New Yorker magazine has an interesting article on a seventeen-year-old who was jailed on Rikers Island for three years awaiting a trial that never occurred.
As with most American journalism, the writer does not ask or answer the question “Compared to what?” Do other states do better or worse in terms of compliance with the Speedy Trial Act? The writer implies that New York is performingly poor yet the article does not explain why New York State, which is among the higher-income states (rank), which collects a larger percentage of residents’ income than any other state (Tax Foundation), and which does not have a high crime rate (ranking), cannot deal with accused criminals more expeditiously.
The entire system is scary. If you have even a modicum of intellect or money, you can get yourself treated reasonably by authorities. If you are poor or (worse) dumb, and the authorities don’t like you, you could be in for a terrible experience with our justice system.
Edit
My earlier post comes from comments made by a criminal lawyer friend.
I would say, that compared to anywhere, languishing 3 years in prison without a trial is unacceptable. The right to a speedy trial was codified in our Constitution and understood even 200+ years ago to be a basic right.
We once had a functioning legal system along with a lot of other functioning systems. Maybe they were not perfect (innocent people executed now and then) but if you committed a crime and were caught, you would be tried (and maybe executed, for better or for worse) in a matter of months. Now you have situations like this one or like that of Mumia Abu Jamal, who murdered a police officer in 1981 and was on death row undergoing endless appeals until 2011 (30 years) when his sentence was finally commuted to life. No one sane can say that a system that allows a case to remain in court for 30 years is speedy or rational.
Likewise, sclerosis has infected the rest of our society – the original NY subway system was dug in less than 4 years from start to finish. The much shorter 2nd Avenue subway line has been under construction (intermittently) since 1972 and will be completed “as early as 2029”. The Empire State Building was built in 410 days. 13 years after the destruction of 9/11, the replacement building is still not complete even though construction began in 2006. It is sort of like the Tin Woodsman, who lost his limbs bit by bit until there was nothing left but tin. There was never a single day when we could say that we were a vital society the day before and had lost the thread the next day, but bit by bit we have lost it and it’s pretty glaringly obvious by now and no one knows how to get back on the right path.
Great article! I hope the young man gets a good settlement out of it, at least.
I would like to learn more about potential prosecutor abuse of citizen’s civil rights via the plea bargain system, or efforts/measures in place to prevent this from happening.
It seems from this article and others I have read that prosecutors often have far too much power to compel innocent persons to confess to crimes they did not commit, through the misuse of the plea bargaining process. It seems scandalous.
I would like to know more about this issue, if anyone can suggest any good reads on this subject.
Ken: On the plea bargaining process, see the classic Torture and Plea Bargaining paper that I just added.
New York’s highest court addressed this ongoing speedy trial issue on April 8, 2014 see People v Sibblies. The case law decision was split. Nonetheless, in both opinions the Justices acknowledge prosecutor courtroom gamesmanship. I am hoping this will lead to better accountability in New York’s court system.
The key concept in the paper is ” how criminal justice systems respond when their trial procedures fall into deep disorder”. So the author starts out, even before he begins, with the premise (IMHO, correct) that our system is already in deep disorder. Seen this way, the trial delays and misuse of the plea bargaining process to compel confessions are not a disease but SYMPTOMS of a disease. Even if you got rid of those symptoms, the underlying “deep disorder” would still exist. Something like 95% of all cases are plea bargained – if we did away with the plea bargaining system, we would need to hold TWENTY times more trials, for which we would need (something like) TWENTY TIMES more courtrooms, judges, juries, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, court reporters, bailiffs, etc. As a society, we are just not willing or able to devote that level of resources to criminal justice (especially for defendants who in many cases are quite obviously guilty, having been caught in the act, on video, etc.) Even though US crime rates have fallen, they are still high by the standards of many societies and we are just not in a position to give every criminal the full trial that he is (theoretically) entitled to.
Jackie: There is some tension between how we want to think about our society and what we are willing to pay for. We want to think of ourselves as providing accused criminals with every opportunity for a fair trial. So we pass a lot of laws that give accused criminals protections. This costs us nothing except paper on which to print the new laws. But then we wouldn’t want to pay for a system that gave every criminal a full trial under those laws. So, as Langbein notes in the classic paper, we crank up the penalties following a conviction so that they far exceed the sentences meted out to the convicted-of-mass-murder defendants at the Nuremberg trials. This forces criminals to accept pleas. New York has apparently added a twist of simply keeping defendants in jail for about the same amount of time as they would have been in prison if they had been convicted.
We could run 20 times the number of trials that we do, even with the same resources devoted to courts. But the trials would have to be streamlined to the point that we couldn’t congratulate ourselves on the fairness of the process and it would become obvious that at least some innocent people were being convicted. (Whereas today if an innocent person takes a plea we don’t find out about it.)
Phil,
I agree with what you are saying but it seems to me that you should be able to strike a happy medium somewhere. As outlined in the torture article, in the olden days, one jury might have (poorly) judged 20 felony trials in one day whereas nowadays the O.J. Simpson trial ran for 134 days and Abu Jamal had appeals on various grounds heard in dozens of different courts over 30 years (while OTOH 95% of defendants never get a trial). We will never achieve perfect justice but we could get a lot closer using the same amount of resources (or maybe even less) if say half of all cases (the ones that are the most “open and shut”) were still plea bargained and the average duration of trial for the remaining ones was cut to a day or two with a single appeal possible. Such a system would probably have FEWER innocent people imprisoned than the current one. I’m not familiar with European systems of justice but I’m guessing that (as is the case with medical care) it’s possible to achieve equally good or even better results using far less money if your society hasn’t lost its marbles.
Again, the current situation seems symptomatic of a society that is afflicted with (indeed is in the terminal stages of) some sort of disease where all common sense and sense of proportion has been lost. It should not take 134 days for a trial (and then the jury STILL gets it wrong). We go on pretending that the system is still functional even though our society has jumped the shark long ago.