Pcr Consultants

Learn from the Small Cases

In an article from The Crime Report, taken from a NY Times article, small cases involving first-time offenders give big lessons to learn. The article is long, but has some great tidbits that all American’s can learn from. It get started this way:

Anthony, a 28 year-old African-American school bus driver with no criminal record, is in the passenger seat of a friend’s car when the police pull it over for a burned-out brake light. The cops search the car, and they find a pipe with marijuana residue in the console. In New York, simple possession of marijuana leads only to a civil violation, but the police describe this pipe as being “open to public view”— so they arrest both men and bump the charges up to misdemeanors.

Because of that charge, Anthony is automatically and immediately suspended from the job he has held for seven years, pending the disposition of the case.

And later it goes on to discuss why the prosecutor maintained the criminal charge, versus deflating it to a civil penalty. One year free and clear of crime was the first offer the prosecutor put forward in order to drop the misdemeanor charge. Anthony balked, and that was taken down to 90 days. That’s still three months without a paycheck. Anthony balked again and the case was rescheduled for hearing in another month. Anthony is unemployed until then.

The article continues:

We tend to think that the job of a conscientious justice professional is to protect a presumptively safe system from dishonest, lazy, or incompetent fellow humans. But in Anthony’s case none of the humans violated the rules. No one likes the outcome, but everyone did his or her individual job as they’d been taught to do it.

Does that mean no one is responsible? Safety experts in aviation, medicine, and other fields would say everyone is responsible.

The cops made the stop and wrote the “public view” application; the prosecutors “papered” the case and refused to throw out the misdemeanor; the defense failed to find a way to make the questionable basis for the charge count for something; the judge took the path of least resistance and gave the thing a new date.

All the while Anthony is out of a job, on the unemployment lines, and absorbing resources from the system rather than adding to them. First-time offenders often don’t do what is required to make situations like this better for them because the system just rolls over them in a cacophony of lethargy and apathy. Learn how to avoid mistakes first timers make to avoid looking at the unemployment line or worse.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *