This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Plenty of cults have slaves in the US. But because the are willing, nothing is done about it.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?
At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge.
Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.
More quilty verdicts would be made. Regardless of guilt
This is true for THC (marijuana) tests that look for metabolites of THC with long half-lives. It takes a very long time for the body to metabolize THC through the different steps and then eliminate those metabolites.
For many of the drugs named in the article their elimination is rapid. For some like fentanyl their concentrations are also low. If someone has an appreciable concentration of fentanyl detectable by a simple test they are very inebriated.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.
But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.
The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.
I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.
(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)
Basically, if you inject enough suspicion into any situation, colorimetric tests will eventually lead you to believe that you're in trouble. And then later if you bring the sample to somebody with access to real equipment it often turns out there was no trouble besides the sort you were looking for in the first place.
I honestly think we could save a lot of lives by just putting a gas chromatography machine in the library next to the 3d printers and training people to use it.
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
kennywinker•2h ago
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
duskdozer•1h ago
fragmede•1h ago
drfloyd51•1h ago
Dreddful.
Jimmc414•1h ago
Zigurd•1h ago
t-3•1h ago
Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later.
If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
kennywinker•1m ago
You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
throwaway9980•1h ago
swores•59m ago
It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.
But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
20after4•37m ago
anonymousiam•20m ago
Organizations such as OSF/OSI (Open Society Foundations, not Open Software Foundation) have successfully placed their preferred candidates in positions of power in many major US jurisdictions. If you research, you'll see many cases of OSF DAs prosecuting or not prosecuting based on their political ideology. Many prosecutions are politically motivated, but now we have foundations funding activist candidates who are all pushing the same agenda. The result is diminished trust in government, which the activists will exploit to eventually make things even worse, because "capitalism is not working."
Zigurd•16m ago