334
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
334 points (99.7% liked)
Luigi Mangione
2847 readers
299 users here now
A community to post anything related to Luigi Mangione.
Please respect Lemmy.world ToS. Don't plot who should be murdered next in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It would be fairly awful given the circumstances. We have a history of faulty and overzealous prosecutions especially against black and poor people. For any given offense there are essentially 3 sorts of sentences. The sentence they will threaten you with in hopes of getting you to plea even if innocent say something absurd like 20 years, the "deal" you may be given which could be 3 months and the punishment for making them actually go to trial which may be 3 years.
Theoretically everyone is entitled to representation but you may not qualify for free help unless you are desperately poor and the quality of the free help may be so bad its worse than nothing. It's normal for unsuccessful prosecution to cost anything from thousands to hundreds of thousands depending on complexity of case. Ultimately virtually all cases are settled with a plea including cases which are so weak its hit or miss if they would have secured a conviction or sometimes cases so weak there was no chance of conviction but scared people accept it. Especially if its a case in which they get no actual time in jail they just agree to pay the government continually for years and go to jail if they ever get in trouble. Hell some people plea because the alternative is spending months in jail although innocent because they cannot afford to pay to get out but they get out immediately with a plea but agree to get robbed by the government for years.
In fact there is a sort of plea you can enter where you don't admit you did anything wrong but agree to go to jail anyway.
So if you understand just how fucked up our system is imagine if they can just keep going after going all the way to trial and definitively losing.
It's hilarious that our pres talks about shithole countries whilst presiding over one.