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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

#281

Post by marcus_holmes »

lurk2 wrote: post #257
neffy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else. And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.

> We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else. They don’t. Americans earn something like 1/3rd more than the average European. They have substantially larger houses and own more cars. > And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place The vast majority of people will…

I lived in Berlin for a while. Most people don't own a car in Berlin. Not because of poverty, but because the city is walkable (you can walk from one side to the other in an afternoon, it's a lovely thing to do on a summer's day). Your metric of "own more cars" is not incorrect, just irrelevant. It's like saying that Europeans are wealthier because they are more likely to have a passport.

Likewise for "substantially larger houses". This is just not a relevant metric - Europeans generally live in denser cities, with more apartment living, more cycling, more parks. That's a preference. It's got nothing to do with wealth. Europeans don't have smaller houses because they can't afford them, but because they prefer living in smaller, denser, more walkable cities.

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

#282

Post by mmooss »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #112
mmooss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are often-repeated arguments; we really need some facts to work with. Is there research on this?

How reliable do you think research into the amount of undetected crime is?

I think it's not perfect, but we have to work with imperfect information. I think it's far more reliable than Internet rando comments, which have zero reliability and are often misinformation, sometimes intentionally.

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

#283

Post by lurk2 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #227
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…

The self-defence thing absolutely fascinates me. What are you guys so scared of? It's a literal fact that a gun is much more likely to be used to kill its owner (or a member of the owner's own family) than any intruder or external threat [0] Why is this such a thing in the USA? Why do you guys hold gun ownership up as this amazing freedom when owing a gun is literally, provably, way more of a threat to you and your f…

You don’t need to ask rhetorical questions if you want to make a statement; it’s incredibly obnoxious and not in the spirit of the forum.

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

#284

Post by richwater »

bsder wrote: post #49
jp191919 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the civil rights in question. Champion of some, not so much on others.

Wait until minorities start open carrying lots of guns. That's how California wound up with gun control under Saint Reagan (hack ... spit).

You know that Reagan hasn't been governor there in like...50 years right?

If the democratic trifecta that has run the state for the past few decades actually cared more about civil rights than scary guns, they would repeal the law.

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

#285

Post by nemomarx »

piokoch wrote: post #274

This is interesting, from the article it seems that authorities broken the law multiple times "[...] people regularly spend months behind bars without charges filed against them, much longer than state law allows." In such a litigious society like the one in the USA, what stops convicts from hiring the lawyer and suing authorities, there are many lawyers who would gladly work for success fee, if indeed the law was br…

you only get those kind of pay outs if the coffee burns you badly enough to need surgery or etc. suing usually needs you to prove a serious damage to get the jury to want to give you money

a month in jail has some concrete damage but it's still going to be harder than pointing at a medical bill, right?

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

#286

Post by shkkmo »

rafram wrote: post #264
dguest wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot that the prosecution will go over the top on charges, as bargaining chips for a plea deal. None of these would ever stick in a real court, but if you're facing sexual assault charges (and a lifetime on the sex offender registry) for allegedly peeing in a park, pleading guilty to a lesser crime sounds pretty good. Everyone has a right to a trial by jury in theory, but if you waste the prosecutor's time by e…

> if you're facing sexual assault charges (and a lifetime on the sex offender registry) for allegedly peeing in a park People repeat this anecdote all the time, but I'd challenge you to find a single person who has ever been put on the sex offender registry for nothing more than public urination. (Let alone being charged with sexual assault, which is nonsensical -- look up how that crime is defined in US law.)

Being put on the sex offender registry happens after conviction. The comment you are responding to is talking about how unconvictable trumped up charges are used to scare people into taking pleas so your challenge doesn't make sense in context.

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

#287

Post by ty6853 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #281
lurk2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else. They don’t. Americans earn something like 1/3rd more than the average European. They have substantially larger houses and own more cars. > And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place The vast majority of people will…

I lived in Berlin for a while. Most people don't own a car in Berlin. Not because of poverty, but because the city is walkable (you can walk from one side to the other in an afternoon, it's a lovely thing to do on a summer's day). Your metric of "own more cars" is not incorrect, just irrelevant. It's like saying that Europeans are wealthier because they are more likely to have a passport. Likewise for "substantially…

It's interesting because I have been to many walkable places in southeast Asia with extremely cheap collective taxis, but even then most extended families have a small motorbike so they can visit another village without all the bother of begging/renting/borrowing.

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

#289

Post by rbetts »

sersi wrote: post #113
nadermx wrote: post #4

"Two men were released after The Times asked about them, half a year after their sentences had been completed." Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed nation.

I think at this point the general consensus of most Europeans is that the US has more in common with a developing nation than with a developed nation when it comes to equality in the eye of justice, equal access to health care, support for the downtrodden and freedoms...

It is easy to under-estimate the diversity across US States. I don't think many Europeans look at Hungary, Poland, or Bulgaria's justice systems and extend that to an opinion on EU justice in aggregate.

This isn't to excuse the abysmal state of affairs in large swathes of the US. Just to say that the US is rarely sufficiently uniform to summarize as a single entity, especially in topics like justice systems where States have significant sovereign power.

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

#290

Post by dagw »

lurk2 wrote: post #260
pseudocomposer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about being “poor” in Europe is, you can be “poor” your entire life by American standards of income/assets, but still never take on medical debt, travel more than a month out of the year, have a couple kids and educate them in good schools, and retire. Most Americans cannot.

> Most Americans cannot. You have no idea what you’re talking about and there is no statistical basis to the claims you are making. The only two metrics Europeans win out on is life expectancy (by around 4 years) and (narrowly) on home ownership rate (around 5 percentage points higher in Europe). Americans are overwhelmingly wealthier than Europeans by every other metric.

there is no statistical basis to the claims you are making

Are you really arguing that Americans (and especially Americans below the median) don't have higher levels of medical debt, higher rates of medical bankruptcy, and get/take less vacation than Europeans.

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