how would you write the Constitutional law?

[mellowtigger]

A serious problem that I saw in Trump's first term was the significant delay (even when he was no longer President) in filing prosecution for illegal acts seen committed over the 4 previous years. Delay almost 4 more years while Biden was President, then finally send things to court shortly before the next election. What? Why wait? Even the Mueller report about Trump obstruction of justice during the first presidency was basically just a document saying, "Somebody should do something about this, but it won't be me."

Trial is supposed to be speedy, which means two things need to happen.

Click to read my thoughts and the example of my kin...

1) Charges must be filed, and 2) Defense must be given opportunity to collect their own evidence. Delays in either process can harm the potential for actual justice to happen. With each delay, evidence is lost to simple entropy or willful destruction, and witnesses forget details... or worse, construct inaccurate history. For #1, we have the statute of limitations. I don't always agree with the numbers, but at least they are clear and impartial. For #2, however, things are murky, and I desire clarity.

I think about it now because of this particular case:

• A relative of mine is held in county jail, accused of murdering another relative of mine. (search jail records with Booking # "57369-2024" here, and news story here).
• The deceased was killed on 2023 December 27.
• Jail records show the defendant was booked on 2024 Feb 06.
• It is now almost 1.5 years later, but the defendant is still in county jail.

I wonder, because my own short 1.5 days in county jail brought me zero knowledge of how I was even supposed to contact a lawyer while I was there, and my cat needed water and food back home. What is the justification for delay of trial? Not justification in the sense of reasonable explanation of logistics, I mean justification as in ethical cause for incarcerating an innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen? Even for murder, even for murder of my own distant kin, I tend to think that the government should just drop charges if they cannot make their case within a year. Yes, a whole lot of criminals would go free and crimes go unpunished. On the whole, though, isn't that better than some innocent people losing portions of their short lifespans to government process? There are innocent-until-proven-guilty people awaiting trial from jail because they cannot afford bond, and some people eventually are judged innocent of the accusation against them. In addition (unrelated to pre-trial in discussion here) some people were wrongfully convicted and sitting in prison, and they number more than a few. All of them are held behind bars, and we should have a good reason for it. That's a product of our authority, government acting on our behalf.

I've tried to read about it. This legal case, for example, is eye-opening. That murder case took 7 years to bring to trial. I understand that the Sixth Amendment grants right to speedy trial in federal cases, and I understand that the Fourteenth Amendment extends that right to state prosecutions as part of "due process". That Sixth Amendment, though, is short. What does "speedy" mean in practice?

The devil is in the details, as they say. I don't know how I would write the code that determines justice in the courts. Do you have any thoughts?

Comments

[mtbc]

The judicial system may just need some more money thrown at it. From queueing theory, we know that a small underresourcing can become a large backlog.

Separately, I bet if lawyers had to get their cases together faster, they'd find a way, although with much ignorable bleating.

[mellowtigger]

Funding, yes. Selectivity seems important too. I have too many conflicting thoughts, and I don't yet know how to distill a guiding principle out of it.

Somehow, there's always more money to build jails. Or, occasionally the reverse, as we sometimes see in the USA that it seems that lawmakers try to create more offenses worthy of jail, so that for-profit prisons can drain more money from taxpayers. This goal prioritizes the wrong thing for the sake of capitalism.

What if it was literally a written rule that jails could contain only [x]% of the population, ever, and unjailable convicts should be released to their freedom. Force somebody to choose where to spend their limited source of taxpayer dollars for the good of the community, since the source of money could not be endlessly refilled. Would it make them choose the most dangerous people, or would it mean that the deciders were even more prone to bribery?

What if public defenders were always guaranteed more money than public prosecutors? Would the prosecutors then have to choose where prosecution was best applied? Would they go after the most deadly offenders? Or would it mean that corporate crime would go even more ignored than it does now, because they can afford even better privately-funded legal research in their own defense, making successful convictions unlikely?

Justice is a problem. I don't know how to fix it. :( I do know that demarchy (random citizens chosen for a government duty) of the 12-citizen jury trial is still the single most-trusted part of government in the USA these days. There must be ways of applying that principle to other areas of government, even within the judicial branch which is the only place we currently find it.