Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) sent out a series of Tweets on Saturday night condemning the U.S. justice system, which incidentally has managed to put the highest percentage of citizens in prison in the world and possibly in history.
More than 2.2 million people are in cages today in America.
Ocasio-Cortez writes, “All too often, our criminal justice system—from tickets to convictions—is treated as a game, where the one racks up the most ‘points’ wins. Paired w/foolish criminalization of marijuana, poverty, etc., it wrecks chaos on people’s lives + stagnates communities for generations”
“As a result, our system is ‘innocent until proven guilty’ only for the rich & ‘guilty until proven innocent’ for the poor,” Ocasio-Cortez continued in a following Tweet. “To borrow from @ZephyrTeachout, the RADICAL rule of law is the idea that in the same scenario, our courts would treat a billionaire the same as a Bronx teen.”
In the following Tweet, she said: “It does not mean the treatment + presumption of guilt before a verdict. It does not mean we aim for the most positive punishment. It means that in the eyes of the law we treat everyone the same. That’s far from what our current justice system does. And that’s why it must change.”
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The United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population. It houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost is estimated to be around $100 million based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
I have firsthand experience that the US “justice” system is based on money and conviction stats.
If you have money, and you are innocent, you have some chance at justice. If you don’t have money and you are innocent, you are almost certainly going to prison.
Part of the reason for this is coercive plea bargains where the government overcharges defendants who are then facing extraordinary prison sentences. Without money to pay for the expenses of trial, with a public defender, who has an overloaded caseload, the innocent defendant is virtually forced to accept a plea deal and serve years in prison – rather than many years.
The shocking thing about this is that all prosecutors know that innocent people go to prison all the time and look at it as part of doing business. Judges also know when they are accepting plea deals that some before them are totally innocent but are making an allocution that is a lie.
They all have to know that innocent people are taking plea deals all the time. Either this or they are simply fools. Many prosecutors are glad to get conviction statistics even if it comes from innocent people and judges are perhaps resigned that justice is elusive.
The millions of Americans in prison, they are but a commodity. They are not real humans in the eyes of prosecutors.
The best proof I have yet seen is that exoneration projects based on DNA evidence routinely exonerate about 10 percent of convicts who pleaded guilty despite being 100 percent innocent. They did this to avoid more excessive charges.
In America there is no howl of protest for this disgraceful fact. If a horse or a dog is maltreated, there will be a hue and cry across America, but to think that 10 percent of people in prison today [a probable minimum] are innocent, causes no outrage. This is truly a wonderful fact about the fecklessness of human nature.
I don’t think prosecutors are necessarily evil. They are human. No better than the common American. And no worse. They simply have too much power.
I suspect the average electrician or stockbroker, put in the same set of circumstances – the ability – literally – to decide which people to coerce into prison – the innocent along with the guilty – might act the same – have a callous disregard for justice in lieu of job advancement that one gets in garnering lots of conviction stats.
They take the low road for it gets them there faster.
The English jurist William Blackstone wrote that “Tis better that ten guilty ones go free than one innocent suffer.”
Isn’t it ironic that in America we have almost precisely reversed that?
Frank Parlato 
Janine Morrison 
J.J. O'Hara 
Richard Luthmann 
Marie White 
Paul Serran
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What about the young lesbian girl that went missing? Did Keith, “cry baby jane” have her killed? Or is she hiding in the Alaskan bush unaware of the events being played out in court and Frank Report. Does any one in this cult have the balls to stand on their own two feet and do the right thing? All I see are a bunch of pathetic rich wanna bee somebodies who probably don’t know how to wipe their own asses. For all you females…wipe front to back
To the best of our knowledge, she committed suicide after Raniere got into her head. What do you define as doing “the right thing,” besides your butt wiping guidance?
I like this girl and her honesty. The leftist part of the democratic party is not into soviet union policy (as the Trump propaganga tries to make us believe), but into classic social democracy like the scandinavian model. By the way, those countries (Sweden, Finland, Danemark, Switzeland, Holland, and even Canada to some degree) are always ranked much higher than usa in terms of children ‘s healt, life quality, social justice, egality of chances, life esperancy, etc. And to claim that those countries are not free and democratic is so stupid, no point to argue.
Those countries have some freedoms ONLY because of U.S. military power and alliances, no point to argue.
More alt left BS. Let’s all aspire to be Canada Finland Sweden etc. You and reality are not friends, I see
Hey Alex, are you the looney FDC willard under another name. Glad you two like this goof.
AOC is the Ralph Wiggum of Economics.
Long may she sit on the Democratic Party, so we all have something to laugh at and abuse. A 10 year old kid could tie this fuckup in knots. Did she get her degree from a cereal box? Surely by now someone higher up would just have forbidden her from speaking publicly?
Tell that to the Family court!!!
I liked it better when everyone was bonded by their disdain for Vanguard…
Even with obvious bias throughout my lawsuit with Amway, I came out the winner. Granted, it was a civil lawsuit and I had all the facts on my side.
Trump has been successful with round 1 of criminal justice reform, which hadn’t gone anywhere in decades.
Scott commented on Trump and criminal justice reform. If you are for Trump or against Trump, I think any rational person will agree Trump’s criminal legal reform bill is good for the United States and all its citizens.
The Link below is to an excellent article on Trumps legal reform measures.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/28/world/all-107-aboard-killed-as-colombian-jet-explodes.html
There are multiple guilty murderers who claim to be exonerated when in fact they got off bc of money from corrupt innocence projects.
***multiple guilty murderers who got off bc of money from corrupt innocence projects***
BS…name them!
Damien Echols & wm3 – Guilty – got off on technicality. Ryan Ferguson – Guilty – off on technicality by corrupt Innocence project. Amanda Knox – Guilty- off on technicality… Anthony Porter – Guilty – off by corrupt Innocence project making innocent man take the fall. OJ Simpson (whose lawyers started corrupt innocence fraud industry) – just to name a few
Shit I would love to see the Clintons finally face justice. I believe it is getting closer as more of their swamp foundation is being dismantled. Love watching the airhead Cortez and her fellow Islamized democraps divide the democrap party
There generally has to be DNA evidence or something similar that is decisive to reverse a murder conviction.
Anonymous where are your facts?
Lol, Snorlax….I was gonna say look at the balls on Frank daring to quote a Democrat on FR!
AWESOME article, Frank. Too, too true. How long can we say we are living in a free society anymore when this is the reality?
It’s heart wrenching how you, Frank, became entangled in this ugly web woven by Clare Bronfman’s perjury and wealth on a warped Justice system.
Ocasio-Cortez sounds more and more like Fidel Castro. He solved a lot of Cuba’s problems too.
I agree, nobody flees to Cuba for a better life.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Latina Trotskyist.
Soviet Russia tried out her ideas nearly one hundred years ago and confiscated the land and livestock of rich peasants.
A rich peasant was a man who had two pigs instead of on.e.
Those peasants who resisted were sent to Siberia.
By the time the Communists were done over 3 million people had died of famine in Soviet Russia and Ukraine.
Many more died for reasons other than famine.
Shawdow, saying that Alexandria is a Trotskist is an insult to our intelligence. She is a social-democrat in an european way, which includes figures likes Tony Blair, Mitterand, de Gaulle, Helmut Kohl and a lot more. Those people are not against free market, they are just in favour of social justice and egality of chance for everyone. There is no link to communism or soviet union. It would be nice if you spare us with your ideology which goes agaist basic facts or commun historical knowledge. Thanks, and no offense!
AOC is an idiot. Her ideas are stupid and ridiculous.
social justice and egality of chance for everyone. You are a silly person to say the least. You project your own failed partisanship on others while spouting total BS
…and people think Trump is scary…. just wait until Cortez trades up from the House to the Senate…if you are a fanboy of Trumps brash public persona your going to love the estrogen fueled leftist leaning brashness of Cortez…. buckle your seatbelt there be a civil war ahead
On the other hand….
In agreement with the writer of this article: the criminal justice system is perversely skewed towards the rich. If you are a criminal defendant with very little resources a plea bargain, just like the poor gentleman that ran a website critical of NXIVM found out, your best course of action is accepting a plea deal.
You lost me at Ocasio Cortez and “our system”.
Yes, this is the ignorant fool who says we only have 12 years left. Shit we have heard that fear porn crap from Al Gore for decades
The last 5 years have been the 5 hottest years on Earth…Trump says Global Warming is a hoax because it’s cold outside.
Who is the “ignorant fool”–AOC, Trump or you?
It is certainly true that Earth has experienced some extremes that were warmer than today, as well as much colder periods. In some cases the main factors that caused these past warm periods – and the ebb and flow of ice ages over recent millennia – are well understood, though not in all. Many of the details remain unknown.
Within the past billion years, there may have been one or more periods when the whole planet was covered in ice. This “snowball Earth” phenomenon remains controversial, with some evidence suggesting that there were at least some areas of unfrozen land and water even at the height of the freezing
There were several “hothouse earth” periods when the temperature exceeded those we experience today. The warmest was probably the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which peaked about 55 million years ago. Global temperatures during this event may have warmed by 5°C to 8°C within a few thousand years, with the Arctic Ocean reaching a subtropical 23°C. Mass extinctions resulted
For the past million years or so, the climate has switched between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods with temperatures similar to those of the past few millennia. These periodic changes seem to be triggered by oscillations in the planet’s orbit and inclination that alter the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth.
Hey ladeda leave science to those who understand it. Get back to me when the airhead accomplishes anything remote to what our President has. Take you fear porn elsewhere.
From your Wiki-post on climate change, it is clear that–like Trump who confuses weather and climate–you confuse changes over geologic time with changes in our lifetime.
So it is idiots like you and Drumpf talking about science again. Just a lot of opinion and no facts whatsoever. But hey, the interaction of IR light and matter is only a known fact for 100 years by now. It is used by NASA, Police, FDA and so on to analyze stuff that comes over the border to detect contraband.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy
The moment you use the knowledge on ‘political incorrect’ samples, Republitards like you and Trump start to cry.
As you are a scientist and we are just dumb, I leave it to you to come to the conclusion what the connection between the following articles is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_window
http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~ajs42/pchem/co2/co2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer%E2%80%93Lambert_law
The first two have the energy listed on the x-axis in different values. You should be able to transform that easily, as you are a ‘real scientist’.
For all people who are interested in some knowledge about how processes work in the atmosphere, there is a nice book.
Introduction to atmospheric chemistry by Daniel J Jacob. Here is a link to the first edition. http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/
We may as well bend over and kiss our respective asses goodbye, we only have 12 years left. Spend them wisely. LOL
Always get a rise when liberal tools try to spout science. It is funny when leftist talk about that which they don’t know. The climate has always changed and will continue to do so and your silly left-wing talking points will never refute that. Keep following the dumb bimbo Cortez off the cliff. She is a perfect representative of your mentality.
“The climate has always changed and will continue to do so”
CDF Dullard, if you don’t know what’s wrong with that statement of yours, then your next quote is:
“a perfect representative of your mentality.”
The first thing we probably have to take into account is that the temperature *is not what we normally think of as a measured quantity* it’s the output of some model that aggregates the energy in the atmosphere across the entire globe and at every level of the atmosphere, and is based on tens of thousands of what we’d call “measurements” (ie. readings from thermometers). Second, we should consider the *daily* fluctuations in temperature at any given point, which probably ranges from 2 to 5 degrees F (1-2C) near the tropics to potentially 50-70 degrees F (30C) near the poles.
Knowing that we’re trying to aggregate thousands of global measurements taken multiple times per day that vary somewhere between 2 and 30 degrees C daily into one “effective global” number per year using a complex model already tells us that changes in the range of a couple of tenths of degrees C from year to year are most likely meaningless and amount to largely modeling and measurement error. The entire range from 1880 to 1930 should most likely be considered consistent with zero trend + modeling and measurement error just based on this background knowledge alone (and our knowledge of how sparse the thermometer readers were in 1890 or 1900 or 1910 etc).
So, it’s a good place to start with to say “what does the smoothed trend using only around 5-10 degrees of freedom in a polynomial/fourier series tell us about what happened?
The sad part is that we have seen too many research areas where the community has found it worthy to pursue lines of inquiry because they garner headlines, grants, publications, etc., regardless of whether they really believe there is underlying merit. In other words, we seem to have very poor filters for determining what “surprising” findings receive further research.
apparently you are the fool ladeda. Really… leftist sources are not your friend.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2019/02/
the alt left loonies always quote the “vast perponderance of climate scientists” who spout global warming Bullshit! They are all being paid by alt left corps, and our President knows more in his gut then they will ever know. The lame stream media doesn’t report it but Im glad lots of posters here know the truth
Indeed he is. Cortez is his latest fantasy girl. She is a liberal wet dream. Problem is she is a dumb as a box of rocks. Perfect representative of Laladee dada and his band of liberal leftists.
Yes I get a kick out of leftists like Willard calling people idiots when he ought to look in the mirror. They don’t come much bigger than him. Typical democrat using their usual fear mongering to pitch their bullshit.
The demoncraps many false narratives are falling apart. Too many idiots in their corrupt party are starting to float to the top of the bowl. Although some people thing that this Cortez lightweight was planted by the republicans….since most people see through her shallow intellect.
President Trump will continue to roll these corrupt losers while they stand around with their thumbs up there ass trying to defend infanticide, racism, open borders, central private bank etc.