More toxic fallout from the war on drugs... This is one that not too many U.S. citizens are aware of: almost nobody charged with a crime gets a trial by jury today. Depending on whose numbers you want to believe, somewhere between 3% and 9% of criminal charges are resolved by a jury trial – the rest are all “plea bargains”. The plea bargain system has completely changed the face of American criminal prosecution within my lifetime. Up until the '70s, if you were charged with a crime and you didn't plead “guilty”, then a jury trial was a virtual certainty. Now it's nearly unheard of.
And the war on drugs did it.
Here's an excellent piece by Brad Schlesinger, writing at Outside the Beltway, that explains it all.
To me, this is just one more in a long, long list of reasons to legalize drugs and cut our losses in the disastrous war on drugs...
No comments:
Post a Comment