PC> We already have a mechanism for this. A judge can deny bail PC> for suspects of violent crimes.
SA> which doesn't work all the time. Granted. So, how many cases do we actually have of someone slipping through this loophole? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? Without checking offhand I imagine that far, far more criminals are released because we don't have the capability of housing them, than are because a judge was lazy or negligent or swayed by an in-court presentation. I just did 3 seconds of research and I'll say that at a minimum there are at least 10,000 early releases of criminals due to overcrowding for every criminal who gets through this loophole. http://www.calsheriffs.org/legislative_jail_overcrowding.htm http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2006/11/ca_prisoners_su.html http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/fact-sheet/6037/ are just three quickly found references. California's prison system alone has over 150,000 incarcerated guests, and only 5% of them will serve out their original allotted sentence. In 2005 (if you buy the governor's numbers) 233,388 prisoners were released early due to overcrowding. Think risk analysis, here. Is giving up a fundamental right to privacy, a fundamental protection against self-incrimination worth the trade-off? On one side, we have a few anecdotal prisoners who get out when they're not supposed to through this "bad judge" loophole. Heck, let's call it 50,000 (that's a staggeringly high number beyond all reasonable estimation, I hope you'd agree). 95% of them would get out when they're not supposed to anyway (in this state), because of overcrowding. That leaves 2500 prisoners. Of that 2500, how many of them are committing a crime that has evidence that is stored in a computer? Of *that* many, how many are bothering to encrypt the data in the first place? It wouldn't surprise me if your example of Duncan is, in fact, the ONLY guy who would have been affected substantially by this law... oh, and it's still pretty likely that he wouldn't have served out his entire sentence. It seems like we'd keep a lot more dangerous people off the street by simply building more prisons so that we can house them for the duration of their sentences, no? Oh, but that costs money, and therefore we need to pay taxes. Nobody wants a prison in their neighborhood. If we're so blithely willing to let all these bad guys out to save some money, why are we even willing to *consider* throwing away the right to not incriminate ourselves to keep one guy in jail? _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
