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View Full Version : Innocence Is Irrelevant - This Is The Age Of the Plea Bargain




DamianTV
08-06-2017, 12:27 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocence-is-irrelevant/534171/


It had been a long night for Shanta Sweatt. After working a 16-hour shift cleaning the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, in Nashville, and then catching the 11:15 bus to her apartment, she just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. Instead, she wound up having a fight with the man she refers to as her “so-called boyfriend.” He was a high-school classmate who had recently ended up on the street, so Sweatt had let him move in, under the proviso that he not do drugs in the apartment. Sweatt has a soft spot for people in trouble. Over the years, she had taken in many of her two sons’ friends, one of whom who had been living with them since his early teens.

When Sweatt got home that night, early in November of last year, she realized that her boyfriend had been smoking marijuana, probably in front of the kids. She was furious, words were exchanged, and he left. Sweatt finally crawled into bed after midnight, only to be awakened at about 8:30 in the morning by an insistent knock at the door. She assumed that her boyfriend was coming to get his stuff and get out of her life.

When she opened the door, police officers filled the frame, and more were waiting at her back door. She could see that squad cars were swarming the parking lot. “There were 12 to 15 cars,” she told me. “For us.” An officer asked whether they could enter. As a resident of public housing, she wasn’t sure whether she had the right to say no. (She did.) But she was certain that if she refused them, they would come back. She had nothing to hide, so she let them in. “I didn’t get smart or give them a rough time,” she said. “I cooperated.”

Sweatt, who is black, didn’t know what had led the police to her door. Their report says a complaint had been made about drug dealing from the apartment. After entering, they began systematically searching her apartment. One officer yanked open a junk drawer in her bedroom dresser, and inside he found small baggies of marijuana, containing a total of about 25 grams—a weight equivalent to about six packets of sugar. There was also marijuana paraphernalia in the apartment. When the officer showed the baggies to her, Sweatt immediately knew they had to belong to her boyfriend, who—in addition to having just been smoking in her home—had past drug convictions.

Sweatt, 36 years old, left high school in 11th grade, but she has the kind of knowledge of the law that accrues to observant residents of James A. Cayce Homes, a housing project in East Nashville. “I’m the lease owner,” she told me. “Whatever was there, I would get blamed.” It seemed useless to her to say that the drugs must have belonged to her absent boyfriend, who had a common name and no fixed address. She believed that this would result in the police pinning the crime on her sons. Her 17-year-old was at school, but her 18-year-old, who worked on the cleaning crew with her, was home, along with the friend of his who lived with them. Sweatt told me, “I’ve seen that where I lived: The parents said no, so everyone in the house gets charged. I’m not going to let my children go down for someone else’s mistake. A parent should take ownership of what happens in the house.” So she made a quick and consequential decision. To protect her sons, she told the police that the marijuana belonged to her. “I said it was mine, and me and my homegirls were going on vacation to California. I said we were going to take the marijuana with us—I heard it was legal there—and we were going to smoke for a week or two, then come back to normal life.”

Sweatt told me this two months after her arrest. She and I were sitting in a conference room at the Metropolitan Public Defender’s Office, in downtown Nashville. She was dressed for work in a black sweatshirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. A large ring of keys attached to her belt bespoke her responsibilities as a janitorial supervisor at the arts center, just a few blocks away. I asked how she had come up with such a specific story on the spot. “It’s a dream,” she said. “I heard California is more lively, more fun, than Nashville. The beaches are pretty. The palm trees.” For a moment she looked as if she could actually see the surf. She was born and raised in East Nashville and has spent almost her entire life within the same few square miles. She had no plans to vacation in California, or anywhere else. “All I do is work and take care of my sons,” she said.

Some 97 percent of federal felony convictions are the result of plea bargains.

The police seemed to believe her story (the arrest warrant noted her upcoming trip) and drove her downtown, where they put her in a holding room. By 1 o’clock that afternoon, her bail had been set at $11,500. To be released, she needed to get $1,150 to a bail bondsman. She contacted a friend, and they each paid half. (“That’s gone,” she says.) She assumed she’d be out in time to get to work that evening, but the money didn’t clear until almost nine, minutes before she was to be sent to jail in shackles. A court date was set for January. Sweatt was facing serious charges with serious consequences, and she was advised to get an attorney.

The fallout began even before the court rendered judgment in her case. Under the rules of the housing agency, her arrest prompted her eviction, which scattered her family. Sweatt moved into a cheap motel, and her sons moved in with her mother, although she still managed to see them every day. She tried to get enough money together to hire what she calls “a regular lawyer,” meaning a private attorney, but failed. So in January she turned to the public defender’s office—a choice that many people in her situation make reluctantly. That’s because of the common misperception, I was told by Dawn Deaner, the head of the office, that public defenders are nothing more than “public pretenders” who are “paid to plead [their clients] guilty.”

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Full article on link.

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All those spy devices in your house? Yeah, cops dont even need to kick in your door to find something they think is wrong. True innocence is no longer a legitimate defense against any whose job it is to "find something wrong".

John Adams once said:

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”

phill4paul
08-06-2017, 12:54 PM
As has been said here many times, by many members, there is no Justice in this perverted Justice system. The prisons have been built and now they must be filled.