I know billbartlett made this sort of blanket claim regarding bail, but a while back we were only talking about the non-bailable crime of second-offense petty theft, below even the absurdly low threshold we've got nowadays in this country for felony (used to be felonies were stuff like murder, rape and robbery, today tresspassing cross a construction site and spray painting graffiti are too). Misdemeanor theft, not Ted Bundy creating tableaux in the sorority house. Big difference. In a properly run society the prosecutor doesn't get the power to subject suspects to an essentially indefinite pre-trial jail term in order to extort a guilty plea for a god damn misdemeanor.
billbartlett at dodo.com.au wrote:
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> In a free country this is determined case by case. A person accused of being a serial killer is usually assessed a more serious risk to society than a person accused of a crime of passion, such as murdering his wife. This is entirely logical, since a person is unlikely to be in a position to kill his wife again, while out on bail.
Um, no, the first thing _he_ does after they let him out is hunt down and kill the guy he thinks was sleeping with his wife. Again though, we're not talking about the abominable crime of willfully ending another human's life, we're talking about, for example, a teenager up on his second charge of being that particular black kid in baggy pants who bolted out the door of the Pick-Kwik with a case of Budweiser under his arm.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net