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In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

nytimes.com

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Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#191

Post by lurk2 »

Terr_ wrote: post #44
milesrout wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery has existed for all of human history, and is sadly the natural state of things. It was stamped out by the British empire, a colonising power, because of the relentless campaigning of Christian moralists. Imprisonment is indeed a newer development. In the past they chopped off your hand and let fate deal with you, or they just executed you. Nobody was going to feed some peasant who couldn't even work. Imprison…

> is sadly the natural state of things Sadly, the even-more-natural state of things involves the total extinction of all known forms of life and nothing but the cold vacuum of space. So we should be very careful not to equate that particular kind of "natural" with other concepts like "unavoidable" or "acceptable".

> So we should be very careful not to equate that particular kind of "natural" with other concepts like "unavoidable" or "acceptable".

Natural and unavoidable mean the same thing in the context the GP used them.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#192

Post by Viliam1234 »

raincole wrote: post #177
lawn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a similar phenomena with how Russians view Ukraine. "Who allowed them to live so well?".

Ukraine is and was literally the poorest european country. Even before this war.

So why do the Russian invaders keep steeling the toilets and washing machines?

When you measure wealth, it makes a huge difference how exactly you calculate it. Having a few astronomically rich oligarchs in your country increases the arithmetic mean, but does nothing about the median.

This is how Russia can have better numbers in national statistics, and yet the average Russian soldier can feel the other way round in Ukraine.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#193

Post by pclmulqdq »

tpm wrote: post #179
pclmulqdq wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own European governments far more. They just have several hundred years of extra practice at being subtle.

Going by "The purpose of a system is what it does", I think European (specifically EU-member) states do a lot more for their citizens than the US does, in welfare, healthcare, environment, infrastructure and so on, so either the oligarchs are very subtle indeed (looking at our Slovakian oligarchs... I don't think so) or they just don't own the governments far more (yet). They are certainly trying though. I think this…

The European upper class doesn't generally pay taxes, and they are more of internationalists than you are thinking. They move around enough and have their home base somewhere like Monaco so they don't participate at all in the welfare systems. European welfare systems redistribute huge amounts of money from the middle class to the poor, not from the rich.

In other words, the European welfare systems are actually a great tool of theirs to keep the competition down: if you're taxing the upper-middle-class workers at a ~50% rate, they need to out-earn you 2:1 to build wealth at the same rate.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#194

Post by mattw2121 »

askonomm wrote: post #185
lurk2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European society proves that Americans could have true freedom and quality of life if it weren't for corporations and oligarchs effectively owning our government. Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans. They are also substantially poorer than Americans, and those numbers get worse when you account for America’s average being skewed…

And yet, by all accounts we have a higher life quality than Americans. Only Americans care about money, because in USA you don't get anything without paying for it all yourself. Here we have minimum mandatory vacations for 4 weeks per year, and many countries have a lot more than that, most countries have a year or more of maternity leave, paid of course, we have plenty of public holidays, paid of course, and we don'…

After reading your comment, one might come to the conclusion that Europeans see Americans through the lens of reporting and social media, just as Americans see Europeans through the same lens. Both sides believe characterizations of the other.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#196

Post by ddtaylor »

db48x wrote: post #125
DistractionRect wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how understated some parts are. Like they just casually mention > Like most Texas county judges, he does not have a law degree. I'm sorry, what? Anyone off the street can be a judge? That one line begs soo many questions, and at least some outrage, which is simply glossed over. Doing my own research, I guess I see why it's glossed over, because apparently this isn't uncommon - a quick search says that on…

Remember that a degree is only a credential, and people without the credential can still be good at their job. What you need to be a judge is knowledge, not a credential.

The Bar exam is supposed to be a legal litmus test of some kind

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#197

Post by lurk2 »

Vilian wrote: post #148
milesrout wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery has existed for all of human history, and is sadly the natural state of things. It was stamped out by the British empire, a colonising power, because of the relentless campaigning of Christian moralists. Imprisonment is indeed a newer development. In the past they chopped off your hand and let fate deal with you, or they just executed you. Nobody was going to feed some peasant who couldn't even work. Imprison…

It was stamped because of the industrial revolution, slaves can't buy goods, not moralism

> slaves can't buy goods

This is true of some forms of chattel slavery, but not of slavery in general. Most forms of slavery throughout history allow slaves some degree of personal property. This was often legally considered to be the property of the slave’s owner, but it was effectively controlled by the slave himself.

There isn’t anything inherent to industrialization which favors the use of free labor. One common argument is that mechanization required the use of more highly skilled laborers, which afforded greater leverage to laborers. This argument falls flat because we can see examples of even relatively sophisticated labor being performed by slaves. Consider the articles posted here recently about slavery in call centers in Myanmar and Thailand, where kidnapped victims are forced to perform scams. There are also the more widely known examples of sweatshops in Bangladesh.

Another argument that is often made is that factories have high amortization costs that require the factory to produce (and more importantly, sell) a high enough number of units in order to cover these costs. What I have not seen here is a compelling case as to why the propertied class of a slave-holding society would care about building factories for consumer goods if the unit economics were not already favorable.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#199

Post by rob74 »

williamdclt wrote: post #190
lurk2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European society proves that Americans could have true freedom and quality of life if it weren't for corporations and oligarchs effectively owning our government. Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans. They are also substantially poorer than Americans, and those numbers get worse when you account for America’s average being skewed…

> Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans That is true. However Europeans tend to believe that restricting some freedom leads to higher overall freedom: I can exercise a lot more freedom when I don't risk a gun pointed at me. I'm a much freer thinker when religious agenda pushed (overtly or subtly) on me (directly or through societal i…

I think it's not just about poverty, some stats about "precarious employment" - as in "I'm above the poverty line, but if I lose my job (or even one of the two jobs I have to do to get by), that will change very quickly" - would also be interesting...

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#200

Post by cess11 »

lawn wrote: post #171
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%. I've written about this here before, but I've been involved in two civil lawsuits in my life. One was in the USA, the other was in mainland China. I should stress that I am an American, and I wasn't even in China when the lawsuit over there was moving along. The Chinese process was very fast -- it went before a judge who reached a verdict in something like ten months -- and it was extremely inexpensive.…

> I don't know how things are in Europe, and hope I never have to find out In Sweden at least this level of insanity is only heard about as anecdotes online...

In civil (and criminal) law, yes, but in "förvaltningsrätt", public law, it's somewhat different. Cases are judged mainly from documents and sometimes the state can sort of force you to provide documentation in a manner similar to discovery and subpoena. It's also where you might end up with a reversed burden of proof, notably in tax cases.

It's still a much saner jurisdiction in many respects, especially for physical persons. You might get marginally nicer judgements in commercial law in certain US states, though I'd personally prefer both swedish law and swedish arbitration due to a combination of lower costs and the average quality of commercial law here. The Stockholm Chamber of Commerce arbitration institute is actually rather popular among international corporations for roughly these reasons.

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