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As regular readers know, I have, over the last few years, become a critic of our criminal justice system.
It comes under the heading of ‘a conservative is a
liberal who has just been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who
has just been charged.’ I did some work for a TV network back during the
Abramoff “scandal” and, for the life of me, cannot figure out what Jack
Abramoff did wrong except to piss some powerful people off. Yet he
served time in a Federal prison at our expense.
Then came the Harvey Whittemore “scandal” in Nevada,
where Whittemore was accused of raising the $140,000 Harry Reid asked
him to raise, convicted of a felony, and nobody even suggested that Reid
did anything wrong–much less criminal. In short, Harvey was convicted
of pissing off powerful people and is now serving time in a Federal
prison, while Harry is living at the Washington DC Ritz Carlton.
Now, there are powerful people and powerful people. To
many people, some Justice of the Peace in rural Nevada is “powerful” in a
way that he or she should not be–and it’s now time to change that.
As Eric Holder’s investigators correctly found in
Ferguson, Missouri, the “criminal justice” system was being used to
extract money in prodigious amounts from the citizens to fund the cops,
the courts, and who knows what else.
That’s not a surprise to those of us who watch the
system closely. I know that many see this as a racial issue, but the
truth is that the system is busy screwing everybody all the time. It’s
just that many times, middle class white folks in the suburbs are harder
targets because we have lawyers. And the best justice is the justice
you pay for.
A logical solution is to make it illegal to fund the
system with fines, fees, and the like. If that makes some tin horn JP in
Mineral County a part timer, so be it. And if that reduces the workload
of the Las Vegas Justice Court, oh, well…
As Eric Holder’s investigators correctly found in
Ferguson, Missouri, the “criminal justice” system was being used to
extract money in prodigious amounts from the citizens to fund the cops,
the courts, and who knows what else.
That’s not a surprise to those of us who watch the
system closely. I know that many see this as a racial issue, but the
truth is that the system is busy screwing everybody all the time. It’s
just that many times, middle class white folks in the suburbs are harder
targets because we have lawyers. And the best justice is the justice
you pay for.
A logical solution is to make it illegal to fund the
system with fines, fees, and the like. If that makes some tin horn JP in
Mineral County a part timer, so be it. And if that reduces the workload
of the Las Vegas Justice Court, oh, well…
In Nevada, as an example, speeding is a criminal violation, not a civil violation.
That means that when you pay a speeding ticket to make
it go away, you have a criminal record. You plead guilty to a
misdemeanor. It also means the cops can show up at your house if you
fail to pay the ticket and haul you to jail. And cops hauling people to
jail over traffic tickets are NOT policing the streets for violent
crime.
The whole system is a perversion of justice. Cops have
an incentive to write tickets to bring in revenue to make judges happy.
Legislators don’t have to worry about actually funding the court system
because, assuming the cops write enough tickets, it takes care of
itself. Taken to its ridiculous conclusion, you get Ferguson, Missouri,
and plenty of other places.
It’s a hot potato that even the most conservative
elements of our own state legislature are hesitant to deal with because,
for some reason, they are afraid of small town justices of the
so-called peace. What brings it to the forefront is an intelligent
decision on the part of the Nevada Highway Patrol to focus their traffic
enforcement efforts on things that actually cause crashes as opposed to
writing a quota of tickets. This has reduced revenue so much that
judges are crying aloud about funding.
That comes under the heading of a load of crap.
There is a way to solve this problem permanently.
Given the very small turn-out in the last general
election, there has never been a better time to launch things like this
as voter initiative constitutional amendments. Getting the relatively
small number of signatures required and placing an initiative on the
ballot making it illegal to fund the court system with fines and fees
should pass with the kind of numbers that restricting tax increases did.
If the legislature doesn’t like that idea, they should do something themselves before the voters force their hands.
And if the judges don’t like it, they need to remember that they are elected, too.
Right now, we need to get our criminal justice system
under control; and you can start by removing most traffic enforcement
from its jurisdiction. Then, we’ll start looking at other things that
come under the heading of revenue farming.
This post originally appeared on Western Journalism – Equipping You With The Truth
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