alt Hacker NewsSuppose you're charged with two crimes in two separate courts. The first is jaywalking, the second is murder, but the judge is given unlimited discretion to determine sentencing.
To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking.
The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere.
Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
Replies
That's not possible because jaywalking has a maximum penalty, and the judge can't exceed that maximum penalty.
A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice.
What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections.
Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time.
Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else.
[1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
Thats not how it works or what happened.
You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
> Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
It doesn't work like that, and I wouldn't be satisfied by a court system that does work like that. It'd fucking disastrous. If anyone convinces you that it does work like that, they are either a scammer, or want to make the law system _very_ scary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_St... which have been there for _many_ years. Its a common law principle that at least twice as old as the USA.