Board 8 > Oh wow... Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction was just overturned

(+) Yeah! (+)

Mr Lasastryke posted...

the jury aspect of the US justice system is awful.

do they literally not have juries in the Netherlands?

---

ChainLTTP posted...

I'd much, much rather live in a place where criminals get off than where innocent people are imprisoned.

And the US judicial system is kind of designed to skew toward the former.

I 100% agree with the first part, but your bottom part is completely wrong.

---

redrocket posted...

do they literally not have juries in the Netherlands?

no

---

RikkuAlmighty posted...

From what I can tell, this isn't a shortcoming of the American legal system. It has its own problems to be sure, but the prosecution fumbled this.

LordoftheMorons posted...

While I cant fault the court here, that deal should never have been allowed to happen. Providing criminal immunity for rape for testimony in a civil case is absurd. Fuck Cosby, and I hope he has a miserable remainder of his life.

Yeah, both of these. A deal is a deal. Upholding it is fair. But that prosecutor should never have made that deal in the first place, yikes.
---

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

I 100% agree with the first part, but your bottom part is completely wrong.

Presumption of innocence, unanimous jury, reasonable doubt, the appeals process. It's really hard to convict someone unless it's glaringly obvious that they're guilty.

ChainLTTP posted...

Presumption of innocence, unanimous jury, reasonable doubt, the appeals process. It's really hard to convict someone unless it's glaringly obvious that they're guilty.

Something like 90% of court cases in the US are resolved via plea bargain, so no, it's really not.

---

Drakeryn posted...

Yeah, both of these. A deal is a deal. Upholding it is fair. But that prosecutor should never have made that deal in the first place, yikes.

The prosecutor failed but I feel like that deal literally shouldn't have been able to be made in a legal venue and the fact that it was able to is a shortcoming of the system.

Like I'm not sure what the procedures are on what can and can't be bargained as part of a deal but just the fact that you're trading up to a criminal case bargain in a civil case is a huge red flag to me.

---

Everyone knows Bill Cosby is a rapist, he will never get a job again in his life. He's no danger to anyone, so I don't really care if he is in prison or not.
---

The systemic problem at work here is the fact that district attorney is an elected position, which encourages the kind of behavior the prosecutor exhibited in order to win his next election.

---

Lopen posted...

The prosecutor failed but I feel like that deal literally shouldn't have been able to be made in a legal venue and the fact that it was able to is a shortcoming of the system.

The original prosecutor or you mean the most recent one who failed to understand that this deal had been made?

Because the original prosecutor absolutely was NOT going to get a criminal conviction without Cosby's testimony, which he would have never gotten because Cosby would've exercised his 5th amendment right. Instead, they went the civil route where Cosby agreed he would give testimony in order to have this agreement that they couldn't go the criminal route for it later.

The original prosecutor did the best they could with what they had, and got $3m for the victim.

---

How did it take 3 years to figure this out though

---

MZero posted...

How did it take 3 years to figure this out though

welcome to the legal system

---

Zero evidence!

---

I think everyone here would benefit from reading the actual text of the courts decision:

https://www.pacourts.us/Storage/media/pdfs/20210630/163038-june302021opinionwecht.pdf

---

redrocket posted...

I think everyone here would benefit from reading the actual text of the courts decision:

https://www.pacourts.us/Storage/media/pdfs/20210630/163038-june302021opinionwecht.pdf

This is 79 pages so I didn't read the whole thing (and IANAL so take this with a grain of salt), but it seems like their reasoning is "yes, you need to follow certain guidelines for transactional immunity, and yes, those were not followed here, but idk *shrug* it just seems so unfair"

(and then admittedly they cite precedent but it still seems pretty ambiguous. why even have rules if prosecutors don't have to follow them and can just promise whatever they want?)

---

ChainLTTP posted...

The US still probably has the best justice system in the world (philosophically speaking). I'd much, much rather live in a place where criminals get off than where innocent people are imprisoned.

And the US judicial system is kind of designed to skew toward the former.

As someone who was stuck in a 2+ year cycle of working to try and pay off 5 grand I owed to the court to eventually be able to get my license reinstated, but who continually got arrested for driving to work in the first place (thus increasing the money I owed to the court every time, on top of spending a night in jail of course), I just want to say go fuck yourself for saying this naive bullshit

Under our wonderful "justice" system, I was legally not allowed to even get a work license, and was stuck in a horrible catch-22 that made me want to kill myself thinking I would never be able to move on with my life and make any sort of income whatsoever. It's a scam dawg

Also hasn't evidence from The Innocence Project found 5% of people whose cases they looked at on Death Row to be innocent? I dunno, killing 1 out of 20 people in state sanctioned murder sure doesn't sound like the best justice system in the world. Nor does throwing in about half a million people for non-violent drug offenses. What an absolute joke.

---

redrocket posted...

I think everyone here would benefit from reading the actual text of the courts decision:

https://www.pacourts.us/Storage/media/pdfs/20210630/163038-june302021opinionwecht.pdf

Wait so did a judge not sign off on this non-prosecution agreement? If they didnt then I no longer think the courts decision is reasonable; a DA alone should not have the power to sign away any possibility of prosecution. I can maybe see disallowing Cosbys testimony in the case, but not full immunity from charges.

---

Our legal system incentivizes taking a plea deal even if you are innocent. If you take a case to court and lose you usually get hammered with max or close to max sentencing. If you plead down you usually get min or close to min sentencing. It's basically how much do you want to gamble with your life.

---

I remember getting a top spot in a debate tournament in high school about plea bargains (for & against). Shits dumb.

---

MZero posted...

How did it take 3 years to figure this out though

Not only that, it had to go up to the state supreme court.

It took that high of a court to recognize such a basic and publicly known immunity. A simple excel spreadsheet could have identified this problem and avoided the criminal conviction at the lowest level.

That's the scary part. Seeing that the legal system is not actually a machine, which follows the commands of the law. It's a bunch of subjective idiots (i.e. humans) who can choose to follow the rules as much or as little as they want.

Scary, but great. It's the reason jury nullification exists too, which is crucial.

---

StartTheMachine posted...

Also hasn't evidence from The Innocence Project found 5% of people whose cases they looked at on Death Row to be innocent? I dunno, killing 1 out of 20 people in state sanctioned murder sure doesn't sound like the best justice system in the world.

yup. the way the US handles the death penalty alone doesn't make it the best justice system in the world lol. (and this is coming from someone who thinks the death penalty is acceptable in certain cases.)

---