What happens after you’re arrested at a protest in New York

it depends on the states. Some states offer more protection for applicants than others. It also depends on position too.

Basically, any arrest record will stay on your record for number of years including ones where the charges were eventually dropped. But in many states, employers are either disallowed or discouraged from looking at it.

If there was conviction, it will stay with you. There is no way getting around that and that will jeopardize your future employment prospect.

  Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.

I find these outbursts of genuine surprise and bewilderment amusing, in the best possible way.

What I'm about to suggest is not meant to remedy or suggest alternate remedies to the workings of the criminal justice system as it currently operates.

I'm merely expressing amusement at the colossal unfamiliarity of most of the generally law-abiding public (Black, White, Hispanic or otherwise) at how poorly our system works, even with the best intentions of the law makers and policy wonks.

I can't but find people who expect an uniform carriage of justice, across all wealth levels, across all demographics and in all instances of law-breaking, to be nothing short of, deranged.

Not so long ago, I held such similar delusions of equality and fairness, albeit not to the same degree as some here on HN.

I always knew there was more than a little truth to the adage that it is far better to be wealthy and guilty than poor and innocent, in America.

Any speck of doubt cleared up after I sat in a courtroom to witness the pre-trial consultations of a high profile defendant in SF. In a criminal case.

It was a farce, to put it mildly. Just the resources available to the prosecutor on one side and the defendant with his high powered legal team -- which came with their own personal scribe to document the exchanges in the court, a videographer and the partner of the law firm among others -- on the other side, settled the matter for me.

I don't quite know if its standard courtroom protocol to call both the parties - the prosecutor and the defendant's attorney - into recess to discuss matters in the judge's quarters but I counted 7 such times they just left to talk behind closed doors.

I was floored at the deference with which the judge spoke to the defendant. The whole thing seemed like some closed door Congressional testimony with ranking members. I've never seen anything like it although I've seen the inside of a courtroom in unrelated matters before. I've seen common folk arraigned before. This was something else.

And mind you this was in proletariat-loving SF not some courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama or Angola, Louisiana. I don't know what one should expect in those places.

Try it sometime. Go to a courthouse and sit in one of the air-conditioned courtrooms and observe the proceedings.

Edit: see comment below. Thx refurb.

Yes, a peaceful, static protest by simply facing the other way while uniformed but off the clock - at a funeral for a colleague - is totally the basis of a new Nazi state and the tens of millions of deaths it caused.

No, those people have guns. It's usually against the people in your community that had nothing to do with it.

> Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.

If people cared about this.