Are You a Felon???

[Kurr]

If BBI and Hough are correct then I thank you both for educating me.

 

[BehindBlueI's]

If BBI and Hough are correct then I thank you both for educating me.

NBD. People get a very skewed idea about how the criminal justice system actually works because their exposure is media portrayal (terrible) and Hollywood portrayal (terrible).

Remember when any theft in Indiana was a felony? Up until about 2012, IIRC. So by the letter of the law, steal a candy bar and it's a felony. Marion County would not prosecute on items less than $10 unless you were a serial thief (not to be confused with a cereal thief, but that's another story). So $11 is a felony, right? Not really, because again unless you were a serial thief they would reduce it to a criminal conversion charge, a misdemeanor. Then if it was your first offense you could get a diversion and end up with no conviction at all if you did your probation and didn't get in trouble again.

Most low level non-violent felonies were also eligible for 'felony diversion', in that you got a felony conviction but if you didn't reoffend it dropped to a misdemeanor conviction or was dropped from your record entirely.

Guys who eat felonies on dumb stuff tend to be doing an awful lot of dumb stuff over and over and over...

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Guys who eat felonies on dumb stuff tend to be doing an awful lot of dumb stuff over and over and over...

And guys that commit violent felonies tend to commit violent felonies over and over and over... Those are the ones that need to be eliminated from society. But that would require prosecutors like Mears to be removed from the practice of law and government "service".

 

[ditcherman]

And ignore the fact that they'd have to be detected, prosecuted, convicted on, and no diversion given.

In my head I heard "injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected".
Maybe because Alice's Restaurant is pretty much perfectly on topic here?

 

[Leadeye]

633,654 moonshiners? Wow that's surprising.

 

[BE Mike]

One possible aid to help solve the problem is to actually prosecute offenders. I see, everyday, on the news that so and so was arrested in Louisville for shooting someone. Yesterday a 9 year old kid was shot, along with many others. In the majority of cases the offenders are convicted felons in possession of a firearm. There are laws for minimum sentences for felons in possession of a firearm while committing a crime. The offender can be charged with that in addition to the main offense. That law might as well not be on the books. We need more police, judges, courts, jails as well as, certain and swift prosecution. The current trend does not do justice to our society of mostly honest, law abiding citizens. If we put recidivists behind bars, the shootings will slow significantly. Not only are they understaffed, but police officers in many localities are ham strung by liberals. The criminal element knows this and aren't in the least deterred. Proactive policing helps get the guns out of the hands of the criminal element, but is rejected by liberals who run these big cities.

 

[DadSmith]

These guys are having the same discussion.

 

[JAL]

You can sit with me on the Group W bench.

Only after you go out and help pick up all the garbage. Then you qualify for the Group W Bench.

John

 

[BigRed]

Amazon product ASIN B00505UZ4G

Bump

"The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance."

 

[JAL]

. . .

Guys who eat felonies on dumb stuff tend to be doing an awful lot of dumb stuff over and over and over...

That's what I've seen in my county. The mopes that get the felony convictions and hard time have been through the system a few times before that, with diversion programs, and then reduction to misdemeanors with probation and perhaps a bit of county jail time. The ones that go straight to the Big Leagues are the serious violent felonies. With rare (deserving) exception, everyone else gets a few chances before that.

That's applicable to the state and county court system where I live. There are other venues that will go after someone with a vengeance using Stalin's "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

John

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

Lavrentiy Beria, the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern Europe, bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone, even the innocent.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” was Beria’s infamous boast. He served as deputy premier from 1941 until Stalin’s death in 1953, supervising the expansion of the gulags and other secret detention facilities for political prisoners. He became part of a post-Stalin, short-lived ruling troika until he was executed for treason after Nikita Khrushchev’s coup d’etat in 1953.

Beria targeted “the man” first, then proceeded to find or fabricate a crime. Beria’s modus operandi was to presume the man guilty, and fill in the blanks later. By contrast, under the United States Constitution, there’s a presumption of innocence that emanates from the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments, as set forth in Coffin vs. U.S. (1895).

 

[Mgderf]

You can sit with me on the Group W bench.

You do realize that there are father rapers on the group W bench, don't you?

You've got a lot of damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself...

 

[ditcherman]

You do realize that there are father rappers on the group W bench, don't you?

You've got a lot of damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself...

Technically, it’s actually a little worse than this.

 

[jbombelli]

 

[Mgderf]

Technically, it’s actually a little worse than this.

Damn autocorrect...