What went wrong with the US legal system?

[Admin]

United states officially has "rule of law" meaning that instead of actually looking at if some action caused harm the focus is on whether or not some statue was violated.

Often whether or not something is illegal depends on the mental state of the person doing the act which is utterly ridiculous.

A big focus is on things such as intent, if someone causes harm due to stupidity they are facing much (if any) consequences than if someone intentionally violates some law.

 

[Admin]

Law enforcement and prosecutors focused on getting convictions instead of actually making society better
Prosecutors for the sake of their career tend to be very aggressive in getting convictions even if it is total nonsense. This can be getting innocent people just to make statistics look better or going after people who violated some moral dogma.

 

[Admin]

The adversarial legal system
Legal cases in the US is basically a battle between prosecutors trying to get as many people as possible and the defense trying to acquit as many people as possible regardless of the actual reality of the situation.

Sure the judge and jury members might be impartial but those are not the ones who actually do most of the work with the initial investigation. This is made worse by the fact that potential jury members are often removed by prosecutors or the defense which is a whole big joke.

The jury members in particular end up playing a very passive role which is very much problematic, it all comes down to the judge being good but that is very often not the case.

The adverserial system also pushes people to spent excorbitant amounts of money on legal fees which is good for the lawyers but bad for pretty much everyone else.

 

[Admin]

massive crime issues and mass incarceration
Turns out that locking up loads of people often for nonsensical reasons isn't going to just make crime go away.

No amount of torture done to the perpetrator is going to un-murder someone, at best it will deter others but that alone clearly doesn't work.

As comparison sweden used to both be lax when it coma to law enforcement but crime was still rare due to the culture back then discouraging crimes, later that stopped working as well in part due to mass-immigration of people who often did not share those cultural values (little/no loyalty to Sweden).

But even after mismanaging immigration for decades sweden is still a much safer country than the US while having only 10% of the number of prisoners/capita.

That's 6 times the murder rate in Sweden, maybe the second amendment wasn't a very good idea?

 

[Admin]

Discouraging people from talking to authorities about criminal matters
The way the system is set up makes it a bad idea to talk to the police under pretty much any circumstances and a lot of criminals know this. Still some people to get into trouble such as due to being innocent of the charge (they might end up pinning some other crime on them).

 

[Admin]

rule of law is how anglos live.

It's gradually falling apart.

The scope of legislation tends to increase exponentially to the point where most people end up unknowingly violate the law, then if there is someone the government dislikes they will likely find some crime to pin on the individual.

 

[Admin]

Psychiatry
One rather dystopian example of punishing/torturing people based on mental states is psychiatry. Of course there isn't any reliable way to asses mental states in the first place making the whole thing very arbitrary.

https://vintologi.com/threads/psychiatry-horror-stories.267/

So on paper you have a "rule of law" situation but the laws allow for arbitrarely detaining people and this will of course get increasingly weaponized as government official wants more power.

 

[Admin]

Enforcing feminism and christian fundamentalism
One big issue with law enforcement is that often laws are based on enforcing religious insanity rather than what's actually good for society.

Feminism is of course a big issue in many western countries but the draconian punishments often given in united states make it a lot worse there.

The age of Consent in US states is also a lot higher overall than other areas and those laws will be a lot more strictly enforced there than europe (where authorities are much more willing to ignore idiotic laws when there isn't any real harm).

A big reason for the higher AoC in the US is the christian morality that opposes sex outside marriage, this has enabled christians to ban people as old as 17 from having sex (they cannot vote) which end up screwing over a lot of young people.

https://www.freerangekids.com/what-is-the-most-common-age-of-a-sex-offender-surprise/

 

[Admin]

Innocent people being pressured into taking plea bargains
In the US people are often given the option to plead guilty in favor of a much more lenient sentence.

This is great for criminals who can get off much easier while it screws over people who are actually innocent. Even if you are innocent you might still not want to go through trial where even if you are found "not guilty" of one charge you might still end up being convicted on some other charge, there are a lot of crimes which they can try to pin on you.

Innocent people also get convicted sometimes due to prosecutors being skilled at maniupating the jury in addition to the prosecutor being able to remove members from the jury who would be too critical.

 

[Admin]

Lawfare
The american legal system basically allows anyone to sue anyone for any reason resulting in a lot of innocent people feeling obliged to pay loads of money in legal fees in order to defend themselves against these nonsense lawsuit.

A lot of states have attempted to 'fix' this by anti-slapp laws but that does not actually adress the fundamental problem and people are still circumventing it by suing in one of the states that do not yet have such legislation.

In that case they did manage to avoid paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees but that's not always the case unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7EmO9uVB-Y

The complexity and bureaucracy of the system makes it very hard for people who are not lawyers to navigate the system. Thus we end up in a situation where lawiers get loads of resources while loads of innocent people get financially destroyed by exorbitant legal fees.

mariocerame wrote:

Jeez man, annihilated? I dunno.... but it is a good result though especially for pro bono work. I would add that we had a complex decision tree for some 7 additional steps after removal:

1) seek sanctions if they didn't amend their complaint to have a non-frivolous cause of action, then
2) challenge personal jurisdiction in OH, then
3) if we were still in OH
3a) try to apply foreign anti-SLAPP laws from FL, TX, NJ, or VA, which may or may not work; or
3b) if they lost on PJ in OH then anti-SLAPP motions in whatever relevant jurisdiction they took it to, being FL, TX, NJ, or VA, then
4) challenge whatever non-contractual claim they amended, if possible, in a m/dismiss, then
5) challenge subject matter jurisdiction as to the preliminary injunctive relief sought, to narrow the issues, then
6) we'd be using the discovery process to bolster the factual basis of your video and prepare for the m/summary judgment after discovery, and,
7) if and only if appropriate based on facts uncovered, refer the matter to a gov't agency for review. We had all this planned out, as well as what was discussed in the video, before we demanded they amend or withdraw. We knew what we would do and were ready to do all this and knew we could do all this. Only then we made a demand.

 

[Admin]

Special interest groups pushing through harmful laws
Corporations will have a big financial incentive to push through legislation that will benefit them.

One common method for buying influence is legal donations to politicians to help them get re-elected.

 

[Admin]

Judges appointed by politicians
In order to become a judge in the US you first need to please enough politicians to get appointed in the first place and you then need to continue pleasing them to get promoted.

Judges who fail to please politicians will not get promoted to higher offices and they may even risk getting impeached.

Congress and the president can also just increase the number of supreme court justices by passing a law to "pack the court" which does not require larger majority than passing some other law.

 

[Admin]

Defaults
In the US you lose by default if you do not show up when you have been served a lawsuit, this is a big problem since people may miss that they have a trial to attend to or have other obligations.