scorching hot take incoming: the most effective thing anyone in the U.S. can do for CJ reform right now is to advocate at the local level for forcing a Grand Jury to convene every single time someone is charged with a felony.
here’s the deal. i’ve been working for a public defender’s office for literally less than three weeks, and i grew up around cops (my dad’s one of those lovely fucking abusive fuck shits). i know, intimately, what bad police look like, and what bullshit charges look like, and how often stupid bullshit is shoved through the courts. i’ve read some of the flimsiest probable cause affidavits on the goddamn planet, and some of the worst warrants.
but who else has? a lot of people, other than knowing it’s bullshit because they’re the target, haven’t seen the scope of the bullshit. others can be told, over and over, and it won’t stick because they haven’t interviewed a 60 year old schizophrenic woman from a jail cell who’s only sitting there because she supposedly stole some OTC medication.
...and then filed the paperwork for two dozen more people, only one of which has a charge that’s violent.
you might say, “what’s a grand jury got anything to do with it?”
simple. a grand jury evaluates probable cause. that means the GJ looks at all of the police reports/complaints, the evidence the state has, and maybe most importantly, they look at the charges that were filed.
i sincerely believe that most people, when they look down at some stupid fuck off charge, will be able to spot a stupid fuck off charge. and when they’ll get called maybe a dozen times a year to be the GJ for all felonies, they’ll start seeing nothing but stupid fuck off charges.
they’ll start reading police reports. they’ll start seeing the same abusive cops, the worst of the worst, over and over again. the bad cops and bad prosecutors will get a reputation among the community. incompetent pigs that are dumber than a box of rocks will be known by name. you’ll humanize the “criminals.”
i promise you. if you read some of this shit, you’ll never have respect for it again. only your literal fascists wouldn’t be able to call bullshit.
let’s also not forget that you will cause a court backup by doing this years long. meaning, realistically, the DA will have to start dropping the charges that never actually mattered in the first place. you’ll force certain things to, in practice, not be illegal simply because the state can’t pick up the cases. if they let these shit ass cases sit, the public defender’s office could just start mass-filing constitutional challenges for the fast & speedy clause.
drop. the. nuke. they’ve had 40 years to reverse course. don’t ask them to reform or dismantle. force them to.
