Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

globalcitizen.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 184 posts

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#101

Post by jklinger410 »

cimmanom wrote: post #91
Svip wrote: post #25

Is it possible to get compensation for wrongful imprisonment in the US? I know it is in Denmark. The logic being that it shouldn't be 'free' for the state to imprison someone wrongfully. In Denmark, you seek compensation after the fact. The exact compensation will depend on several variables, so I cannot give an exact figure. But I did find a case where a man was wrongfully imprisoned for five months, and got 141,000…

Being held before trial is pretty much never interpreted as wrongful imprisonment, even if the suspect is acquitted.

Being detained is basically considered just a "pain in the ass" by the courts, although it ruins the lives of many.

This is one of the many ways that privilege infects our systems.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#102

Post by rayiner »

Svip wrote: post #89
zazen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP does use the word "imprisonment", but I think it's possible he's actually asking about pre-trial incarceration. OP says he's from Europe, and a lot of countries don't have the jail/prison distinction as in the USA.

We do actually (»varetægtsfængslet« in Danish), but I forgot the appropriate term in English. I thought given the context that we were talking about bails, I didn't have to be specific.

Ah ok. I was confused by your question because while the distinction between pre-conviction "jail" and post-conviction "prison" is not always followed in English, "wrongful imprisonment" as a phrase almost always refers to wrongful conviction + imprisonment.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#103

Post by briandear »

titzer wrote: post #4

This is horrible. Instead of bail, they should just have steeper fines for failure to appear and yet on the flipside the same guarantees afforded to jury duty as far as employment (i.e. can't be fired for having to appear in court). That would allow poorer people to keep their jobs and still be present for court dates. Flight risk is really not as high as the system is designed for.

> Flight risk is really not as high as the system is designed for.

Citation please?

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#104

Post by pc86 »

cubano wrote: post #87

In my experience by far the worse part of the totally racist and unfair US bail system is the fact that... ... if you can't bail out, you don't get any REAL credit for the time you have spent locked up when you finally go to court and get sentenced , which really rubs injury into insult and flies 100% into the face of "innocent until proven guilty" bullshit we are all told is the way the system works. Before everyone…

> over 30 years getting arrested for minor shit all over the US

Have you tried not spending three decades committing petty crimes "all over the US?"

As for your original point - credit for time - you get 1.5x for time served. If you're sentenced to prison. If you spend weeks in jail but don't actually get sentenced to prison, there's nothing against which your time can be credited. Nobody's crediting jail time toward probation.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#105

Post by athenot »

CamTin wrote: post #99
EvilEndures wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prosecutors already only take cases they think they can win via plea bargain. Part of why convinction rates are so high is Prosecutors ignore any case they might lose or the defendant can afford a quality lawyer who might cast reasonable doubt on the verdict. I doubt repayment for wrongful imprisonment would make that worse.

Prosecutors might only take those cases, but they're not the ones making arrests. Police are. Once you are already in jail then, under the proposed scheme, the prosecutor's options become 1) let you out (drop charges) and expose the public purse to wrongful imprisonment damages, 2) take it to trial and lose, also exposing the public purse to the same damages, 3) take it to trial and win, which is expensive but at lea…

> 1) let you out (drop charges) and expose the public purse to wrongful imprisonment damages,

> 2) take it to trial and lose, also exposing the public purse to the same damages,

If a doctor makes a mistake, he or she is liable (in addition to the hospital). In the case of wrongful imprisonment, there should be exposed liability for the officers too. They are the ones who make the judgement call to arrest someone based on the information they have and the threat they perceive. If they fail at that and end up causing a net harm to individuals, they should be bearing (within reasonable limits) responsibility for that.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#106

Post by nafey »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #37
arethuza wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the goal is presumably to try and persuade him not to speed again?

The goal should be to persuade everyone not to speed in the first place.

This statement does not support the argument that you were making in the first place

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#107

Post by briandear »

bdhess wrote: post #80
cs02rm0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if a $100 fine for someone with only $100 to their name is adjusted to punish Bill Gates the same amount... how much do you fine him? Every cent he has to his name? Because if you leave him with anything the punishment isn't the same. And what if he then commits a much more serious offence? I still think the whole concept is so flawed it's a farce.

To me it seems just as farcical to levy a $100 fine on someone who only has $100. What exactly does that accomplish?

So if a robbery results in a 10 year sentence and a poor person makes $15,000 per year, that means the sentence costs the poor person $150,000, not adjusted for inflation. A rich person who makes $1 million per year would he. Need to serve less than 2 months then right?

If we are trying to use this socialist fine system, then that would necessarily result in shorter jail time for rich people because they are being “harmed” more proportionally.

These scaled punishments are absurd.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#108

Post by drivingmenuts »

dragonwriter wrote: post #85
candiodari wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and also the case in the US. (however it's always going to be >$1000 or so, for obvious reasons, including of course in Germany and Scandinavian countries) (by the way, I hate how tiring it is to see Europeans claim how "socially progressive" and protective of rights the EU governments supposedly are. You have more rights, as a suspect, in the US. Not less. The US, without any doubt, protects the rights of accuse…

> The US, without any doubt, protects the rights of accused person FAR better than ANY European country. Just ask Julian Assange Since Assange’s entire excuse for his flight from justice is the fear that the whole Swedish and British process has been a pretext for being dragged to the US for an unfair trial, I don't think he'll back you. Of course, he's also completely nuts. If the US wanted him from the UK, we'd jus…

He's not hiding in the UK - he's hiding in Ecuador, with whom we do not have an extradition treaty, apparently. An embassy is the sovereign soil of it's own country. Otherwise, we could just storm the place with overwhelming force and take him. Ecuador lacks the means to effectively stop us.

Note: I am NOT suggesting we do this.

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#109

Post by wccrawford »

pc86 wrote: post #104
cubano wrote: post #87

In my experience by far the worse part of the totally racist and unfair US bail system is the fact that... ... if you can't bail out, you don't get any REAL credit for the time you have spent locked up when you finally go to court and get sentenced , which really rubs injury into insult and flies 100% into the face of "innocent until proven guilty" bullshit we are all told is the way the system works. Before everyone…

> over 30 years getting arrested for minor shit all over the US Have you tried not spending three decades committing petty crimes "all over the US?" As for your original point - credit for time - you get 1.5x for time served. If you're sentenced to prison. If you spend weeks in jail but don't actually get sentenced to prison, there's nothing against which your time can be credited. Nobody's crediting jail time toward…

Why though? He was on worse than probation for the entire time he was in jail. Why doesn't that count as time served?

Re: Bail has become a way to lock up the poor regardless of guilt or threat

#110

Post by scott_s »

CamTin wrote: post #99
EvilEndures wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prosecutors already only take cases they think they can win via plea bargain. Part of why convinction rates are so high is Prosecutors ignore any case they might lose or the defendant can afford a quality lawyer who might cast reasonable doubt on the verdict. I doubt repayment for wrongful imprisonment would make that worse.

Prosecutors might only take those cases, but they're not the ones making arrests. Police are. Once you are already in jail then, under the proposed scheme, the prosecutor's options become 1) let you out (drop charges) and expose the public purse to wrongful imprisonment damages, 2) take it to trial and lose, also exposing the public purse to the same damages, 3) take it to trial and win, which is expensive but at lea…

Not necessarily. We could decide that being in jail prior to seeing a judge or magistrate that sets bail does not count as wrongful imprisonment; it's the period of time during which the state has to decide if they really want to follow through on charging this individual, and if so, wether or not they want to take the risk of wrongful imprisonment. We could say that only time after a judge or magistrate has made the bail or no-bail decision would count as wrongful imprisonment were the individual found innocent.

The time between arrest and bail hearing max out at a few days. Not great if you're innocent, but much different than the weeks to months before a trial.

Post reply on HN