Justice, Bail, and Bigo Behaving Badly
Screen grab of Richard Barnett in Speaker Pelosi’s office during January 6th riots at the capitol from WFMT News 2/Getty Images
Remember the guy with his feet up on Pelosi’s desk during the Great Capitol Invasion of ’21? You may or not know that he turned himself in on January 9th on an arrest warrant for his role in the event and has been sitting in jail ever since. He isn’t happy about it, and he let the federal judge presiding over his case know it:
Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man charged with breaking into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and stealing her mail during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, threw a tantrum during a virtual court hearing on Thursday, yelling at the judge and his own lawyers that it wasn’t “fair” that he was still in jail weeks after his arrest.
One of the most recognizable figures from the Capitol assault, Mr. Barnett, 60, was photographed on Jan. 6 with his feet up on a desk in Ms. Pelosi’s office and a cattle-prod-like stun gun dangling from his belt.
From the moment he was taken into custody, he has waged an ongoing — and so far, unsuccessful — effort to be freed on bond, and he loudly lost his patience with the process at an otherwise routine hearing in front of Judge Christopher Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington.
Alright, first let’s address the schadenfreude felt by those of us who can’t help but find satisfaction in seeing these rioters facing consequences. I wonder if Mr. Barnett or any of his pals screamed about unfairness for those jailed for participating in last summer’s riots, or for the thousands of non-violent offenders who stay locked up pre-trial? I know which side of that bet I’d place my money on if I had to choose. I’m not proud of the frisson of joy I feel at Barnett’s predicament, for reasons I will get to shortly.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s discuss what he did, what he continues to do, and why it is that he is still sitting behind bars. Barnett, who calls himself “Bigo”, is one of the most recognizable faces from the riots at the Capitol, sitting with his feet up on the Speaker’s desk and later holding up an envelope he took from her office. According to Barnett, “I did not steal it. I bled on it because they were macing me and I couldn’t fucking see so I figured I am in her office. I got blood on her office. I put a quarter on her desk even though she ain’t fucking worth it,” Barnett told one news outlet, according to the complaint. “And I left her a note on her desk that says, ‘Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch.’”
Barnett’s charges include theft of public property, violent entry, disorderly conduct, and knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted area. When he was taken into custody, Barnett told police they could not prove his participation in the riots because he is smart. He also admitted to being in the Capitol and bragged about his visit to the Speaker’s office. Prosecutors asked that he be held without bail, alleging that he was a danger to society. In support, they pointed out the stun gun hanging from his belt while in the Capitol, as well as social media posts in which he indicated his willingness to leave this world “kicking and screaming, covered in someone else’s blood.” The judge who arraigned him, Chief Judge Beryl Howell, agreed, calling Barnett “brazen, entitled, and dangerous.”
Here we are 2 months later, and the 60-year-old Barnett is still behind bars, despite his ongoing attempts to be released. Most of the others who have been arrested for their participation in the rioting are out of jail. Barnett went before his trial judge today, who is a different judge than the one who arraigned him. When this judge, Judge Christopher Cooper, set Barnett’s next court date for May, Barnett displayed his incredibly bad impulse control and judgment by screaming at the Court. He yelled that he did not want to spend another month in jail (sorry Bigo but it’s actually more like two?), that it wasn’t fair, and it was “a bunch of crap.” He accused prosecutors of deliberately dragging things out.
Stunningly, his tantrum failed to persuade the Court to set him free, but the judge did agree to revisit the issue if Barnett’s lawyers file a motion.
As a lawyer with a fair amount of experience in criminal law and a person who disagrees with the bail system in general, I have a lot of thoughts on this. First of all, was it fair in the first place to hold Barnett without bond?1It was inarguably within the judge’s discretion, but was it fair? The basic intent of a bond is to secure the accused’s appearance, not to be punitive. Often, the defendant puts up money or property as collateral, knowing bail can be forfeited to the government if he or she fails to show up in court. Quite often, it is a family member’s money or property at stake, which can make a person either more conscientious about honoring bond conditions, or less for those who care only about what they themselves have to lose. Bail amounts are not supposed to be the same for everyone and every crime, but are to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Underlying factors vary from state to state and state to federal, but generally a judge will consider 1)the defendant’s propensity to flee, abscond, or simply not appear; 2)the likelihood that the person will commit more crimes if allowed to be free; and 3)the seriousness of crimes charged (under the theory that a person facing serious charges carrying long sentences is more likely to flee.) In evaluating these factors, a judge may look to the accused’s criminal history, community ties, strength of the state’s case, and other considerations.
In my own humble opinion, the bail system is fundamentally unfair. In federal court, requiring a cash bond is rare – more often the bond is simply a promise to abide by certain rules and conditions set by the judge – while it is very common in state courts. The vast majority of people who find themselves in the criminal justice system do not have the means to purchase their freedom if bail is more than a few hundred dollars, and sometimes not even then. If you are poor, you get to stay in jail while a person of means, all other things being equal, can be free. I will go a step further and profess my belief that many non-violent crimes (shoplifting, theft, destruction of property, disorderly conduct, drug charges, etc) should not require pretrial detention or bail at all, barring special circumstances (such as a history of fleeing or missing court.)
How do I apply this reasoning to Mr. Bigo Barnett? Not easily, I confess. Theft of an envelope? Big meh. And under normal circumstances, I would say that the other charges against him, which amount to trespassing and disorderly conduct, are likewise not the type of crimes that warrant bail, let alone pretrial detention. But this was not the local WalMart; he invaded the very seat of our government, carrying a weapon, having already warned he wasn’t afraid to die violently. These are federal charges, carrying a lot more time than they would in a state court (in my jurisdiction, this particular combination of charges would be misdemeanors and a person would likely not serve time, but if they did, the absolute max would be something like 2 years in jail.) I don’t know Mr. Barnett’s criminal record, though I would expect it would have made it into one of these linked articles if he had one. Then there is the fact that he turned himself in, a check mark in his favor. Releasing him on bond does not seem unreasonable to me.
But these decisions are not made in a vacuum, and that his crime involved the Speaker of the House is the elephant in the room. Barnett’s own lawyer theorizes that were it not for that infamous picture of Barnett in Nancy Pelosi’s office, he would have been released already. He’s probably right; you can’t violate the personal space of a powerful person like that and not expect harsh repercussions, fair or not. And I posit that it is not. By that I mean not that the repercussions shouldn’t be harsh, but that the Speaker is not more deserving of safety and security than any of the rest of us.
On the other hand, one can hardly show less respect for law and authority than Bigo did by participating in an assault on the security of the Capitol. Lack of respect for the law suggests a lack of respect for the justice system. After all, why would he show up and capitulate to the power of the court of the country whose very governance he sought to overthrow? His crimes sound minor in nomenclature, but the implications are anything but.
One might think that Barnette would be humbled by his predicament and want to show the Court his willingness to respect its process, and to respect the judge. Mr. Barnett has not, as evidenced by his tantrum. It is frustrating to be caught in the slow grinding wheels of the criminal justice system. His complaint of having to wait another month and his accusations that this is a deliberate slow-walk by the prosecution is laughable to those of us who are familiar with the life cycle of a criminal case. Languishing without bail for months waiting for a trial is not a rarity. Mr. Barnett is, unfortunately, getting an immersive course in much of what we libs have been yelling about for a long time.
He doesn’t see it that way, I reckon. The way he is being treated is ok for those other people, but not for him. He thinks it is an outrage that he would be left sitting behind bars. He feels entitled to a bond. Just as he felt entitled to scream at a federal judge when he didn’t get that bond. Just as he felt entitled to have his preferred candidate given the presidency. Just as he felt entitled to storm past security and into the Capitol when he didn’t get the president he wanted. Just as he felt entitled to put his feet up on the Speaker’s desk.
What would I tell Mr. Barnett if he were my client? Right now, I’d be telling him that after his performance today, he will be very lucky to see freedom any time in the near future. I’ve had angry clients before, including some who were just as or more disrespectful to the Court as he was. Some judges roll with it, like Judge Cooper seems to have done; others are a bit pettier and would absolutely find a way to make a defendant regret that kind of outburst. I’d tell Mr. Barnett that I would be issuing an apology on his behalf to the judge, and I’d let him know he had done nothing to convince the Court he is not a person who should stay locked up.
Does he deserve to be given a bond? In my opinion, probably yes, but no more so than any other person charged with the crimes he is accused of. Not because his cause was righteous or because his actions were justified. Not because he’s Bigo Barnett, the very reincarnation of George Patton. He deserves a bond, because in my opinion, most accused but not convicted criminals should have one. Or better yet, not be detained pretrial at all.
That’s my opinion, but if I don’t get my way, I won’t throw a tantrum about it.
- “Bail” and “bond” are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Bond is the promise to abide by rules and conditions and to return to court. Sometimes a condition of bond is the deposit of money or real property interest, and that is “bail.” In federal court, bail is not as common and it is not as easy to “pay your way out of jail”. Mr. Barnett was denied bond of any sort.
Like a lot of white men, he’s most upset that he is being held to the standards of (in his mind) black criminals. He’s a classic misdirecting narcissistic snowflake. I pity him but have little sympathy for him.
We used to shoot people who tried to overthrow the government after all.Report
The Speaker…
1) attracts random nuts.
2) is subject to politically motivated violence and intimidation.
3) is a symbol of many things in this country.
All that implies that keeping her safe and secure is harder and more important than normal.Report
Barnett was part of a group of people who entered the Capitol with apparent and in some cases explicit intent to disrupt a proceeding of Congress, a proceeding fundamental to completing a Presidential election. It was therefore itself a particularly deep and sensitive affront to the lawful, peaceful government of the country.
That’s before we consider that at least some of his co-conspirators announced an intent to engage in violence, in some cases bloody violence, to take the very lives of legislators and of the Vice-President of the United States (for whom the famous scaffold was avowedly intended).
It wasn’t the same thing as breaking into, say, a private lawyer’s office and effing around with his mail. That’d have been bad, but, as you say, something the judicial system would have looked at with a degree of moderation. Barnett was attempting to disrupt the rule of law itself. This offense should be considered very serious indeed.
Then we can consider his overt lack of remorse and vocal contempt for the system of law in whose clutches he has found himself, and what those things say about the degree to which he presents a flight risk or a propensity to commit further crimes.
Keep him on ice until his trial. If the jury finds him guilty, maximum sentence within the guidelines.Report
“…kicking and screaming, covered in someone else’s blood.”
That sounds like a pretty good reason to deny bail. The truth shan’t set him free.Report
That phrase is from a meme. He just thought he was clever for adopting it.Report
Too clever by half, as it turns out, eh?Report
Interesting idea: Lock his ass up and “forget” to give him a trial. Then, whenever someone claims that The American Criminal Justice System Would Never Treat A White Man This Way, we point to Bigo and say “well, here’s this guy…”Report
Well, the federal system, anyway, which is a lot less inclined to consider local politics.Report
Well said, and abolish cash bail.Report
You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.Report
Cash bail should be abolished but I am having a very hard time gathering even the smallest iota of sympathy for the exurban white supremacists who want to end democracy because it means having to share it with people who are not white, male, heterosexual, and nominally Christian. The dude seems to be the living example of the “remembering everything and learning nothing” combined with Cartman’s “respect mah authority.”Report
This is one of the comments we’ll be able to point to in a couple of years when we argue about cash bail again.Report
Which part? The part where he says that cash bail should be abolished? Or the part where he says that cash bail should be abloished?Report
The lack of sympathy part.
Hey, I think that cash bail should be abolished too! But I have a very hard time gathering even the smallest iota of sympathy for… You live in New Jersey, right? Let’s look at the Newark Police Blotter for the last 24 hours.
But I have a very hard time gathering even the smallest iota of sympathy for someone who engages in aggravated assault, burglary, criminal mischief, unlawful possession of a weapon (bat), terroristic threats, and simple assault.
I have a very hard time gathering even the smallest iota of sympathy for someone who engages in aggravated assault, burglary, possession of a weapon (gun), and child endangerment.
I have a very hard time gathering even the smallest iota of sympathy for someone who engages in burglary and violation of a restraining order.
I’m opposed to cash bail, though.
How much sympathy do you have for someone who violates restraining orders, Kazzy?Report
And then we’ll have a long, pointless debate about the supposed contradiction between Saul’s thoughts on cash bail and his feelings about somebody who wants out.Report
Hey, I’m just going out of my way to explain how little sympathy I have for someone who endangers a child.
How could you possibly be opposed to that?Report
Who’s opposed to that, if that’s what you’re doing?Report
I’m just pleased that we’ve established that we have no sympathy for people who commit certain classes of crime.
For the record, I’m opposed to cash bail.
See you here in 3 years!Report
Who, other than you, said “no” sympathy?
Saul said he had little sympathy, and yes, most of us feel the same way about ordinary criminals as well.
Why try to gin up a hypocrisy charge?Report
No you are going out of your way to express sympathy for anti-democracy insurrectionists and to troll the libs.
I disagree with the characterization that he was merely trespassing and merely stole an envelope. He willingly joined a failed coup that wished to reverse a democratic and fair election where 81 million people voted for Biden and 74 million people voted for Trump. This is not a small gap.
We have seen countless ramblings of people try to downplay or deny the humanity of people who vote Democratic to rationalize a false belief that Republicans are a majority party. You are defending this implicitly if not explicitly.
You can think cash bail needs to be eliminated but someone is guilty of serious crimes.Report
I’m not expressing sympathy for anybody. If you want my opinion of Richard Barnett, it is that he is stupid, entitled, and, according to all of the evidence that was publicly broadcast by him and his buddies, guilty as hell of going into Pelosi’s office and stealing an envelope (leaving a couple of quarters behind notwithstanding) AMONG OTHER THINGS.
I hope you found reading that as edifying as I found writing it.
Edit: Apparently, I need to add “allegedly” to that.Report
Every single ‘someone who engages in’ in that post needs to say ‘someone who is alledged to have engaged in’.Report
Oh, we’re applying that now, are we?
Mutandis mutatis.Report
Bigo hasn’t been convicted of anything as yet, meaning that so far he, too, is “alledged” to have engaged in criminal conduct.Report
Yes?
Have I said otherwise?
I literally have an entire post below about whether or not he should be released pre-trial, and I don’t take any position on his guilt or not. And I’m pretty careful to say things like ‘the actions he did’ and not ‘these specific crimes he did’. Unlike Jaybird, who straight-up listed charged crimes as if they were things that had been done by the people waiting for trial, which is why I said that.
And, yes, I know that often ‘allegedly’ is used even for the _facts_, which is fine when the facts are in dispute. But I’m not going to use ‘allegedly’ to refer to undisputed facts like ‘Was physically inside Pelosi’s office’ during the events of January 6th’. He was not ‘allegedly’ there, he _was_ there under any normal level of proof we use in discussions.
There are allegations that being there was criminal behavior, and charges have been filed against him for that. The government then has to prove these actions happened (Which they did happen, but still needs proving) and that such a thing violates under criminal law. At which point we can say he’s guilty of whatever crime he’s found guilty of.Report
If we agree on the policy (e.g., abolish cash bail) do we also have to agree on who we are sympathetic towards?
Isn’t it in fact BETTER if we can agree on policy regardless of who we are sympathetic towards?
I mean, in the future debate where Saul says he opposes cash bail, are you going to… wave in his face that he… previously opposed cash bail?Report
No. I honestly think that we’re going to have cash bail for a good long while.
And we will be debating how we should get rid of it for a good long while.
We should get rid of it!
I don’t have any sympathy for criminals, though! Especially the bad ones. Violent ones? No sympathy at all.Report
I agree that we should get rid of cash bail.
As does Saul.
A COALITION IS FORMING!Report
I’m not sure I have sympathy in general.
It seems something that would lead to sub-optimal choices so it shouldn’t play a role in policy evaluations.
Having said that, I’m cool with various cities trying “cashless bail” to see how it works in practice.
I understand (and agree with) the theory on why we should be moving towards that… but humans are complex and there could easily be negative complications.
My expectation is we’ll find there are classes of crimes (ignoring restraining orders comes to mind) where we should be replacing “bail” (which in practice means no-bail) with just “no-bail”.Report
Unless I’m missing something, what’s actually on the table with this guy is…
1) Right Extremist
2) Serious gun rights supporter
3) Serious Trump supporter.
We don’t actually know if race is on his radar much less “white supremacist”. He could be that too, but he doesn’t have to be.
This guy was/is insisting on his own facts. Trump won, ergo Nancy is a villain, ergo this guy is a hero for opposing her, ergo the system should respect that.
There’s a Loony Toon aspect to this. He’s about 5 steps over the cliff and now that he’s realized that, he’s started to fall. He wasn’t supposed to fall [i.e. be the criminal villain], that wasn’t the plan.
The real question should be how dangerous is he, not how big a symbol is he. However everything he’s done so far indicates he’s not dealing with reality and combined with his love of firearms and willingness to take the law into his own hands that’s not a great combo.Report
I left it out, but he calls himself a white nationalist. Because he loves his nation and he is white, he explained.Report
Fair enough. I didn’t find that when I did my 5 minutes of research on him.Report
But the fact that people are downplaying what the Video Game Freikorps/anti-democracy insurrectionists did is revealing.Report
I feel the question of ‘Is a specific person being held officially pre-trial via the court system just?’ is very different than the question of ‘Does the bail system work?’
Here, the court system _formally_ decided to not release him. Which…at least is honest. You can disagree with it, but at least it actually did what it was trying to do on purpose, via a formal decision by the court. One that could be argued against.
I, like I have always said, believe that the threshold for ‘not being released pre-trial’ should be _really_ high, because in this day and age, going on the run as a private middle-class or lower citizen is nearly impossible, you can’t travel one state over and reinvent yourself, and the only people we should really be holding without bail are the people rich enough to flee to non-extradition countries, with enough internationally-based wealth they can still access it. For upper-middle class people, we might need to freeze access to some of their back accounts. For the poor person who is barely paying his rent…the guy isn’t going to flee. What’s he going to flee in? Does he have a passport? Can he even _afford_ a passport?
That said, there is the issue of other people supporting people like, which is probably why he _offically_ didn’t get bail instead of the ‘unreasonably high’ bail that a lot of people get: Because the far-right has demonstrated they will hand huge amounts of bail money over to anyone they like. Would they hide an outright fugitive? Would some far-right billionaire spirit them out of the country on their private jet? I don’t know, but I do remember Eric Rudolph had community help evading authorities.
So it sorta comes down to what sort of person he seems to be. Is he the sort of person who would flee? There is the major point he turned himself in, so seems likely to show up for court? OTOH, there is the point that he seems to have basically no respect for the court, so maybe would be willing to flee?
This is one of those situations where I honestly don’t have an opinion and think the court should decide…except I’m not sure it’s using the correct determinations. Then again, I’m not privy to its thoughts.
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But all of that really has no connection to whether the bail system is a good idea. It is not. People should never, ever, be released ‘on bail’. That concept should not exist. They should be released pre-trial 99% of the time and that last 1% of the time the courts should decide they simply _not_ being released. Having money involved at any point in this is just utterly farcical and an obvious injustice, especially since most of the time the money is _borrowed_ anyway.
(Seriously, anyone defending the system is going to need to explain why we literally have a formalized systems of loans built around it so people out of bail almost never have any ‘skin in the game’ to start with…they paid the bondsman the amount they needed to. And regardless or not they show up they are already out that money, and only that money. Ergo, the entire supposed ‘incentive’ to show up on court doesn’t even exist! Nothing makes it been more clear that this system exists only to keep the wealthy out of prison than that.)
If someone is a flight risk, a threshold that should be very high, then they should not be released. And the ability of the court to detain someone like that should only be allowed for ‘flight risk’, or maybe ‘will violate pre-trial rules created by the court, like destroying evidence or threaten witnesses’, something that would keep justice from happening, not a ‘They might do it again while out’, which is utter bullshit…they haven’t been shown to have done ‘it’ in the first place. They aren’t guilty yet!
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But I realize that people probably won’t go for that, considering it is all too easy to fall prey to made-up examples of ‘We have to lock the deranged serial killer up or he’ll kill people pre-trial even while the police are watching him’, (which is something that doesn’t really happen), so we need to allow that, also. So, at minimum, we need to require a preponderance of evidence presented in a hearing that he _actually did a crime_, and that crime hit a specific threshold of harm.
‘Probable cause’ is actually too low. I don’t have a problem with search warrants and stuff being at that, but if we’re going to detain a person on the idea ‘They committed a violent crime and could commit another one while waiting for trial’, the prosecution should have to at least prove the first part of that sentence is more than 50% true. Aka, we need to use preponderance of evidence, not probable cause.
And going back to Barnett: If the court does think he will show up to court (Which is an entirely different determination.), but the prosecution wants to keep him locked up _anyway_ so he ‘doesn’t hurt anyone between now and then’, they should have to present evidence that he _probably_ committed a crime that at least had the _intent_ of violence, _and_ that it’s possible he would repeat it.
I don’t think they could do that, although a large part of that depends on exactly how conspiratorial he is…he’s in a sorta weird category because people like him (And we don’t know if those people include him) seem to think they were operating on the orders of the US government (Or, rather, the president.) and thus the actions they did might not actually be crimes, and might instead be almost anti-crimes, a government-sanctioned undoing of a crime. So not only could the crime be done again, but _must_.
Does _he_ think this? I have no flipping idea. This is possibly the worst, most-edge case-y example of this situation….assuming he’s not going to flee justice (Which I am also unsure of!) I honestly don’t know if he should be released pre-trial, because I honestly don’t know if he’s going to show up at the US Capitol and try to shoot Nancy Pelosi or AOC, and I honestly don’t know what he was intending the _first_ time. At minimum, I would argue he needs a restraining order keeping him away from the Capitol and anyone who was in the Capitol at the time he invaded it. And I don’t think a tracking anklet would be a bad idea.Report
There’s a very good quote that floats around periodically:
“If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.”
Cash bail is a way to have yet another law only exist for the lower class.Report
And I don’t think a tracking anklet would be a bad idea.
While I have a number of issues with tracking anklets, I think that they are a much better solution than holding a guy until trial.
There are a number of crimes we could come up with that would make me say “you know what, yeah… that person shouldn’t be released until trial and only then if not found guilty”. (Ghislaine Maxwell is a great example of someone who I do not think should be let out on bail.)
If a person is not accused of one of those crimes? Make sure that they are capable of understanding that they have to come back, at a certain time, on a certain date or there will be additional penalties on top of whatever penalties they may already have coming. Then let them go.
I’m sure that we will have a lot of data in short order demonstrating that the list of no-release crimes needs to be longer or that this was a policy that we should have embraced a decade earlier.Report
There’s always the problem that in law enforcement, ‘replacements’ eventually turn into ‘things they use when they wouldn’t be allowed to use the other thing, and they also keep using the thing it was supposed to replace’.
Aka, how the police get tasers to use instead of shooting people, and not only kept shooting people, but now feel free to tase willy-nilly. Giving them a non-lethal weapon didn’t much reduce their use of lethal force, it mostly just gave them easy amount of non-lethal force too..and tasers don’t leave marks like billy clubs do!
So tracking anklets should be used _instead of_ prison, but we’d have to worry they were being used in addition to prison…
…or, we would risk that if we didn’t use prison for literally everything. Where are we not putting people in prison that we could use them? Early release programs? Parole? I guess.
But…we’re already doing that, right?
So, yeah, I’m hesitant to giving the justice system a ‘lesser’ tool to use ‘instead’ something worse, because they never seem to use them ‘instead’, but…not sure how they could use them ‘in addition to’.
Do we really even need to do that? Couldn’t we just say: Give us your cell number. We will give you notifications, if you don’t show up in court at that date and time, we will reschedule your stuff a few days later, and the police will come get you and you will sit in a jail cell until the rescheduled date. (And the sitting in jail itself is the punishment, as is the risk you might have to stay there unless you can convince the judge you learned your lesson.)
Oh, and if you don’t have a way to get there, call the police a few hours early, and they will give you a ride.
I think we put a little too much emphasis on ‘law and order’ here. The government should actively work to make sure people show up for court, but not via a legal framework, unless someone is clearly trying to not be in court, or at least seems totally apathetic about being there.
Tons of people, right now, are either sitting in jail, or have active warrants out they don’t even know about, simply because they didn’t _know_ they were supposed to be in court, and missed it. And I feel the government should actually get off its ass and _make sure_ people know, and _make sure_ they are updated, and actively work to get them into court, instead of just writing down ‘failure to appear’ over and over and sticking it on warrants.
You know, if we didn’t have extremely overworked public defenders, that could be the job of their office…keeping track of ‘their clients’ and making sure they got to court-dates and whatnot. Private lawyers do exactly that. But considering they have approximately two minutes a client, or whatever the stat really is, we can’t.
We also need a law saying that, by law, employers have to give you time off to be in court.
Yes. Ghislaine Maxwell is exactly the sort of person I feel should not be released because not only is she a _British_ socialite, she literally has connections all around the world, many of whom were involved in her alleged crimes, which means they have every incentive to hide her. And while we have extradition with Britain (Uh, I hope someone remembered to fix that after Brexit?), her being British means the Federal government doesn’t have the power to lock down her finances.
She is exactly the sort of person who can go ‘on the run’ the rest of her life, with barely a change in said life…all she has to do is keep out of certain countries.
Granted, I still think the government should have to prove the case slightly farther than they currently do have to, to restrict her like that…which they should have no problem doing in her case, I’m not saying they have a bad case with her, I’m saying the ‘threshold for detaining someone pre-trial’ should be moderately higher than the search warrant threshold.
Which it currently isn’t, and in fact arrest warrants are sworn out with literally no chance at opposing them. It is completely absurd the police can lock someone up who has an alibi, a very obvious alibi, simply because, basically, they wanted to, and the person has to wait until a bail hearing to even _talk_ to a judge.
I’ve argued here before the police should be basically required to take every single person they detain straight to a hearing and have a judge sign off on the detention before it starts…which would be much, much easier if the number of people they were detaining was a small fraction of what they do now.Report
He was originally going to be released with an ankle monitor but prosecutors objected.Report
They don’t work well on people capable of gnawing their own feet off.Report
There’s a lot of risk aversion built into the system. In 99 out of 100 situations there’s no good reason to hold people in confinement awaiting trial for a misdemeanor or non-violent felony. Usually the person is going to show or if they fail to the cost to the community is less than the cost of keeping them confined. In my brief CDL days I had a client who stayed locked up for around 6 months awaiting trial for charges that were almost certain not to result in any jail time at all. It was ridiculous but we had a rural jurisdiction and a judge who I’m still not sure understood what he did.
The problem is that 1 out of 100 where something really bad happens involving someone who was released. No one wants to own it and the truth is most of the people on the ‘abolish cash bail’ side are fickle and don’t really understand the system or why it exists. Wait until some dude gets released who then commits whatever the most heinous act of the day is and everyone melts based on their priors about drugs or sex crimes or spousal abuse or whatever. And for my fellow attorneys who jump in to say ‘it’s really for the flight risk not the community risk’ I say, I know what it’s for. My point is that a lot of people with strong feelings on the subject don’t.
The far more interesting question to me isn’t where anyone stands on cash bail, but rather what do we replace it with?Report
Likewise, look at this horrible crime committed by a (legal) immigrant. Why are we letting these people into our country?Report
Or its Variant – we can’t release all these undocumented migrants because even though we have decades of history saying they show up for hearings more often than our own citizens, they snuck in here to make a better life for themselves so of course they are a risk to the community.Report
One of the huge problems is that I don’t know that we know why we have the justice system we have.
Like, what is the point of it? What is it supposed to do?
Like, why do we have cops? Why do we have courts? Why do we have jails/prisons?
It feels like there’s so much “we’ve always done it this way” that it has resulted on a kludge on a kludge on a kludge on a kludge and we’d probably benefit from saying “wait, what do we want to actually *DO*?” and compare that to the system rather than just patch a hole every other presidency with a new and improved crime bill.
I saw this story yesterday and it had my jaw on the floor:
Like… WHAT IN THE HELL IS A SUPREME COURT FOR?!?!? WHAT IN THE HELL IS AN APPEAL FOR?!?!? WE HAVE NEW INFORMATION AND NEW EVIDENCE AND WE CAN’T HAVE A NEW FREAKING TRIAL?!?!? WHAT IN THE HELL DO WE HAVE A JUSTICE SYSTEM *FOR*?!?!?
And we’ve got all of these problems with the cops that need reform, and we’ve got this bail system that needs reform, and we’ve got this justice system that needs reform, and we’ve got this prison system that everybody makes prison rape jokes about and so I’m pretty sure that that needs reform too and it seems to me that we have entirely lost sight of what we wanted this stuff for in the first place.
I can’t imagine that it’s working as intended.Report
The system has many thousands of years of reform and “patches” built into it. We’re deep into both “evolution” and “deeply buggy very old code”.
Picture the amount of work that it would take to build a dog from the ground up. We’re not even close to being that skilled and human society is more complex.
It’s a lot easier to look at [something wrong], change that, and see if we really had a good reason to put that there that is still relevant.
So we briefly tried getting rid of the police and instantly found the wheels went off in multiple ways, including the volunteer replacements killing minority youth which is what we thought we were fixing.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/post-trial-evidence-is-issue-in-supreme-court-case.html
IOW, A Supreme Court is for saying “Yeah, that’s fine.”Report
If new exonerating evidence is insufficient to get a new trial for someone who maintains his innocence is not enough to get a new trial, one wonders why we have appeals courts at all.
Jobs, I guess?Report
To address procedural issues.
I am not making this up.
Report
You can’t appeal for a new trial when new evidence appears and you can’t appeal a dismissal of a motion for a new trial despite new evidence having appeared.
Not convinced that the justice system participants know why they’re there.Report
The point the Supremes are making is we have limited resources and need to live in an imperfect world where prisoners lie and can be expected to spam the courts if allowed to.
For the Death Penalty, if we’re going to have it then it seems to be an abuse of the system to insist on absolute perfection and to drag things out until everyone involved dies of old age.Report
If evidence that even the government admits is new evidence is insufficient to get a new trial, then the system is broken worse than it would be if it suffered from more spam.Report
We’re deep into “bad actors can be expected to abuse this” territory. Criminals have nothing but time and the courts are supposed to be treating everyone the same.
The system not having enough bandwidth was one of Kalief Browders’ problems.
We also have the issue of whether or not retrying 27 year old cases is even possible. If the state needs to do that then they probably need to just let him go.
Now here we probably should be just letting him go (although this sort of thing is why pardons exist).Report
A good way around this might be the “even the government admits is new evidence” loophole.
It’s smaller than the “bad actors are allowed to make things up” loophole.Report
“We’re deep into “bad actors can be expected to abuse this” territory. ”
There’s a whole Constitutional Amendment about literally that. Several of them, in fact. Clearly the people who wrote the founding documents of government were more concerned about abuse of the powerless by the state-empowered than they were about abuse by bad actors.Report
Ar you alleging that the photo is a deep fake? Yes, the government does shit like this and it is bad. There are still people who commit crimes and there needs to be a justice system to deal with that. It is not that hard to have believe both things are true.Report
I’m taking the story at its word. This part here: even after it was found police falsified evidence and secretly paid a witness, the witness recanted, and the real killers came forward and confessed.
This strikes me as sufficient reason to have a new trial.
The Supreme Court of Missouri disagrees.
Well, a justice system is better than nothing, I guess!Report
You’re assuming a lot of good faith in the creation of the system that simply isn’t there.
Paid police forces were fundamentally created as slave patrols to capture escaped slaves.
Well, technically, some of them were a way for the wealthy to protect _other_ forms of capital. Like, in Boston, the first police force was basically a scam that was the merchants offloading the cost of their harbor security onto the city coffers. Why the _entire city_ should have to pay taxes to protect only the wealthy merchant’s stuff at the docks is a question we probably are never allowed to ask, least we then start asking why we have a branch of the FBI called “Art Crimes’ intended to stop rich people from getting conned by fake extemely expensive art, or said extremely expensive art stolen, a crime that literally 99.9999% of the population doesn’t care about and is not important in the slightest, and almost every victim can afford it. As opposed to, for example, a dedicated group that investigates wage theft.
But, anyway, police forces were entirely created to keep capital secure, and by capital, I mostly mean _human_ capital, which has always been startlingly mobile compared to other capital and often ran off by itself.
But then we stopped having that, so we invented…a way recollect said capital called involuntary servitude, aka, prison labor. Which is where we invented the carceral state, to collect said capital and hold them, and force them to continue to work for no wages.
Now, we didn’t invent prisons, the English did. They were invented not to rehabilitate anyone _or_ to hold slaves to work for free, that would be crazy.
No, prisoners were created as a place to hold people until violent punishments like whipping could be done to them. That’s why they exist…there often were long lines at the whipping and hanging and whatnot, and you really wanted to schedule them in some form, you know, group them up, make a holiday of them, so you kinda needed the people to stick around, and they tended not to come back to be whipped, weirdly.
And prisons also turned out to be handy for holding anyone you weren’t allowed to kill, like random noblemen! It was much better than having to keep them in a locked room at their own house.
I’m not exactly sure when we started using imprisonment _itself_ as a punishment instead of as a holding place _to wait for_ punishment, but, let’s be clear…prisons were never intended to accomplish _anything_ except people from wandering off…which they admittedly are pretty good at. There literally was no purpose behind prisons besides ‘We cannot let this person leave our custody.’.
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So the current system is not a system that slowly got out of wack and now fails to meet its original intent.
It’s a horrific system that has very very slowly been bent into something slightly less horrific…but still very horrific.
I mean, there are parts that are good, but they exist mostly to put brakes on the parts that were horribly bad…and we never changed, or thought about.
How do we fix this? We don’t. There is no way to fix it. Every part of it has to be dismantled and the entire thing built differently.
There are parts that might be useful, the idea of an adversarial system to find the truth is not a bad idea, but that requires an _entire side_ of the system that attempts to find the truth, not ‘single unpaid public defender attorney that can’t spend any time on his client’. For an example of something that is obviously wrong.
We can imagine that being fixed, but it requires a ‘police force’, or rather an investigatory force, that is actually attempting to find the truth, uncovering evidence both for and against suspects, and this, in turn, requires something so different from the police that the police almost certainly cannot be turned into. It certainly requires almost completely different incentives.
I still like my idea of literally not allowing paid defense attorneys. Everyone gets the same public defenders, you can’t hire outside counsel for criminal defense. Because, as always, if you want to make sure that something is actually funded to workable level…you have stop letting rich people opt out of it.Report
RE: Origin was slavery
Lots of cities post-date slavery so the number of slaves they’ve caught is zero even if we look back centuries.
RE: Burn the system down and start over
The general public is apathetic. The same entrenched interests and political forces that currently fund the public defenders at 10% of what they need will be creating the new system.
The gov collects enough money to run the current system correctly, they just have other political priorities.Report
That doesn’t really have to do with anything. Policing in the US did not really get independently invented anywhere, or at least ot after
A historic bias isn’t going to go away when you create an identical situation to with places with said bias, and staff it with people entirely _from_ those situations, and train new people identically.
Now, it is entirely possible to argue the _extent_ of any historical biases and how much history shapes thing, but new cities do not create with summoned-from-the-ether police forces and police officers with no history, and shuffling around which level of local government who is currently operating the police does nothing.
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Also, um, your dating is very weird. There’s no such time period as ‘post-date slavery’…slavery is not illegal in the US, and still exists. Slavery without a conviction by the government for a crime is illegal.
So pretty much every major police force has caught slaves. Just not ‘runaway slaves’, they were convicted by a court and sentenced to labor.
I guess, technically, they _mostly_ had specific sentences and were thus in ‘involuntary servitude’ and not ‘slavery’…but at least a few were sentenced to life, I’m sure, so…slavery.
And these slaves first were leased to people and corporations to work for them, slavery in basically every aspect but the name. It was technically made illegal as of 1867, which no one cared about, it wasn’t even formally outlawed in Albama in 1928, and there’s a reason FDR had to issue an executive order in fricking 1941 to direct the DoJ to actually start prosecuting people for violating that 1887 law.
And that, to be clear, was just the _leasing prisoners_ part that was outlawed.
Requiring the prisoners to work on chain gangs (aka, for the state)was still legal, and mostly phased out by the 50s. It’s forcing people to work, without pay, are we calling that slavery?
And even now, in the most ‘humane’ version of things, we were just talking about this WRT job creation: All Federal prisoners are required to have ‘prison jobs’. And these jobs sometimes are makework, and sometimes are a way to operate the prison. But they are work that we are requiring prisoners to do, without pay, under the threat of punishment, and they are not allowed to refuse those jobs or leave for another job.
Thus every Federal prisoner, under the definition of the term ‘involuntary servitude’, is in involuntary servitude. Which again, is only different from slavery in that it has a specific time limit…which means everyone sentenced to life with no chance of parole…is a slave.
Yes, the US government has slaves.
There wasn’t this hard and fast cut-off of ‘slavery vs ‘not-slavery’ you think there was.Report
So with this widened use of the term slavery…..we are good saying that taxes are a form of slavery?
The dishonesty of leftist ideology is riddled with this type of base stealing.
Slavery only ever comes out of social constructs, so are yall willing to put them down and back away slowly, or is it always a doubling down?Report
No, requiring people pay a portion of income to the government is not slavery. Hell, requiring to pay _all_ income is not slavery.
Slavery is a very specific thing, wherein someone is not allowed to cease being in a specific job or doing the work in that job without getting directly punished.Report
“Slavery is a very specific thing. What is that thing? It’s whatever I need it to be so that I can have moral justification for engaging in comforting anger, and it’s not whatever I need it to not be to avoid defending something crazy.”Report
Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy weren’t slaves by any sane definition (certainly any definition the Supremes would use).
This argument is an effort to invoke slavery for the emotional/ethical impact. That it changes Ted Bundy into a “victim” should showcase just how far out there it is. Pointing out abusive practices that ended 70+ years ago is better but doesn’t imply a need to burn the system down as it is now.
Ending the system as it is and starting over was what CHOP(?) tried. It didn’t go well. It’s probably much easier to just figure out best practices and try to get places like NY to use them.Report
No, they’d probably call it involuntary servitude. Involuntary servitude vs. slavery is one of those things that is actually one thing with one term for it at one end, and one term for it at the other end, and a very vague middle.
Does that make some huge difference? That Ted Bundy was in ‘involuntary servitude’ and not ‘slavery’? Is that the hill you’re dying on here?
Because I suspect the real issue is you just don’t want to mentally connect up the ‘slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted’ in the 13th amendment, to what we currently do in the prison system.
Except…what we do in the prison system is literally why that exemption exists, otherwise what we do, in the prison system, right now, would be unconstitutional under the 13th amendment.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable to realize that our behavior in prisons is _almost_ barred by the anti-slavery amendment except there’s an explicit exemption for it. But that fact is still true even if uncomfortable.
It’s me describing reality for the emotional/ethical impact.
Let me guess, you also don’t like me this sentence: The Florida government deliberated in court how Ted Bundy should be punished for his crimes, and the conclusion they came to eventually was they should pay people to strap Ted Bundy into a chair and electrocute him deliberately to kill him, which they did on January 24, 1989?
Here’s a weird idea: If a direct factual description of how the government has behaved makes you uncomfortable, make you feel bad for the person that behavior was aimed at even if they are a murderer…maybe the lack of comfort on your part isn’t any sort of manipulation or trick?
Maybe it’s not ‘those words being used have negative connotations’, maybe it’s more like: I don’t want to think about the actual thing happening because then I will attempt to use the general ethical rule to judge them. And I know that forcing people to work under the threat of harm to them, or strapping people to chairs to electricute them, or whatever, is clearly unethical and immortal behavior in a sorta general sense. So I want people to come up with new terms and euphemisms to disguise that truth even from myself.
This is literally the point of euphemisms, to not have to think about a certain thing in the way we normally would. We know what the thing is, but we’re using a different way to reference it because a direct reference causes us to emotionally react in a certain way.
Which is fine if we’re using euphemisms for sex, whatever. Hell, it’s why we don’t actually talk about what happens during surgery…no one wants to call it ‘sewing bits of skin together at the end of surgery’ instead of ‘closing the patient’. The former is gross, and the latter is the same thing, but allows us not to think about the gross part.
The place we shouldn’t use euphemisms? Any place where the reason we’re uncomfortable is morality.
Indentured servitude. (If you want to somehow argue that ‘slavery’ doesn’t quite fit to anyone.) That is the legally correct term for what we do in prisons. Call it that.
…now try to describe prisons at all without using the special words we have invented for those! Holding someone captive for years?Report
The definition of slavery isn’t “forced to work” or my kids would be slaves when I force them to make their beds.
The definition of slavery is “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.” (google)
The state is not a “another” person. Prisoners can’t be bought nor sold and not “property”. High productivity jobs in prison are viewed by the prisoners as plum jobs because life sucks in general.
Life sucks in general because they’re not free. That lack of freedom is what creates comparisons to slavery.
So “uncomfortable” isn’t the word for this claim, more like “laughable”.
It’s only “unethical and immoral” if we hand-wave the heinous behavior that led to Dahmer and Bundy not being free.
Trying to pretend those two were the moral equiv of a random Antebellum slave is farcical. It’s ethically fine to keep them in prison and make them make their own beds. It’s even ethically fine to strap them to an electric chair and kill them because their deeds were that heinous.Report
Force them to in what manner? What happens to them if they don’t?
Here’s a question for you: _Can_ children be slaves of their parents? Why or why not?
Do you want the textbook definition of ‘involuntary servitude’ now?
Or are you desperately trying to ignore _that_ part of what I said?
Because that’s the other side there, if you don’t want to call it slavery…it’s just involuntary servitude instead. It’s one or the other.
I think you forgot why this discussion started, when you decided ‘since slavery’ was a useful timeframe.
Which, my point was, in reality, we didn’t get rid of slavery…we just continually toned it down and restricted it more and more.
For example, prisoners were actively leased to private corporations and individuals, to forcibly work for them for no wages, even as late at 1941. This is why FDR had to direct the DoJ to start enforcing laws against that. I mentioned that above.
Note this is in fact _constitutional_…it’s been illegal since the 1880s, but constitutional.
Are we going to make the argument that _leasing_ people to other isn’t slavery? If the government controls the people and merely leases them to everyone else it’s not slavery?
Or are we bumping ‘since slavery’ to sometime in the 1940s?
And notable, the only part of that is illegal if a) the prisoners have no choice, and b) if it’s directly working for a third party.
The prison requiring prisoners to work on something that makes a third party money but _isn’t_ working under the direction of that third party is still, indeed, legal. A prison can hire itself out to clear brush and order prisoners to do that.
Fun fact: The way we try to police that at the Federal level is disallowing prisoner-made items to be sold in interstate commerce unless the prison is operating that within a specific program called ‘Prison Industry Enhancement’. Of course, this does literally nothing when the prisoners are not ‘making products’, which of course prisoners often don’t…because that’s annoying to do in prisons anyway. They do things like data entry and phone banking and, if there’s any physical stuff, it’s usually outside labor.
What about the _really evil_ slaves? Should they be in slavery?
More importantly: You understand that American chattel slavery is basically the worse form of slavery that ever existed, right? There’s plenty of lesser things that are correctly called slavery.Report
“You understand that American chattel slavery is basically the worse form of slavery that ever existed, right?”
you very clearly want us to be thinking about “American chattel slavery” when you say “slavery”, otherwise you would not be using the word, and so it is entirely appropriate to respond with an old-fashioned look to gibbering claims that unpaid overtime is “literally slavery“.Report
The theft of the art from the Gardener museum is a matter of public concernReport
To repeat the point that literally everyone here should heard me say by now and gotten drilled into their memory: Wage theft is approximately $50 billion dollars a year.
The Gardner Museum was the site of the largest art theft in history (Until 2019), of art worth approximately $500 million dollars now, and one the FBI has spent 30 years investigating.
Yes, that huge robbery, one of the largest art robberies in history, is…a 100th of the size of the of yearly wage theft.
Failure to recover this art has caused…people to not see the art. Well, the people who could physically make it there and pay the entrance fee, at least, I guess other people couldn’t see it anyway. That’s all it has done.
It should be noted: The statute of limitations on the actual crime is very expired, which means at best the FBI is trying to track down someone merely guilty of possession of stolen property, and recover the art. It is extremely unlikely the original thieves even still have the art, which mean…they won. They are completely in the clear.
And to be clear: I honestly don’t have a problem with the FBI doing this. What I do have a problem with is us caring about this crime and not _also_ about a crime a) is desperately needed to be stopped, b) is much much larger crime monetarily, and c) has almost no penalties.Report
The biggest number I found was “$8 Billion” (admittedly from only the 10 most populated states) and that was probably a misuse of the word “theft” because it’s assuming jobs which violate the author’s interpretation of the min-wage would still exist if they were paid according to the author’s interpretation.
If you have a different definition and/or if you’re redoing the definition of “theft”, then you should have a link in there and be clear about what your definition is.
I’ve had my wages stolen, i.e. money we both agreed to give me for my work wasn’t given to me. The end result of that was prison time for the people who stole from me. The amount stolen from me was less than a grand and there might have been 50 workers total so I can say that the forces of law do pay attention to this sort of thing.
(Also on a side note for perspective, ) Personal income increased to about $18.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019. (That’s a quote from https://www.statista.com/statistics/216756/us-personal-income/ )Report
Wrong. That number is not only from just ten states, as you say, so is an extremely weird thing to compare to(That study itself goes on to estimate what it is talking about costs $15 billion across the entire US.) but also is only covering one form of wage theft, min wage violations.
And $8 billion is actually an incredibly large amount of theft! Here: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/
“In 2012, there were 292,074 robberies of all kinds, including bank robberies, residential robberies, convenience store and gas station robberies, and street robberies. The total value of the property taken in those crimes was $340,850,358. By contrast, the total amount recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million in 2012. This is almost three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies that year. ”
The total amount of all robberies in 2012 was a third of a billion dollars.
The total amount of wage theft proven in court and the employer was forced to make restitutions…was almost three times as much. In a system that barely goes after wage theft.
That’s just burglary, if you add up all thefts in the US, it’s closer to $12.3 billion…which is, of course, still less than just the estimated min-wage wage theft.
LOL. What does that have to do with anything?
“Yes, I bought $500 worth and stuff and stole $200 while doing that, but if I hadn’t stolen it, I would have only bought like $300 worth.”
Incidentally, we have _plenty_ of evidence at this point that raising minimum wage does not result in less jobs, so it’s completely absurd to argue that violating that law results in more jobs.
You’re trying to argue that min-wage violations aren’t theft if the workers agree to them…it’s criminal activity, but not theft. Unfortunately for you, min-wage wage violations are only a small part of wage theft. Forms of wage theft that are literally taking from workers:
1) Being forced to work through paid breaks or before or after clocking out:
None of those workers agreed to that, and they go and put in 4 hours, and the law, and their employment contract says they get 15 minutes paid break, and then…they are not given that. 15 minutes of their labor is stolen. Is the argument that they should quit immediately so as to not have that time stolen? They’re still not paid for that time!
There was a contractual agreement there, and the company breached it. We can argue if people have the right to agree to terms in violation of the law before hiring, but is never what happens WRT to demanding unpaid labor from workers.
2) Agreeing to a job that pays by task, instead of by hour, and the tasks being scaled in such a way that the work cannot be done in an amount of time that the wage would fit inside min-wage:
This is actually closer to fraud than theft, it’s a deliberate misrepresentation of the amount of time work will take. You can argue ‘People should be able to agree to do a job at $5 an hour’, but ‘People should be able to agree to do a job for $10 that they have been told will take one hour, but the company knows will take two’ is something else entirely.
3) Stealing tips:
Tips legally belong to the person tipped. There are various state laws that allow companies to require tip pools, but those have specific rules, and the tip pool is merely property jointly shared by workers. Tips are not, in any manner, owned by the business, period, even if the business is in possession of the money.
So this is just straight-up, outright, theft.
4) Illegal deductions:
This is when a business remove some money from employee wages to cover some alleged offense by the employee, like damaging goods. Often employees do not agree to any such thing in advance, and such behavior is prohibited or strictly regulated under state law, and that’s just completely ignored.
No one did time for failing to give you money owed to you, stop manipulating whatever happened to you to make it sound different.
If they did, you should be able to cite the crime.
Here is a hint: It almost certainly was misappropriation of assets or embezzlement, which _somehow_ no wage violations fall under.
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But more importantly, let’s address this concept: What you have actually argued for here is _less labor laws_. If you want less labor laws, make that argument direclty. You will fail, but feel free to make the argument.
I want the laws currently on the book to actually be enforced. The things that are disallowed to disallowed. Because they aren’t. Because the wealthy people do not want them to be.
It’s amazing how selective ‘law and order’ people can be. This is a giant amount of theft, more than most other kinds of theft put together, and the government does basically nothing about it…even when companies are _caught_ and _lose_ cases or settle…it’s almost always ‘You have to pay the people what you owe them under the law’.
That’s not how we do any other sort of crime! It’s not even technically a _fine_, it’s not even a punishment. It’s like if you could steal cars and when the police caught you, they made you get out of the car. And that was the ‘punishment’, that you had to stop driving the car you had stolen!
And the people supposedly all concerned about property are not even slightly concerned about this.Report
Uber and various other companies structure themselves so their employees aren’t employees. This results in them sometimes making less than the min wage. “Criminal activity” and “theft” are loaded words when what Uber is doing is NOT illegal, you just want it to be.
Using the word “theft” to describe a consensual economic transaction is a mis-use of language; Especially if you’re not making it clear that you are talking about consensual economic transactions as opposed to things you could call in the police over.
Your thus-far linked stats make NO effort to break down the difference between Uber-style political desires and outright illegal actions. Given the size of Uber and the rest of the “sharing” economy, it’s likely the bulk of your numbers.
And since you and your sources are willfully misusing definitions, I think it’s reasonable to insist your links have definitions for “wage theft” and breakdowns to how much is each.
In that context, I can have no clue what “$933 million recovered for the victims of wage theft” even means. Are we talking about bosses being arrested (like mine), or are these contract disputes and bankruptcy?
$933 million would be something like 0.005% of all income. Having 0.005% get tied up in bankruptcy and other weird situations seems almost expected.
Note I’m not disagreeing with you that stealing tips happens or that it’s not illegal (or even something that should result in people being arrested for it), I’m just pointing out that you’re not detailing the scale of the problem and lumping that in there with Uber seems designed to exaggerate the problem.
It was a subcontracting company. You’d think it impossible to run out of money when all your workers are getting paid by someone else but they managed it. The company had serious spending issues, specifically to give the owner’s family “management jobs”.
Money that was withheld from paychecks to pay for other things (medical benefits, insurance, 401k, taxes), was simply spent. Things fell apart when they totally ran out of money and couldn’t pay workers.
I walked away from it, shopped around (I knew my bill rate), and signed onto a different contracting company doing the same thing for a lot more money. I didn’t bother suing them since I figured they had no money and it wasn’t worth my time (others did). Years later I found out that they ended up in jail for this but I have no idea what the name of the crime was.
It’s the whole “if everything is racist then nothing is” problem.
Misusing the word “theft”, or “slavery”, to give an argument emotional punch dilutes the value of that word and lowers your brand.Report
“Using the word “theft” to describe a consensual economic transaction is a mis-use of language;”
And I will say that it’s interesting to watch the sort of person who angrily argues that “copyright violation isn’t theft” turn around and angrily argue that if you were “at work” but not paid, then it’s theft, and you’re a slave…Report
Now you’re just ascribing positions to the ‘sort of person I am’, huh?
I’ve actually stated my position on copyright law here quite a few times, and I’ve said I have no problems with it existing. I think it lasts _way_ too long and creates problems with orphaned works, but clearly some exist in some manner.
Does that mean I’m okay with the vast majority of current piracy? No, as those have almost nothing to do with failures of those copyright system.
Now, someone wants to around illegally copying Sherlock Holmes books, yeah, that copyright is way too old, and morally, I think an argument can be made there.
But that is almost never what copyright piracy is talking about, which is almost always very current things that certainly should still be under copyright. I don’t think people should pirate them, and I think there should be punishment for that.
But is it theft? No.
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Theft, fundamentally, has two requirements to define it in a _moral_ sense. It has to be deprivation of some property, and it has to be against the rules of society…which isn’t the same thing as theft in a legal sense.
People can steal a parking spot, in the ‘moral’ sense of theft. If you break the agreed-upon parking lot rules and deprive someone of a parking space that is rightfully theirs, you have stolen that parking space…again, not in any legal sense, but it isn’t a misuse of the word theft.
Is copyright violation ‘theft’ in a moral sense? No, because the copyright holder is not deprived of anything.
Is wage theft ‘theft’ in a moral sense? Yes. (And sometimes in the legal sense!) Violating a contract, after the other person has already done their part with the expectation you will follow it (And follow the law during that), is indeed theft, and that is the vast majority of wage theft.
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You and Dark Matter want to argue that ‘consensual’ wage theft is not theft…well, the problem is, that often is theft from other people. For example, if people use contractors to keep from hitting the employee threshold required to pay unemployment insurance, that clearly is theft from the government, even if not from the workers…in fact, it’s probably a conspiracy to commit theft.
You want to argue that the very rare instances of ‘completely consensual wage theft that only affects the involved parties’ is not morally theft, fine. But that is such a small portion of what we are talking about that that technicality is fairly moot.Report
oh look
it is again that thing where you angrily declare that I’m wrong when I suggest you are the sort of person who does a thing
and then you do the thingReport
You know, this discussion would have been MUCH shorter if you had explained your misconception there early. You have built this entire exception that you think is the rule, and it’s not even _part_ of these stats. The page I cited was from 2014, and used data from _2012_. Rideshare was barely a thing at all in 2012! I already was using stats without any rideshare!
Rideshare is really not even included in _modern_ stats either, mostly because this information is self-reported (Not, asking if there was ‘wage theft’, asking if there were practices that are wage theft.), and people who drive for Uber don’t think they are making less than min wage…and usually aren’t! At least, not in the money handed to them. Just two minimim-distance rides in an hour is hitting Federal ‘min wage’. There isn’t any obvious reason they would be included under this.
The reason that contractors are included in these discussions is not stuff like rideshare. It’s stuff like a big box store hiring ‘contractors’ (Which may or may not actually be independent of them) so they can keep the payroll off their employee books. Because they are a giant company, and can’t put twenty illegal immigrants they are paying 5$ an hour to clean the store on their records…but they _can_ put an invoice to a ‘contractor’ (Which, again, might actually be them.), for $200 for cleaning the store.
I.e, there actually objectively _is_ wage theft there…it’s the contracting company not paying min wage! Like, that’s actually a straight-up obvious violation of the law…and it’s so common people push for laws not even allowing this situation of ‘sub-contracting cleaners’ to even exist because it almost always is used to hire companies that ‘pay off the books’.
One of the Walmart lawsuit I mentioned? There were allegations that Walmart ‘lost’ information about work hours in a deliberate, systemantic way to underpay workers at Walmart warehouses. However, Walmart had spun it off into a wholly-owned ‘contracting’ company in a an attempt to not be liable for this. With the intent of ‘This company has no assets and does nothing expect hire people to run a warehouse, if you sue it we will just dissolve it’…which is why the workers sued Walmart, instead.
First, let’s address this ‘consensual’ thing, when it actually is consensual:
If a corporation has X employees, and corporations that have X employees are required to pay unemployment insurance, or follow non-discrimination laws, or provide health insurance to all employees, but that corporation hides the employees as ‘contractors’, they aren’t just hurting _the contractors_. Corporations are often required to behave differently based on size, and yes, a lot of them will _consensually_ hide the number of employees behind contractors.
If I work for a company that is large enough to be required to provide health insurance, except they evade this requirement by reducing their ’employees’ to contractors, now they don’t have to provide it…and let’s say they are paying their employees so poorly (But within min-wage laws, that’s not the issue here.) that those employees now qualify for subsidies on the exchanges. Instead of that company paying for their employee’s health insurance, as required by law, they just got the Federal government to pay for it.
Sure sounds like there was theft somewhere in there. In fact, it almost almost sounds like the corporation entered a conspiracy to commit theft with their employee because they set up policies that basically ensured that would happen.
Also, as an aside: It’s a weird how ‘corporations and employees should be allowed to enter into consensual contracts’ only seems to apply when it’s a corporation demanding certain things of employees, and not employees demanding things of the corporations. Remember, folks: A corporation and an employee in a consensual economic transaction that results in the employee getting paid less than the law allows fine. A corporation and an employee in a consensual economic transaction that results in the corporation being disallowed from hiring non-union employees is bad.
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However, your premise is extremely small. Most violations of amount of labor law violations are _not_ consensual, in any manner. Mostly because companies are reluctant to advertise to potiential employees that they _are_ breaking the law. (Because…that’s generally a stupid thing to advertise.)
They only find this out once they are working for them, and the company doesn’t give them their legally required break, or ‘loses’ some of their hours, or for some reason doesn’t think things clearly definded as overtime under the law count as overtime.
They are lost wages directed to employees for violations of labor law. (Not contract disputes.)
And again, wage theft does not normally result in anyone being arrested or going to jail.
Yeah, that’s embezzlement, not wage theft. At least, it’s not what anyone is talking about as wage theft, anymore than we’re talking about muggers stealing your paycheck on the way to the bank as wage theft. Embezzlement is taking property that is in your possession legally _but isn’t yours_ and misusing it.
Now, a lot of wage theft is _conceptually_ embezzlement, and you would _think_ it would fit under that crime, but it does not. (A resturant keeping tips writting on CC receipts would count as embezzlement, that’s the only example I can think of.)
Even outright refusing to pay employees is not embezzlement. If this company had simply asserted they didn’t own you employees _anything_, they would not be in jail. They’d have lost a lawsuit and had to pay them, but would not be in jail. But once they _do_ pay their employees, and thus metaphorically ‘collect money from the paycheck to distribute to other people’, they have to actually direct that money to where they said they would, because it’s no longer theirs. Misusing it at that point is embezzlement.
For example: If I work for a bank, and that pay me in a big bag of money, and I turn around and put that money in the bank, they can’t then take that money on the grounds…they didn’t want to pay me. They already gave me the money, legally, it is now mine. The fact I put it back in their possesson doesn’t change ownerhsip.
The same thing applies if I don’t work for the bank, but my employer has a ‘hand the bag of cash money to us and we’ll put it in the bank for you’, they likewise can’t keep the bag of money I hand them back. The same applies even if they did not literally hand me the bag, if they just agreed they’d do that, and said ‘Here is your bag of money, I am taking to the bank for you’. Or…’Here is your bag of money, I am putting this in a 401k for you.’
…but they can just refuse to give me the bag of money in the first place!
See, we have very strong laws to protect people stealing someone’s _money_, that punish such a thing very harshly, with actual real prison time. But we have very weak laws to protect stealing someone’s _labor_, and the max punishment is just basically ‘You do have to pay the person what you said and promise to not do it again! Bad corporation!’.
Your former employers just stupidly wandered across the invisible legal line where they had legally _already_ turned the labor into money by issuing the paycheck, and at that point, ‘money penalties’ applied to misusing now-employee money they still had in their possession! Oops! They should have just refused to pay anyone, asserting that they didn’t owe anyone anything. This would have fit neatly under labor laws and risking no criminal liability…the corporation would have eventually had to pay, but…good luck with that if the owners have taken all the money from the corporation.Report
Alright, first let’s address the schadenfreude felt by those of us who can’t help but find satisfaction in seeing these rioters facing consequences.
First help the Kalief Browders of the world. Then maybe we can spare this asshole a few moments of sympathy.Report
No.
Kalief Browder hits the radar as showcasing system problems in a way that a random death that is instantly regretted does not. System dropped the ball many times for years.
Richard Barnett ended up where he’s at because he’s one of the craziest, most violent, and least law abiding Trump supporters. The system may reasonably think he’ll continue on that path.
Kalief’s situation is clearly a problem but Barnett’s (within the margin of error) may be the system working correctly.Report
Yeah, this guy gets no bail, but “Molotov cocktail attorneys” get a plea bargain. Hmmm
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-plea-deal-offers-molotov-cocktail-lawyers-20210222-djhffldmkncg5myhvfuzo4fzve-story.htmlReport
Interesting. They both spent about a month in the slammer before being released by the Court of Appeals to home confinement. And though we know there’s an offer, we don’t know what it is. But it’s almost certainly a felony plea, which would cost them their licenses, with prison time — or they would have taken it already.Report
He’d get a plea bargin too if he asked for one. That’s how the system works.Report
“Let this be a lesson to all those right wingers that don’t have a successful riot….”
“….and all those insurrectionists that bring stun guns instead of rifles…”
silly rabbitsReport