Monday, January 25, 2021

How about a Libertarian AG?

I always enjoy reading Clark Neily's posts at CATO.  Here's an interesting one about what a Libertarian AG could accomplish under a Biden Administration: 

Inauguration Week seems like an opportune time to think how much more just the Department of Justice could be if President Biden took the bold step of putting a libertarian in charge of it. As I've written before, our criminal justice system is fundamentally rotten — it punishes vast amounts of morally blameless conduct, uses coercion-fueled mass adjudication to perpetuate mass incarceration, and insists upon a policy of near-zero accountability for its own transgressions. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any American institution inflicts more injustice than our so-called criminal "justice" system.
One might argue that because the vast majority of criminal enforcement occurs at the state level there's not much point in focusing on the federal system. I disagree. The U.S. Department of Justice looms large over the entire criminal-justice landscape by establishing norms, setting examples, providing oversight, and offering — or withholding — financial incentives to other agencies and jurisdictions. For better or worse, DOJ represents a kind of industry gold standard for criminal justice. And that's disturbing because, as discussed below, many of DOJ's standard practices are astonishingly unjust.
DOJ is a sprawling, $30 billion-a-year agency that wears many hats. Accordingly, it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive list of proposed reforms in a single blog post. But one of the most consequential things DOJ does — and an area in particular need of fundamental reform — is the enforcement of federal criminal laws. On that front, a libertarian attorney general would be well-advised to address three specific issues: accountability, prosecutorial tactics, and institutional culture.
1. Accountability. The lack of accountability among federal prosecutors is simply astonishing. Perhaps the most stark — but by no means isolated — illustration is the Ted Stevens case, in which prosecutors systematically cheated their way through the prosecution of a sitting U.S. senator, got caught, and were subjected to no meaningful discipline of any kind....
2. Prosecutorial tactics. Many of the tactics used by DOJ prosecutors — especially to induce people to waive their constitutional right to a jury trial and plead guilty, which more than 90 percent of federal defendants end up doing—are simply shocking....
3. Institutional culture. A major part of the problem is that people who work within the criminal justice system come to accept as perfectly normal and unobjectionable the kinds of policies and tactics described above, such as letting misbehaving prosecutors off with a slap on the wrist (if that) and applying such extraordinary pressure on defendants to plead guilty that almost no one chooses to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to a trial anymore....
The bad news is that our criminal justice system is fundamentally broken and unjust. The good news is that criminal justice reform represents a vast orchard of low-hanging fruit—policies that could be adopted overnight and would ameliorate some of the system's worst pathologies and realign many of its most perverse incentives.
Maybe putting someone whose core value is liberty in charge of an agency whose core mission is depriving people of it isn't such a crazy idea after all.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

But he didn't. He nominated a "nothing's gonna change" AG.

Anonymous said...

Justice? Please.
Two memorable adages from practicing as a Miami state PD:
" In the Halls of Justice, the justice is in the halls"
and from my African-American clients, " How come when they talk about 'justice', its usually 'just us' ".

Anonymous said...

There's Jay Weaver carrying the us attorney's water again. Why is he allowed to report on the Esformes case when he's made anti-semtic comments on facebook.

Anonymous said...

Libertarian? According to John Brennan, that is a group of people who need to be put in re-education camps.

Anonymous said...

1:30, how're you doing. MAGA.