You really need to have evidence to support your assertion. Also the very story you linked provided a reason why charges were not filed.
All I know she often refuse to press charge to known criminal. Let's put this way, is there any logical reason why it is a known carjacking and the retired officer shoot one dead and they were let go.
Unfortunately now, "I don't want to look bad" politics in Cook County has turned into being very lenient in charging offenders with crimes. That was part of the Kim Foxx platform, reduce convictions.but "I don't want to look bad" politics has put many hundreds of thousands into prison during that time without need.
By the way, America has a greater prison population that countries with several times our population.
We're #1!! We're #1!! We're #1!! America, fuck yeah!!
That's rarely a concern when deciding whether or not to prosecute. In most places they just shovel them in and out faster if there are overcrowding problems, go shorter sentences, but get the convictions to supposedly send a message and look tough on crime. If a prosecutor declines to follow up on a case it's probably for some other reasons. It's possible the case against the other two really is wobbly, no prosecutors go after anything but slam dunks. Wins make careers and losses ruin them. Nobody cares about who is actually guilty or not, the scoreboard is the only thing that counts. It's also possible that it's a marginal or bad shooting and that they want the whole thing to go away quickly before it all blows up and they're forced to go after the ex-cop. If I was a gambling man I'd put the ranch on option #2.
You are completely right about prosecutors and their motivations but they could have easily charged them and dropped the charges later without taking a hit to their scorecard. I also think that #2 might be plausible and is something that I hadn't considered.
That's true. It's a shame we've been able to do something material about much of it, drug penalties, for decades, especially in the last dozen years with our current state of science, but "I don't want to look bad" politics has put many hundreds of thousands into prison during that time without need.
Ah well, that's how politics rolls.
Don't be soft on crime, just use the means provided by law to reduce the sentencing possibilities with MJ to start, which I've gone over more than once.The entire "tough on crime" movement is exactly what got us into this position. Our prison population exploded at the same time that crime was generally falling. Today it's still hard for the politicians to do more than small things, luckily some states are but not nearly fast enough. Being labeled "soft on crime" is too scary for a politician. Crime rates today are substantially lower than when we started exploding our prison population.
Actually we have the highest prison population in the world by far both in raw numbers and per capita. We have roughly 25% of the worlds prison population while having a bit over 4% of the world's population. We really really love putting people in jail for very long periods in the US.
The DA in the OP is definitely an outlier and not the norm. The norm is they charge them with a dozen or more crimes so the person is looking at 60 years in jail and then offer them a plea deal for 5 or 10 years. I'm not just talking about these particular assholes BTW, they actually deserve it, but just about every poor bastard that is caught up in the criminal justice system for whatever reason. The last thing a DA wants to do is actually bring a case to trial so they overcharge the shit out of you, tell you that if you take it to trial they will go for the maximum of 60 years (or whatever) but if you take the plea bargain you will only get 5 years. There are a ton of innocent people who have taken plea bargains, granted not all of them resulted in jail time but still a criminal record, because of the insane amount of time they would face if they lost at trial.
Considering all of the above, I find it really hard to believe that the DA couldn't charge these guys.
Your assertion that DA's will overcharge just to get a plea is pretty out of line as much as you might think it is true. I have seen many cases where someone can be charged with dozens of charges and they are only charged with 2 or 3 or so. Most of the prosecutors don't want someone charged with tons of charges since if they need to bring the case in front of a jury they don't want the jury to be confused with multiple charges. I have even seen it where if someone is charged with 5 or 6 charges, they will actually drop charges and only pass through one or two to Grand Jury so as to make the case easier for them.
Now they might hold over them the fact that they can bring more charges in order to get them to plea to the charges they are facing, but they definitely don't normally hit people with a dozen or more charges from the beginning.
- Merg