Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

Re: Criminal

No one is "accountable" for such things, nor should they be.

An inmate who has served his sentence (minus any credits he has earned) has a constitutional right to be released. Holding him any longer than that would be a deprivation of liberty without due process of law. We don't want our government to have the power to hold people arbitrarily. Instead, we want its power to hold people strictly limited and defined by the law. That was one of the principles over which the Revolutionary War was fought, and society should not punish anyone for upholding this principle.

Prosecutors should not be punished for agreeing to plea bargains, and judges should not be punished for approving them. Prosecutors who were forced to go to trial on the original charges in every case would often lose due to problems with the evidence, credibility of the witnesses, sympathy of the jury, etc. They offer plea bargains to ensure that the defendant gets some prison time instead of taking a chance that he will escape punishment entirely. As it is the system puts undue pressure on the innocent to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit; forcing the prosecutors' hands would only make this problem worse.

More importantly, our prosecutors do not have the manpower to take every accused criminal to trial and our courts do not have enough judges or courtrooms to handle all those trials. This seems unlikely to change unless the public is willing to pay higher taxes. If prosecutors could never make plea bargains they would have to let most suspected criminals walk away without ever being charged so that they would be able to fully litigate the cases they do prosecute.

Our prison system should do much more than it does to rehabilitate inmates in order to make them better citizens when they are released, but until the legislature and the governor enact laws requiring them to make reforms the prisons can't be held accountable for not doing so.

Finally, it is a *very* bad idea to make legislators and the governor liable for their decisions about what laws to pass and how they are written. In such a system the courts would make the laws, thus appropriating the power of both the legislative and executive branches of government. Separation of these powers is another fundamental principle on which our country was founded, and it should not be abandoned just because it is imperfect. Besides, there is little reason to think judges would be better than (or even as good as) legislators and governors in deciding what the law should be.

The person who is really responsible for a repeat offender's actions is the repeat offender himself. Trying to blame the system instead ignores the entire concept of individual accountability on which our criminal laws are based.

Re: Criminal

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