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KimchiNinja
Joined: 01 May 2012
Location: Gangnam
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 Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2014 11:24 pm Post subject: Woman Busted for Possession of SpaghettiOs |
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An all-American tale...
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A Georgia woman may pursue legal action against police and prosecutors after she spent more than a month in jail for possession of SpaghettiOs.
Police say they arrested 23-year old Ashley Gabrielle Huff after they found a spoon covered with a suspicious residue inside the car she was riding in. From the beginning Huff insisted that she wasn’t using, selling, or making methamphetamines.
The woman spent more than a month in jail while her attorney tried to arrange a plea bargain. That’s when the crime lab report came back confirming the spoon was encrusted with spaghetti sauce.
http://news.kron4.com/news/woman-busted-for-possession-of-spaghettios-sauce-may-sue/ |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 12:37 am Post subject: |
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The first thing that strikes me is how they try to push the plea bargain on her. I wonder how much dysfunction within our criminal justice system stems from plea bargains being pushed on innocent people who could have been exonerated in court. This popped up in my news feed the other day:
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| We look at the incredible story of how a 16-year-old high school sophomore from the Bronx ended up spending nearly three years locked up at the Rikers jail in New York City after he says he was falsely accused of stealing a backpack. Kalief Browder never pleaded guilty and was never convicted. Browder maintained his innocence and requested a trial, but was only offered plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. Near the end of his time in jail, the judge offered to sentence him to time served if he entered a guilty plea, and warned him he could face 15 years in prison if he was convicted. But Browder still refused to accept the deal, and was only released when the case was dismissed. During this time, Browder spent nearly 800 days in solitary confinement, a juvenile imprisonment practice that the New York Department of Corrections has now banned. |
I don't want to come off as too cynical here, I understand in principle the plea bargain can be a useful tool at times, and I know cases like the above are extreme (and perhaps exaggerated in some of the details, I don't know), but an innocent person ending up in jail because they had a plea bargain pushed on them is still a failure of justice. Maybe it's not as big of a problem as I'm feeling, I only ever really hear about the topic in the context of problematic cases like this. |
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KimchiNinja
Joined: 01 May 2012
Location: Gangnam
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| Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 12:43 am Post subject: |
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| Yeah, there seems to be an abnormal amount of pressure to "admit your guilt, and save yourself", even when the only evidence is a SpaghettiO encrusted spoon. |
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guavashake
Joined: 09 Nov 2013
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| Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 6:26 am Post subject: |
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Here's another good weird news story...
White Lesbian Couple Sue After Becoming Pregnant With Sperm Donated By Black Man
http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2014/10/02/2-white-lesbians-sue-after-becoming-pregnant-with-sperm-donated-by-black-man/
Jennifer Cramblett was five months pregnant and happy with her life in April 2012. She and her partner had married months earlier in New York, and within days of their nuptials she had become pregnant with donor sperm at a fertility clinic in Canton.
Cramblett, 36, and her partner, Amanda Zinkon, 29, were so elated that they called Midwest Sperm Bank LLC outside Chicago to reserve sperm from the same donor in the hope that Zinkon would someday also have a child.
But that’s when Cramblett received some disturbing news, says a lawsuit filed Monday against Midwest Sperm Bank in Cook County, Illinois. She learned from an employee at the sperm bank that she had been inseminated with sperm from No. 330, a black donor, and not No. 380, a white donor she and Zinkon, who are white, had chosen. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
The first thing that strikes me is how they try to push the plea bargain on her. I wonder how much dysfunction within our criminal justice system stems from plea bargains being pushed on innocent people who could have been exonerated in court. This popped up in my news feed the other day:
| Quote: |
| We look at the incredible story of how a 16-year-old high school sophomore from the Bronx ended up spending nearly three years locked up at the Rikers jail in New York City after he says he was falsely accused of stealing a backpack. Kalief Browder never pleaded guilty and was never convicted. Browder maintained his innocence and requested a trial, but was only offered plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. Near the end of his time in jail, the judge offered to sentence him to time served if he entered a guilty plea, and warned him he could face 15 years in prison if he was convicted. But Browder still refused to accept the deal, and was only released when the case was dismissed. During this time, Browder spent nearly 800 days in solitary confinement, a juvenile imprisonment practice that the New York Department of Corrections has now banned. |
I don't want to come off as too cynical here, I understand in principle the plea bargain can be a useful tool at times, and I know cases like the above are extreme (and perhaps exaggerated in some of the details, I don't know), but an innocent person ending up in jail because they had a plea bargain pushed on them is still a failure of justice. Maybe it's not as big of a problem as I'm feeling, I only ever really hear about the topic in the context of problematic cases like this. |
Its a massive failing of justice, Fox. Complete innocents don't very often end up in jail, but often criminals are incarcerated for crimes they didn't commit.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/procon/sterling.html
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How did conspiracy law emerge?
If the mandatory minimums were a result of haste and excess by Congress, conspiracy as applied to these mandatories was completely by oversight and by accident. It was submitted as part of a simple technical corrections amendment. No one even thought at all about what the implications were of applying conspiracy. It was presented as though this was simply a slight little loophole that had been inadvertently created and just had to be rectified by inserting the words, "or conspiracy." No one envisioned that by applying [the statute] to anyone in a conspiracy, no matter how low they were in the conspiratorial chain, that they would get the maximum that could be imposed for the kingpin. Nobody figured that out as we were working on it in 1988. It was a total oversight. Now of course you can't change [it], because that's soft on drugs.
Isn't this all a deadly mix?
The current sentencing situation is a sort of witch's brew of three poisons put together making an abominable poison: mandatory minimums designed for kingpins with very long sentences; conspiracy bringing in the lowest level offenders who become eligible for those; [and "substantial assistance" policies]. The only way they can avoid those mandatories is to provide substantial assistance to a prosecutor and if it means telling a wild story to avoid spending almost life in prison without parole, there are many people who will do that.
... It's the prosecutor who decides whether or not your substantial assistance, your testimony, is good enough to get the prosecutor's motion to reduce your sentence ... . So the incentive is, "I'll tell any story I can." I mean these aren't exactly saints that we're dealing with here, dope dealers. [They are] people who are often very desperate. They realize, "If I can get five years instead of 30 years, if I tell a story against that other guy, tell me what I have to say, I'll say it."
Doesn't the prosecution know that people are lying?
The entire criminal justice system knows that perjury is the coin of the realm. In New York City police officers call it "testalying." In Los Angeles they call it "the liar's club." Everybody knows that lying takes place. The prosecutors don't feel bad about it, this is simply part of the system. They just justify it by saying, "We have to get the bad guy." ... Police officers conform their testimony to what they know the courts expect to hear in order to get the results that they want, not on the basis of what the facts are. |
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KimchiNinja
Joined: 01 May 2012
Location: Gangnam
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| Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2014 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| Its a massive failing of justice, Fox. Complete innocents don't very often end up in jail... |
I'm not so sure about that. Complete innocents in the low income bracket end up in jail, or hassled by the law, all the time. And other income brackets are not immune. |
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