[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
orion wrote:
Not in the US.
Incorrect. We have constitutional amendments addressing the issues and the rule of lenity. Habeas corpus. Unanimous jury verdicts (largely). And that is just for starters.
In European countries where the systems actually proudly err on the side of the alleged defendants cops act differently.
And before you go off on a tangent, no European prosecutor has the rights an American DA has and no European prosecutor can pile NS charge after BS charge on a defendant until plea bargaining seems like a good idea.
This is bad logic - if Europe errs more on the side of criminal defendant, that doesn’t mean that the US doesn’t at all.
Moreover, “piling up charges” is what criminal activity does - every act that breaks the law is worthy of punishment. If that bothers you - who cares?
Plus the US has 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prisoners.
This statistic doesn’t speak to the issue of whether the system is built to err on the side of the criminal defendant. What that statistic tells you is that we put more people in jail - it says little about whether the laws err on the side of the defendant.
So either the US citizens are all OG´s, or the American justice system is anything but rigged in favor of defendants.
This statement is pure Orion hyperbole - and misses the point. The system isn’t “rigged” in favor of one outcome or the other, it is a matter of erring on one side or the other. No system should be “rigged” - what matters are whether there are deliberate safeguards in place to err on the side of defendants. In America, we have them. If another country has more safeguards, no problem, but that doesn’t mean America has none.
If these weren’t in place in America, per your complaints, predictable critics like you wouldn’t be clamoring to extend these rights to non-citizen terrorists. You are making arguments out of two inconsistent mouths - if our defendant’s rights were no good (“anything but rigged in favor of the defendant”), you wouldn’t be peeing your pants to grant these “worthless” rights to terrorists.
Which leads us to the next point that the “stress” of American cops can hardly stem from the US justice system, unless of course the blatant unfairness of the US justice system makes a lot of people see cops as enemies.
But that would be quite the opposite of what you argued.
The US justice system tries to balance law-and-order versus a presumption of innocence - in the real world, that is a hard line, and police, charged with a heavy responsibility, have to make hard choices in real time.
They have “stress” because they have a job to do, and the system is designed to slow them down. And that is ok - the system should do that to an extent, we want that. That doesn’t mean that their job isn’t tough as a result.[/quote]
Nice backpedaling.
So as long as we have established that the US is the country where defendants have a really tough time compared to other countries that call themselves “democracies”, we can safely draw the conclusion that the few choices said defendants have left can hardly be a source of frustation for American cops.
Unless of course European cops handle that kind of stress wayyyyy better. Or they have a different idea of what it means to be a cop.
I don´t know what it is, but it cannot be a justice system that errs on the side of caution.
Then, if they cannot handle the pressure they should get the fuck out of their jobs. Nobody is putting a gun to their heads.