To be clear, to get a plea bargain:
- The accused has to plead guilty to a lesser charge.
- The accused may be given a reduced sentence in return for the guilty plea. This probably includes either a greatly reduced prison sentence that might also include credit for time served. Remember that they’ve been sitting in jail for months already and (we’ve already established) can’t get out because of bail-related situations unless they were offered a plea bargain during the first round of their questioning and offered up dirt on someone – see item 3.
- Sometimes (many times) this includes giving up information on someone else involved in the same crime or another crime. No one should ever assume that this is truthful, factual information. Most people in desperate situations will do whatever they have to to get out of them, including bearing false witness, especially against someone who has made them angry or hurt them, like an ex-boy/girlfriend or estranged spouse, or friend who took advantage of them somehow. This just leads the way to putting more innocent people in jail, and they are usually from the same cultural group as the accused because they come from the accused’s sphere of influence.
- Once the plea bargain is signed by the accused, it is presented to court where the judge decides if (s)he will approve it. It can be approved as is or with changes to the terms. It can also be turned down. There are no guarantees in taking a plea bargain except one: The accused has now pled guilty to something and is guilty in the eyes of the law in no uncertain terms or retractable circumstance.
- The accused pled guilty – (s)he is staying guilty of something.
- Being guilty will stay with the accused for life. It will determine what schools one can attend, what jobs one can have, where one will be permitted to live and the cost, what types of insurance one can have and how much they will cost, what kinds of loans one can get and the interest rates on them, whether or not one can buy a weapon legally, and whether or not one can vote, depending on the state where the accused lives. The limitations are excruciating and insurmountable. In most cases the jobs pay less and nearly everything else costs more.
- Pleading guilty to something generally creates effective lifelong poverty.
- If one is truly innocent, there is no chance to EVER prove it in a court of law nor in the court of public opinion with few exceptions among close friends and family members, maybe.
Plea bargains create positives for the court and others in the justice realm. They save time and money. They can cut months to years off court trials. They are always used as positive statistics for convictions obtained in order to show the effectiveness of the DA, the PA, the judge, and an attorney or two or three, helping to show the public that they are so very effective – even if few of the people “prosecuted” and “found” guilty did anything wrong. Remember that 90 – 95% of those arrested plea out, and it’s nearly impossible to know the reality of who was or wasn’t guilty. We can, however, make some assumptions based on The Innocence Project’s findings over the years.
Of all the cases taken on by the Innocence Project so far, about 43% of clients were proven innocent, 42% were confirmed guilty, and evidence was inconclusive and not probative in 15% of cases. In about 40% of all DNA exoneration cases, law enforcement officials identified the actual perpetrator based on the same DNA test results that led to an exoneration.[28]
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project>
Using these confirmed statistics, approximately 39% of people arrested in violent crimes are innocent, but plea out and accept a lesser charge. That’s nearly 4 of every 10 people arrested did nothing wrong but will live with the stigma of committing a crime for their entire lives – remember that this creates poverty.
If you thought that you are guaranteed a speedy trial, think again. Getting a criminal case to court takes an average of 2.7 years in many larger cities. The trial may take days to months. If one is found guilty, sentencing may take a few more months. We’re talking nearly four years. Keep in mind that this timing is after being arrested which can be days to years after the date of the crime and depends to some degree on statutes of limitations (there aren’t any in crimes of murder). From this alone, do you see how difficult it is in our current system to get reliable testimony? We depend on testimony from people who are trying to remember what took place four or five years ago. What were you doing five years ago on July 14th at 7 PM? As I write this, it’s 2022. What were you doing on July 14, 2017, at 7 PM? When you met your new neighbor a few houses down, were you sure what he looked like and could recognize him a month later if you hadn’t seen him in the meantime? This is really a separate issue, but I wanted to put in a short bit about it for those who think that our legal system works like those on a one-hour cop or attorney show. It doesn’t. This is, however, a sales point for officials offering plea bargains. Get it done in the next few weeks or upwards of 5 years, take your pick. Another consideration is that, if found guilty, sentencing can take another three or four months while the accused now the guilty party is still sitting in jail. Depending on the severity of the crime, time served may not be a consideration. Those extra months of sitting in jail are also just lost time – keep in mind that some reliable statistics show that 43% of convictions are probably wrong.
One last comment based on the title. All of this can be quickly avoided when one has the financial resources to put it all to bed in a few months at the longest and without more than a day to a few days of jail time. Additionally, with wealth, one can expect to get off without repercussions in nearly every case. Sometimes money can’t do it all when you’re a person of color, but it still buys great attorneys who can fix a lot of ills for the guy with the checkbook. When the perpetrator has enough wealth, the public needn’t expect justice to be administered when it should be.
” . . . with liberty and justice for all.” Not so very.
© Bobbi Bartsch Curtis, 2023, All Rights Reserved.
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