[thebmax]

I agree with you that the poor get hit by this just as hard. A person who is facing a drug charge who has a few priors will be given the choice of pleading guilt and serving a few years in jail or going to trial and risking 20 years or some such nonsense.

But why should making everyone suffer from an unjust legal system better than the alternative. This is like the socialists who believe everyone being poor is better than some people being rich. "The equal sharing of misery" as Churchill put it, is not a good outcome.

[wpietri]

The reason that we should end the "one law for the rich, another for the poor" system we have now is that the system will never get more just unless the people with power have an incentive to make it so.

I'm pretty skeptical that Black was ill-used by the prosecutors. But even if he were, then as long as he was no more ill-treated than the average drug defendant, then I don't think we should worry about him more than the average drug defendant. And possibly less; Black still has incredible advantages over most of humanity.

[AnthonyMouse]

>The reason that we should end the "one law for the rich, another for the poor" system we have now is that the system will never get more just unless the people with power have an incentive to make it so.

That only works if the injustice affects sufficiently many affluent people that they act to change it -- and that they act to do more than just solve it solely for the rich. Which is highly unlikely, because those who can't buy their way out of a prosecution with lawyers can buy their way out of it with campaign contributions or outright bribes (but I repeat myself) or calling in favors from politically connected friends, etc.

And even if that wasn't the case, most rich people will never be prosecuted anyway (which is the same reason that most blue collar voters don't vote in anyone who will fix it for their brethren).

But the main reason is that solving it for working class people is hard, because good criminal defense is extraordinarily expensive and indigent defendants themselves can't afford it, but there are so many such defendants that governments can't afford to pay for it on their behalf either. Meanwhile solving it for the rich is easy, because they each have their own money so they just open their wallets and obtain the best justice money can buy.

This is always the problem with the "we'll make the problem worse and then they'll have to fix it" logic. When the problem is extremely hard, making it worse doesn't cause an easy solution to magically appear, it just makes it worse.