美國有二百萬人坐監但從未接受過審訊。
真的嗎?
有錢可以請律師, 無錢審都唔洗審?
人權在哪? 這是國際標準嗎?
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Due Process is Dead: A Staggering 95% of All Inmates in America Have Never Received a Trial
By Claire Bernish on January 25, 2016
In the Land of the Free, one-quarter of the entire planet’s prison population, some 2.2 million people, currently languish behind bars; yet, an astonishing number of them — around 2 million — have never been to trial. Indeed, these figures categorically debunk the notion the criminal justice system in the United States maintains any semblance of its formation’s original intent: to ensure the guilty suffer punishment befitting their crimes, while the innocent avoid false conviction.
As the fundamental basis for the justice system in the United States, the Sixth Amendment states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”
Justice, as an untold — though no doubt, appalling — number can attest, has been utterly abandoned for the interests of the careless expedience, apathetic convenience, and unabashed profiteering of the U.S. prison-industrial machine.
“The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial,” explains award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, in a recent Truthdig column. “There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Of those millions who bargained away their right to a trial by accepting plea deals, “significant percentages of them are innocent.”
Plea bargaining failed in its attempt to facilitate pragmatic justice seen in earlier courts, before the advent of the “adversary system and the related development of the law of evidence,” as John H. Langein once described. After the Civil War, as Judge Jed S. Rakoff explained in the New York Review of Books, rising crime and immigration rates began to burden the system and plea bargains offered an acceptable solution. In other words, court proceedings were at one time swift and simple, and though such expediency might have seemed a desirable quality in the past, the incontrovertible reality at present is a system wholly focused on speed at the expense of the necessary — in fact, imperative — assumption of innocence of the accused.
Indeed, for incontrovertible proof the court system no longer functions for the people — neither in its capacity to protect the public from the actual criminals, nor in its ostensible assurances no innocent person will be punished unfairly — take even a cursory glance at the trial system. Plea bargains have actualized a replacement of justice with a farcical, well-oiled machine of incarceration. “In actuality,” as Rakoff described,
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com ... lqQVxzWX2A475yCr.99
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