Alvin Bragg Just Killed Criminal Justice Reform
This is a free country, right? We as citizens are supposed to have a fundamental right to freedom. Only if proven guilty of a crime, do we lose that freedom. The United States justice system is meant to give us all a fair chance to defend that freedom if ever charged of a crime. The standard is “Beyond a reasonable doubt.” That means if someone is accused of a crime, if there is a reasonable doubt that they did not, then they are not guilty. That is extremely fair. Anyone can be falsely accused of a crime. There can be misunderstandings. The justice system should very thoroughly ensure that there is never, ever any reasonable doubt if there is a conviction. But we all know that that is not the case. Innocent people have been and will be convicted.
Alvin Bragg, current Manhattan District Attorney, just indicted former President Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi said in a Tweet, “everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” Let’s get the dispute over politicians out of the way really quick.
Whether you like or hate Donald Trump I’d like to believe that we Americans generally believe in fairness. Even Democrats who hate Trump have spoken out saying the case against Trump was very weak. Federal law enforcement declined to pursue charging Trump. The key witness to charging Trump, Michael Cohen, in a 2018 letter negated all the accusations against Trump. The witness proved to be very unreliable. The evidence against Trump on this particular charge was weak at best. But Bragg charged Trump anyway.
Trump claims that this is political targeting and a “witch hunt.” He points to crimes of his political opponents like Hillary Clinton refusing to comply with subpoenas. He believes that pursuing charges is unfair and completely political.
Well, two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because Hillary Clinton got away with it, doesn’t mean that Trump can get away with it if he did commit a crime. But the problem is, if the justice system is doling out charges unfairly it’s dangerous for all of us.
Trump has the best lawyers money can buy, and he has a world-wide platform to publicize the goings-ons of his case. But, what about the average person that gets an unfair criminal charge? For decades, advocates like those who represent the Innocence Project have been fighting for criminal justice reform, and Bragg’s actions have just destroyed any progress made.
Nancy Pelosi has previously advocated for criminal justice reform, particularly for minorities who are more likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Personally, I think that is a righteous cause. But she just revealed that she doesn’t truly give a single care about ensuring justice is served. If I lived in her district and voted for her based on that platform point, I would feel really used and lied to.
“Everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence,” Nancy Pelosi Tweeted.
She did not say that the Courts must prove someone guilty before their freedom is taken away. She just slapped every person wrongfully arrested/charged/convicted, or every person who was over prosecuted across the face. No one has to prove their innocence. We are assumed innocent. The Courts must prove guilt. If not, then any police officer for any reason can arrest someone, charge them, and that person loses all their freedom. Nancy Pelosi presumes that people are guilty and must succumb to the law.
“In 800 jurisdictions across the United States, black people were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people over a three-year period ending in 2018, according to an ABC analysis of data voluntarily reported to the FBI. In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts,” Anagha Srikanth wrote for the Hill. There is statistical evidence that minorities are arrested and charged more than white Americans. There are many debates as to why that is, but no one can possibly argue that every single one of those minorities arrested were actually guilty. Nancy Pelosi is saying that the many minorities that get arrested and charged (sometimes unfairly) now have a duty to prove their innocence. That is not fair. We cannot presume people’s guilt.
Those words that she used were not a slip of the tongue, it wasn’t a misspeak. She typed out those letters one by one and hit send.
Pelosi made a clear-cut statement on her policies and how she views the justice system.
She doesn’t get a pass just because she was making the statement about Trump. She made that statement, and those views affect all of us.
Sure, maybe, powerful people like Pelosi and Bragg are only abusing the justice system against Trump right now. Arguably, Bragg has taken steps to prevent over-charging. “Since taking office on Jan. 1 [2022], Bragg has downgraded 52% of felony cases to misdemeanors.” But if these politicians are so frivolous on how much evidence is enough to pursue criminal charges and convictions, then who’s to say who might be next on their hit list? Arguably they are using the criminal justice system to target certain people that stand in the way of their political motives. Justin Gest in an article for CNN argued that Latinos are shifting toward more Conservative or Republican ideology. Does that mean we Latinos better watch our back? If Nancy Pelosi can’t rely on us for our votes and support, maybe she’ll make sure to hold us to the standard that we must prove our innocence if ever facing criminally charges. As stated above, minorities are more likely to get charged with crimes. If the Latino population is expected to use whatever resources they have to prove their innocence, they are going to lose that battle against the behemoth that is the US court system.
The Criminal Justice system in the US is already pretty corrupted. Originally, the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard was meant to be taken extremely seriously and meant to be a very high threshold to reach. The way it was designed to work is even if there are huge amounts of evidence against a defendant, if there is even just ONE reasonable doubt against guilt, that the defendant is innocent, then that defendant should walk free. The reason behind it was that our freedom was such a fundamental right that we would rather watch some people who are guilty walk free than one innocent person wrongfully have their freedom taken away.
But as we all know, this is not the case at all. “The fact is, among convicted felons between two and eight percent are innocent individuals who accepted plea agreements. It’s easy to assume many criminal cases go to trial, however the hard truth is that 94% of state convictions occur because the defendant accepted a plea deal, or in other words pleaded guilty to a lesser crime,” wrote Sott Grabel. Innocent people very often agree to a plea deal just out of sheer fear of a harsher sentence if they go to trial. This happens all the time.
Prosecutors can stack juries. It’s been done. They are very capable of selecting people that are more likely to side with law enforcement and deliver a guilty verdict no matter what the evidence is. There is, also, a strong culture in which a police officer’s testimony is treated as undeniable. We all know that there are many bad apple police officers that might lie on the stand or write the facts on a booking sheet to establish evidence against a person that isn’t true. Maybe police officers are not doing it maliciously, but if their job is to seek out evidence, they may interpret things incorrectly. There are many debates of the expansive discretion that law enforcement has to determine whether to take a person’s freedom away. If a police officer testifies that a defendant committed a crime, that testimony is treated as a verifiable fact, even if impeachment comes into play. What is a defendant to do when their word is not treated as verifiable on an equal ground and a police officer is insistent on accusing them of a criminal act? Again, that puts innocent people in the position where they have to prove their innocence when it should be the other way around. An innocent person will instead just plead guilty to avoid a harsher sentence.
Not to mention the other weapons that the US justice system gives to the Prosecutor arsenal. . . “charge-stacking (charging more or more serious crimes than the conduct really merits), legislatively-ordered mandatory-minimum sentences, pretrial detention with unaffordable bail, threats to investigate and indict friends or family members, and the so-called trial penalty.” (Clark Neily for NBC News). Basically, this means that if anyone is charged of a crime, you are very likely to get a criminal conviction even if you are innocent unless you pay top dollar for an incredible attorney who can call in some favors with the DA. The court system is actually stacked against innocent people, particularly if they are a minority or if they are impoverished.
What happened to Trump, happens to we common folk every day. But several Democrats were hoping for and now are celebrating the indictment showing their true colors. They don’t care and never have cared about criminal justice reform.
Let’s think hypothetically, you are going 55 MPH in a 45 MPH zone. The red and blue lights flicker behind you. You pull over. Who knows why, but one thing leads to another, and the officer says, “step out of the vehicle.” Now you are scared. You ask why. He refuses to tell you. You ask again. Next thing you know, you are getting maced and yanked out of the car. You are then charged with resisting arrest and some other criminal charges. You now have to spend the next year of your life and then some fighting to prove your innocence (which you may not win in court). For that whole time, you are not free. You may end up serving time or probation for a lesser guilty plea just to put a rest to it.
Your life is ruined. Your reputation is questioned. You may have difficulty looking for employment. Bottom line is the criminal justice system is very imperfect and is hurting people. That hypothetical has very similar facts to an actual event caught on video. If the person who was pulled over wasn’t supposedly an attorney, the outcome might have been very different and that person likely would have been criminally charged. I’m not saying that all police officers are corrupt and out to get us. But we can’t look away and act like police officers never overstep, wrongfully arrest, target someone, or charge someone unfairly. It happens and the criminal justice system needs to amend in response.
But instead, Bragg and Pelosi have decided to worsen this intense sometimes corrupted power of the criminal justice system just so they can get Trump. Consequences be damned. They galvanized the very flawed system that has hurt countless people for their political agendas.
I wonder how that makes the 2% to 10% of convicted individuals that were actually innocent, or the 18 inmates convicted and sentenced to death row that were later exonerated feel. . .
Now, it wouldn’t be fair if I spent this whole article blaming Pelosi and Bragg for perpetuating the severe flaws in our criminal justice system. Republicans are known for the “Back the Blue” movement and their “Tough on Crime” policies. In that hypothetical I mentioned above where a similar circumstance was caught on video, you can see Republicans justifying the police officer’s possible abuse of power in the comment section stating that the person who was pulled over should have just complied when the police officer ordered him out of the car. That’s not how this works. Again, we are presumed innocent, and we have a right to freedom. A police officer cannot just come up and order someone to comply. They cannot force someone out of their vehicle without cause. A person is not obligated to do whatever a police officer says just because he said so. We have rights. Republicans, however, characterize all law enforcement as heroes and that all citizens must comply with everything and anything that they say. They presume that anything the police officer does is correct and justified.
It’s too extreme. They dismiss police brutality and many cases of police abusing their power as “a few bad apples.” But, honestly, police brutality or abuse of power happens far more often than they are willing to admit.
In fact, no they are not all heroes. After the school shooting in Uvalde, those police officers were exposed as power tripping individuals who were more concerned with using their power over the parents who were on the scene by detaining them or threatening to arrest them for demanding that the police go in to save the children. That’s a whole other issue for a whole other day, but it does remind us all that law enforcement goal is sometimes not at all to make the community safe, instead it is only to collect evidence to get a conviction against individuals.
Republicans are very callous about criminal justice. They assume guilt the moment there is an arrest or charge, unless it is a Republican party leader like Trump. A sheriff of a county very close to me loves to go viral. He posts memes about calling up his sheriff’s office to report possible criminals. There’s no dignity in that. It’s in very poor taste that the sheriff’s office is single-mindedly focused on getting as many convictions as they can without recognizing that these are human beings, and their freedom is at stake. But hey, let’s post a meme about it and #BacktheBlue.
I think what agitates me more about Pelosi and some other Democrats, though, is that they pay lip service claiming that they are in favor of criminal justice reform. But all those platitudes are full of you know what. It’s a superficial lie and platform point to turn out the vote and nothing else. Pelosi believes that we are obligated to prove ourselves innocent. Bragg thinks that very contradictory evidence is enough to charge and attempt to pursue a conviction. Just because they are only doing it to Trump doesn’t make it any better. If they are not applying the same standards and using the criminal justice fairly for EVERYONE including a polarizing politician, then they are killing criminal justice reform.
They are killing fairness. They are killing freedom.
Trump will probably be fine (actually maybe not; we live in such a topsy turvy world, normal predictions don’t apply anymore). Trump has a lot of money; he has a lot of power. He has the power to fight the charges. But this indictment just perpetuates a very serious problem in the United States. The court systems are no longer a representation of justice.
The details of the charges against Trump haven’t been released yet, maybe there is something I don’t know. Maybe there is overwhelming evidence to justify a charge. But if not, I’m scared. If the criminal justice system is willing to throw fairness to the wind to charge a former President of the United States, then there is no hope for any of us who run into trouble, a misunderstanding, or maybe something malfeasant.
