The Criminal Justice System

In this episode, the components and function of the American Criminal Justice System are explained.  

Transcript

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Do you get annoyed when you're driving down the highway and everybody starts slamming on their brakes when they see a police officer either parked on the side of the road or with somebody pulled over on the side of the road? Do you know when you're required to provide your identification to a police officer if they ask for it? Do you have a right to have an attorney every time the police uh a police officer wants to talk to you? Welcome to my podcast, Inside the Criminal Process. This is Scott. Today I'm going to cover the basics of the American criminal justice system, which consists of the police, the courts, and corrections. So the purpose of our criminal justice system is to control and prevent crime and to provide and maintain justice. Controlling and preventing is pretty straightforward. Police respond to emergency calls, get their handle the situation, and move on to the next call or investigation or crime. By arresting, prosecuting, and punishing wrongdoers, the system is attempting to control crime. In the process, the system also hopes to prevent new crimes from occurring. Hopefully, others will be deterred from committing crimes based on the knowledge of the punishment, as long as the punishment is sufficiently serious. I'll talk about this later, but in my experience, most criminals never even consider the fact that they may get caught. So I'm not convinced that deterrence is a justification for harsh punishment. Reasonable people may think, geez, I'd like to do this, but I probably shouldn't, because I could get caught and I could go to prison and that would be horrible because I would be housed with a bunch of really hardcore criminals or or not so uh not real social people. But most people that choose the criminal lifestyle don't ever consider that. And they don't uh think about it rationally and reasonably or make choices based on what might happen, and just assume they're not going to get caught. So justice is a really difficult concept to define, and it's pretty subjective. Justice should mean that all citizens are equal under the law and they're free from arbitrary arrest and seizure. Justice should be linked to fairness, basically, in our society. We want our laws and those that are bound by the law to be fair. Think about your idea of fair. Do you remember Daniel Penny? He was a Marine Corps veteran that protected people from a crazed man on the New York subway. Um this man was harassing people. Penny subdued the man with a rear naked chokehold, and the man died. Likely from drugs in the system in a lifetime of not taking care of himself. That's just a guess. I didn't read the autopsy. Anyways, wouldn't you want Daniel Penny on your train if there was a presumably mentally ill man under the influence of some dangerous drug, harassing you and acting volatile and dangerous? Well, I certainly would. But Penny was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. We'll discuss these in a future podcast. Penny was acquitted, but let me ask you, do you think it was fair to charge him in the first place? Penny had to pay for a lawyer, spend a great deal of time preparing for trial, go through the stress of possibly being found guilty and possibly going to prison. And his arrest will be on this criminal record for the rest of his life. So if I were Penny, in the future, I would be loath to help or protect anyone. It probably just wasn't worth all the stuff that he went through. But I don't know. I haven't talked to the young man. Um I just I thought that was that was a miscarriage of justice, that whole situation, the fact that he was charged. So since our system is people-centered, you're gonna hear me use this word a lot, and you already have, there's a lot of discretion involved in decision-making by people that work in the criminal justice field. I talked about it briefly in the last episode and then the first episode. And here are some ways discretion plays into the criminal justice system. The police have discretion when they're enforcing the laws, when they're investigating certain crimes. They have discretion in arresting and detaining people, searching people in buildings. Prosecutors have discretion in filing criminal charges brought by the police. They have discretion in their plea bargains, they can dismiss charges, they can refuse charges, or they can file charges inappropriately, in my opinion, in the Daniel Penny case. Judges have they have a lot of discretion during trials. They set conditions of pretrial release, they accept pleas, they dismiss charges, and they impose sentences, have discretion in all of those tasks. And corrections officials, they have discretion in assigning inmates to facilities, managing prisoners, punishing those who misbehave, and rewarding those that follow the rules. Local law enforcement includes municipal police departments and sheriff departments. States can designate other specialized agencies and give them and their officers enforcement and arrest powers. For example, in states where gambling is legal, the state usually has a gambling commission that employs officers and or investigators to enforce and investigate violations of the gambling laws and codes. Some states have liquor and tobacco enforcement agency, bureaus of investigation, transit officers, and marijuana enforcement agencies. And states pass laws to give these the investigators and officers assigned to these agencies arrest powers within the state. Most crimes, as I've stated before, are enforced by local law enforcement agencies. You don't call the ATF or FBI when someone's trying to kill you or break into your house. Agencies with authority to enforce the federal law include the DEA, the FBI, ATF, U.S. Marshals, Secret Service, Postal Investigators, Forest Service, almost every federal agency has some level of police power. And I discovered this um when I had a case. A parole officer had done a home visit on one of the parolees and gathered several of those plastic milk crates full of paperwork to enclose to include school loan applications, ID cards, checks, all sorts of stuff that you find when somebody is committing um fraud or forgery, misrepresenting who they are, stealing identities, doing crimes of that nature. I had no idea where to start, but I was assigned the case, and I've never been a fan of investigating white collar or fraud cases. I found a number on one of the federal applications for federal student aid that said to report fraud or something, something to that effect. So I called the 1-800 number, and after quite quite a long time, I was eventually directed to an agent who worked for the Federal Department of Education, and she was assigned to, she had several states that she was she oversaw and did investigations in in that region or that area. She was excited, and I happily turned over all the documents thinking that my work was done. So then the state attorney general's office eventually took the case, and I was tasked with figuring out how the parolee knew all the people she was using the identities of to get the school loans. It turns out they were all inmates in the state prison system who were serving life terms. So I had to research and see if they had done time together because the AG wanted to charge the individuals with an organized crime or racketeering case. And we had to prove that they knew each other, and this was a concerted effort amongst them to commit fraud in getting these in getting these federal loans. So I had to look at the records of their incarceration, see if they were at the same prisons together, see if there was some type of nexus or connection between the the offenders that would have uh that would have allowed them to be able to get together and and commit this crime. So the anytime you have an organized crime or racketeering case, there's usually sentence enhancers, and the convictions for those cases um are usually harsher. They're usually harder to prove. Under the federal law, it's the Racketeer-Ifluenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the RICO Act. Um, it's a government, the government has to use that statute to charge organized criminals, and there's certain guidelines the U.S. attorney has to follow to get the case deemed as a RICO crime. And it's not it's not easy. There has to be a bunch of different crimes that lead up to it. There's a lot of stuff you have to prove to get it deemed as as RICO with the U.S. attorney. Um and most states have similar laws. Well, I won't say most, but I know that my state and several other in the others in this area have similar laws that they enforce at the state level that are that are handled like RICO crimes. So in November of 2002, President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, which combined it, combined the police power of 22 federal agencies, um, which was meant to step up the fight against terrorism. And terrorism is basically random use of violence at different intervals to achieve political goals. So I'll likely cover this in in in future episodes as well. Moving on to the court system, as discussed previously, we have two separate systems, state and federal corrections. So we've we've discussed the police, uh, the court system, moving on to corrections, which is the third branch of the criminal justice system. Um corrections is responsible for overseeing the punishment metered out by the courts. It includes jails, prisons, uh, parole, and probation, possibly, and community corrections. Depending on the state, the probation department may be under the judicial department, as it is in my state. Um, or it could be part of the Department of Corrections. There are a couple states that I'm aware of that the probation department falls under the Department of Corrections. So, with classifications of crimes, we we talked about these in the last episode. Serious crimes or felonies. Um the punishment could be death or imprisonment for more than one year if the person is found guilty. Misdemeanor is any crime other than a felony, um, fines or imprisonment up to a year if one is convicted would be the punishment and petty offenses. Again, in my state, you can only issue a summons for a petty offense. You can't actually arrest somebody and take them in and book them into jail. And there's typically only fines associated with petty offenses. So I had a case one time when I was in training as a brand new police officer. I get a call to this diner. It was the middle of the day. I pull in, this guy meets me out in the parking lot, he's like, hey, this guy stole these, told, stole the license plates off my car. And um he gave me the license plate of the person that had stolen his plates. I said, Well, what's how this all happened? So they were both pulling in to the parking lot, and the guy that reported the crime had pulled in front of the guy to get a parking space. It was a real small parking parking lot, so spaces were were premium. He pulled in front of him, he parked there. They had an altercation, he gets out, the guy says, Hey, that was my spot. I was headed towards it. The guy said, So what? Like first come, first serve. I got there first, it's it's my spot. So the guy, he the the guy that reported it went in to eat at the diner and he looked out, and this guy's squatting down, taking the plates off of his car. And he goes out and he says, What are you doing? The guy says, I'm taking your plates. And he said, Well, I can see that, but what are you gonna accomplish by that? He said, I'm gonna give them to the police. So I'm looking at a theft. Um a theft of the license plates. But they're they're very low value, and there's certain things that that that I'm gonna talk about, the elements that go with theft that that made it so that I couldn't charge this guy. But I tracked him down. He lived in a neighboring jurisdiction. I had a car from that jurisdiction meet me there. I contacted the guy. He said he had the plates um and he wanted to turn them over, but he wanted the he wanted the man charged with the crime. And I I said there was no crime. There's they didn't fight, they didn't he didn't assault him, um, there was no harassment, disorderly conduct, nothing like that. And um he was really upset and he was completely unreasonable, but he gave me the plates eventually, and all I could really charge him with was criminal tampering, which is basically um something somebody does to inconvenience the other person. I couldn't charge him with criminal uh trespass. I couldn't charge him with uh disorderly conduct. He he hadn't done anything other than take the plates off of the car. Uh it wasn't even criminal mischief because he didn't he didn't destroy them or damage them. And I couldn't charge him with the theft because, like I said, there was a it was a very small amount or worth of those license plates. And in order to be charged with theft, somebody has to take something that belongs to another person, and they have to have the intent to permanently deprive the lawful owner of the possession of that property. And this guy clearly didn't have that intent. He just he wanted to get the guy's attention, he wanted the police involved, he did not intend to keep the plates and never giving them back, though. So this thing ended up in court. This the guy was fighting it. He was so upset that that there was no crime that this guy could be charged with for getting to the parking space before him. Um so that was uh that was an interesting case. And criminal tampering is it's not charged very often, um, but it is something, it it is a crime, but it's a petty offense. So I couldn't arrest the guy and take him in and book him. There's also quasi-criminal violations like code violations, usually code enforcement deals with those driver's license violations. Um child abuse and neglect is an interesting uh issue in the state that I I live in. If if there's uh a case of child abuse or neglect, there will be a quasi-criminal action filed against the parents. It's called Dependency and Neglect Action, and it's filed in the county court. And the purpose of that is to get the child a guardian ad lightum and for everybody to kind of get together, the social services, the judge, the guardians ad light them, and the attorneys get everybody together and act in the best interest of the child. So that's the whole purpose of having the dependency and neglect action, separate from the criminal trial. So the the criminal trial, obviously the defense attorney is going to be representing the parents, but they're not going to look at the best interest of the children. They're going to uh vigorously represent their their clients who are who are the parents, and then the prosecutors trying to get convictions for child abuse or neglect. But um that's that's how child abuse is handled in my state. So the with the elements that I'm talking about, every crime is broken down into its elements. And those elements are what define the crime, and they're what has to be proven for a person to be convicted of crime, theoretically. So where this will come in, and I'm gonna cover major felonies and their elements and what has to be proved to get a conviction in those in a later podcast. But um just as an example, a common misconception, if if you've ever heard somebody say, geez, we went out to dinner or we went to went on vacation and we came home and we had been robbed. There was stuff missing, somebody broke into the house and and took all of our property or took some property or whatever. And they could they they call it, you know, we got robbed. They probably actually mean they were burglarized. Uh burglary and robbery are two separate crimes. Burglary is the breaking and entering into a dwelling or a place of business when you don't have the lawful uh right to be there and committing a crime therein. So it could be looked at, and and many of these burglaries were pled down in the city that I worked in to a trespass and a theft. So that's two misdemeanors rather than the burglary, which is a felony. Robbery, you have to actually take something forcibly from a person, uh, either using physically force or using a weapon. And if if you use a weapon, then it's it's usually menacing as well, a felony-level menacing and robbery. Um But that's the difference. It has to there has to be a person from whom you take the the property. There is a first-degree burglary in the state that I that I live in that is basically if you're armed when you commit a burglary, when you break in and steal something, it's a it's a high-level felony like robbery. So um that's like a sentence or a or an enhancer for the crime. So another another common one is you hear the term assault and battery. Uh we really don't have battery here in this state. It's that's not used. Uh an assault is just when somebody is is injured, somebody physically causes injury to another person intentionally, that's called an assault. Even and and even if there's just pain, you don't have to have a major injury for it to be an assault. But the level of injury or if you use weapons or not determines the level of the felony. So obviously a first degree assault is is more serious than a second or third degree assault. Third degree assaults are usually misdemeanors. That's your basic, you know, bloody nose, busted lip, second degree assault, first degree assault. First degree assault is is with a weapon, an injury caused by a weapon. Second degree is um there's certain things that make something a second degree assault, like there has to be serious bodily injury. A doctor has to sign off on a form saying, yes, this is serious bodily injury based on the definition in the statute. And there are crimes that have similar elements. So you'll hear the phrase lesser included offense. An example is kidnapping and false imprisonment. So false imprisonment is a is a lesser included offense of kidnapping. It used to be when I first started in police work, if somebody was in your house and would not let you leave, um, we we would charge them with kidnapping. But that wasn't the intent of the legislature when they passed that law. So so that turned into it has to be a false imprisonment. So kidnapping has to be moving somebody from one place to another. And it used to be sufficient to move them under the first DA that that was in in office when I first became a cop. Sufficient if you made somebody move like from the kitchen to the bedroom, they would they would take a kidnapping charge on that. Um but then it morphed into what's a different DA took over was just it was a false imprisonment charge. But false imprisonment is a lesser included offense of of kidnapping. And um and you'll sometimes hear that during jury instructions or or just when when officers are talking about what charges are appropriate. So I'm gonna go through and answer the questions. That I posed at the beginning of this episode. Uh the slamming on of one's brakes when they see a cop is really a pet peeve of mine. There is no officer that has somebody pulled over that is gonna decide to let that person go and then come after you because you were doing five or ten miles an hour over the speed limit. First of all, they wouldn't be able to prove that they had probable cause to stop you unless they have you on radar or laser. They can't just visually say, hey, that person's going 15 miles an hour over the speed limit. I'm gonna let this guy go because he was going only going five miles an hour over and I'm gonna go pull that person over. It doesn't happen. And I get it that it's kind of uh a natural reaction to seeing the lights or seeing the police car. Uh but I'm begging you, don't slam on your brakes. Just take your foot off the gas and look at your speedometer. Odds are if you're in a lot of traffic, you're probably not even going over the speed limit, anyways. But it's uh I just wanted to educate people on why it's unnecessary to always immediately slow down as as soon as you see a cop. Um it's not likely going to help anything, but I'm I had to mention it because it really, really annoys me. That that causes more traffic jams than anything, actually, in in the large agency that I worked for. It violated our policy for you to do stationary patrol on the highway during rush hour because that agency knew that that putting cops out on the highway during that time, there's enough of a traffic jam going on because of rush hour. We did it you didn't need cops out there like screwing it up even worse. So the second question: if an officer asks you for identification, they have to have a reason, okay? And and if they don't, but they walk up and say, Hey, can I talk to you for a second? And you say yes, that's a consensual encounter. They don't need any reason to talk to you if you're willing to talk to them. Um it's all obviously okay to ask why if they want to see your identification, and if they can't provide a reason, you have the right to refuse to provide your identification. Um again, consensual encounters or some type of reasonable suspicion that you are about to commit or committing or have committed a crime that that would allow them to talk to you and detain you. Um but it they have to have that, they have to have at least reasonable suspicion if you're not going to consent to the encounter. Again, if they have probable cause or reasonable suspicion that you've committed, are about to commit or have or are committing a crime, they have every right to contact you. Uh the words and the actions of the officers are going to be important in these scenarios or these situations. If the officer is using commands, hey, come here, I need to talk to you. Um, you might not be free to leave. If they're asking for cooperation, there may be no reason for the officer to detain or contact you. And again, it's it's okay to ask if you're free to leave. That may prevent a situation in the future where a judge has to decide whether it was reasonable for you to feel that you weren't free to leave. A lot of people, just based on the the way they were raised, you know, have respect for law enforcement and and will cooperate with them and stand with them if they ask if they ask them to. But if it starts getting to where you think that you're being accused of something or or you think the officer is is fishing to find something to to hold you accountable for or whatever, you certainly have the right um to ask them if you're free to leave. And if they say no, then they have to have a reason to to keep you there. So do you have a right to an attorney every time you talk to the police? So if you're in custody and the police are interrogating you, you have the right to have an attorney present. And this will this will be covered in a future podcast as well. Um However, the police don't, they're not obligated to get the lawyer for you, and lawyers are not always provided if you can't afford one. So they're not gonna say, they're not gonna read you your Miranda rights or you say, I want a lawyer, and they're not gonna call a lawyer and say, hey, can you come sit with this person while I talk to them? It's not gonna happen. You have to meet and and and if you are in trouble and you're gonna get arrested and you need a lawyer, you have to meet certain criteria to get a public defender. That's not the but it's not the police officer's job to figure out if you qualify for a low cost or a free attorney. Um The police do have to stop any interrogation once you've requested to speak to an attorney, though. If they're interrogating you and you say, I want a lawyer, um, they do have to stop. And just know that if they have probable cause to arrest you, they will, and then you'll will have to answer the booking questions like name, date of birth, address, phone number, etc. Nothing incriminating. As long as they're not asking you um questions designed to elicit a an incriminating response, they're just asking basic booking questions, you are required to answer those without an attorney present. So hopefully I've uh I I wasn't too confusing when I was describing these things, um, but we'll go through quite a few scenarios and cases where these uh these things have come into play and um maybe get an opportunity to to clarify some of these issues. So in the next episode, I am going to discuss discuss crimes and their elements, and hopefully I'll have some good examples and scenarios to discuss. Until then, thank you and take care.