Occasionally we hear about repeat offenders who flaunt the law, yet are free to flaunt it again. I’m talking about DUI, or multiple felony arrests or driving suspensions or any other crimes you’d like to mention.
Apparently the man who sucker-punched Rick Moranis has been arrested for assault several times this year. Even if he has no convictions, he should have been denied bail after his fourth arrest.
If you google “22 prohibition orders” without the quotes, there is a story about a man who was arrested for driving erratically w/o a license. Apparently, he has had over 50 driving suspensions, 14 driving prohibitions (whatever they are), and three lifetime driving bans. He also owes $60k (Canadian) in driving fines.
Some of them snitch on other people in order to avoid or minimize jail time. Practically working for the cops. Happens a lot with low level drug offenders.
It seems to me that being able to put someone in jail, without bail, because of previous accusations for which they haven’t been convicted would be a good way to get people locked up for no real reason.
A while back I was watching a documentary where the police (discussing old cases) said between the time of charging someone and the trial, they’d arrest them for anything they could think off. Old parking tickets, jay walking etc. Even making something up and than ‘realizing’ they made a mistake and letting them go.
The idea being that when they had to face a judge and jury, the prosecutors can bring up the suspect’s “arrest record” and it went a long way in making the person look bad and getting the charges to stick.
Well , that depends on what the purpose of “bail” is. In NY, since at least the 1990s, judges are only supposed to consider flight risk in setting bail. Not public safety, not how likely it is that the defendant will commit another crime. The bail reform you may have heard about in the past couple of years didn’t change that - it just made it more difficult for judges to ignore the law impose bail based on other factors.
“What we think they might do tomorrow” is already a factor in setting/denying bail. It seems fair to not jail people before they’re found guilty, provided they promise to show up for the trial. Sometimes we give them incentives to show up for trial, by making them put up collateral (bail money). And sometimes, when “what we think they might do tomorrow” is not show up for the trial, we simply keep them in jail until the trial.
If we think there’s a high likelihood of committing serious new offenses while they’re out on bail - say, driving drunk, or murdering witnesses who might testify at their trial - it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to hold them in jail until their trial.
Prosecution for police informants get delayed as long as they continue to cooperate with the police. I had a pair of thieves steal a handgun from my house and even though they were caught and the police eventually tracked down the handgun during a raid in a public housing project they were never charged. I raised holy hell with the cops but was told that the matter was being taken care of, do you want your handgun back. I said no because the insurance had already paid for it and it most likely had been abused by the many hands it went through before it was recovered. I wanted them thrown in jail but it wasn’t happening. Turns out they were basically career confidential informants.
[quote=“Joey_P, post:3, topic:925716”] Can prior accusations, for which you haven’t been convicted of, be held against you? Should they be? [/quote]Normally, bail can be denied if there is a high probability that (s)he will continue to perform the same crime. It’s not the lack of conviction that should deny bail, but after several arrests for the same felony, it would appear that the defendant will continue his crime spree.
According to this NY Post article, he committed four assaults and was arraigned for three of them (including the Moranis assault) on Sunday. He was arrested for another assault on Oct 17 and received a “desk-appearance ticket”.
So it sounds like two arrests for four assaults, not four arrests.
I get that, and it makes sense and I’m sure it’s how it works it the real world. My issue is simply that they’re assuming you’re guilty before you’ve had your day in court.
I’m not sure how to fix a system like that. We want to presume innocence, but I also see the merit of keeping, say, an accused murder off the streets and why, in some cases, it’s better to accidentally keep an innocent person in jail for a few weeks than to allow a guilty person to roam free during those same few weeks.
I don’t think it’s a knee-jerk assumption; this is what the bail hearing is for. Moreover, it’s not assessment of guilt, it’s an assessment of whether the defendant presents an unacceptable risk to the public.
Then again you have the “three strikes” laws intended to deter violent crime, but which have a side effect of putting people like Earlonne Woods in prison for life (his sentence was commuted by the governor of California). He had two convictions related to a single robbery, where he was an accessory and did not commit any violence, and his third strike was stealing $40 out of a cash register. (There are lots of examples where murderers got lighter sentences.)
But wouldn’t that have to be based on a presumption of guilt? If you assume the person is innocent (of this any anything else they haven’t been convicted of yet) it would follow that they don’t present a risk because they haven’t been shown to have done anything wrong.
It’s not a flat-out presumption of guilt; if that were the case, you’d skip the trial and go straight to sentencing. It’s a cursory review of the existing evidence to determine whether there is sufficient risk (of the defendant causing problems) to justify pre-trial detention in the name of public safety.
In the case of Moranis’ sucker-puncher, if (hypothetically speaking) you have surveillance camera footage showing that the perp really does have an ongoing compulsion to spontaneously assault people, even in the absence of convictions for those assaults (maybe they happened too recently, or there was some police procedural error that got him off on a technicality for prior incidents), such evidence maybe ought to justify detaining the perp until the trial. It’s no more unjust or presumptive than pretrial detention due to being deemed an unacceptable flight risk.
Really? Weird. In Canada, the arrest record is inadmissible at the trial stage, and also on sentencing. Conviction record is inadmissible at trial, except in certain rare circumstances, and only convictions are admissible at sentencing, not arrests.