Why should convicted felons be punished if they have a gun?

"they weren't sure whether he took part in the scheme" is called "reasonable doubt" and a finding of "Not Guilty".

 

What are you on about now ?

Nobody can be held indefinitely without trial and due process here in the U.S. except under charges of Treason or Patriot Act.

 

If you are a convicted felon and released, reasonable restrictions can be placed on you, including those pertaining to guns.

Maybe after three or five or ten years, the state could be persuaded to review the likelihood of an ex convict being allowed a gun again.

 

Wow. You've moved from nonsense to outright fabrication, shoog.

 

He means most of those accused are pushed (maybe coerced is a more apt analogy in many cases) into a plea bargain and pleading guilty.

Fair trials take a lot of preparation time and legal maneuvering back and forth before they are ready to be held. Some defendants can't afford bail, some prosecutors will push for the judge to set the bail amount unreasonably high. Sometimes bail is not even granted, in some cases. This could happen even when it's a non-violent felony and the defendant turned themself in.

A lot of defendants who have already been sitting in prison for 9 months will just plead guilty so they will only have to serve a few more months. Better than waiting for it to go to trial, all the legal expenses of a defense attorney, and of course the potential risk, however small, that the court might find them guilty and give them a much longer sentence. Someone who doesn't sign a plea bargain to 20 months may be looking at 4-5 years if convicted at trial. And they may already have spent 14 months in jail, even if they're eventually found innocent. What would you do?

Another statistic that may surprise many people here: more than half the prisoners sitting in U.S. jails have not been convicted yet.

Typical waiting times for a trial are 10 to 14 months, with 18 months not being uncommon (even when the defendant is not out on bail). Try demanding a trial before then and the judge may not allow certain witnesses or legal motions, or just express a general hostility to the accused during the trial that will greatly increase the chances of conviction. The sentence might also be higher too. Prosecutors will dump vital documents on the defense just two days before, so the defense doesn't have adequate time to go through it or file the relevant motions in response.

So the statement "95% of defendants never get a chance at a trial" may not be so far from the truth.

 

A University of Illinois student was charged with a hate crime on Tuesday for allegedly placing a noose in a campus residence hall.

Andrew Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore, was charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and committing a hate crime, which is a felony, after students found a noose hanging inside an elevator over the weekend, according to university police.
​

https://abcnews.go.com/US/illinois-...ed-hate-crime-placing-noose/story?id=65371709

 

The police must now see if enough evidence can be collected.

Leave the nooses alone, haters.

 

No, the majority of convicted felons were pushed into a plea bargain and never had a trial, that's how the system works.
That's especially true for accused felons who are likely to only serve a couple of years. The justice system simply doesn't want to waste the resources on a trial for all of them, so they're basically given the option: plead guilty and get 2 or 3 years, or take it to trial and be likely to get 5 or 6 years. In some cases it can end up being a lot more extreme than that. It's pretty much in their overall best interest to plead guilty even if there's a chance they could be found not guilty if it went to trial. Somewhere around 80-90% of cases never end up going to trial.

And yes, even the majority of cases where the accused have a fair chance of not being found guilty by a jury still don't go to trial.
I actually talked to one man, and he said he had a family to support and didn't want to risk a much longer prison sentence, didn't want to pay lots of money for a lawyer, and anyway, by the time it would have gone to trial he would already have been in prison half the time he would be if he just took the plea bargain and pleaded guilty.

 

Fair point. 2A makes no distinction about who the people are.

 

That wasn't my intended point. My point was questioning whether the federal government really has an appropriate role in automatically permanently taking away those people's civil rights, based on a very broad list of potential offenses and situations.

And even in the case of some criminals, who may not necessarily be deserving of those civil rights, whether further criminalization will necessarily achieve anything. If it doesn't then it's just excessive punishment and making more things illegal that don't really have to be.

You can't just paint over all persons who are convicted felons with a broad brush stroke.
At the very least, you need to go over those felonies one by one, and look at which situations exactly justify the creation of a new crime for these people.

 

With these red flag laws, due process is trodden upon. An asides, from your point.

 

It may not have have been your intended point....but it is spot on. 2A makes no distinction which of 'the people' have the right to bare arms, ergo all people do, including felons and mental cases etc.

 

Yep up to and including children, dementia patients, paranoid schizophrenics, or the disabled (think palsy and vision problems or both)

You know the 2a states who can and who cannot OWN a gun but it says NOTHING about discharging the bloody things! Ergo bullets should be restricted

 

I don't want to make the argument in this thread about absolute rights from the Second Amendment.

So why don't we try to focus on the distinctive topic here, shall we?

You all have had plenty of other arguments about that in numerous other threads.

So first, let's just assume, for the sake of argument here, so we can focus on the topic and not get distracted, that not all people's rights should be protected. And let's also assume it might be okay in some instances to make it a crime for certain people to buy or even have a gun, even though we also assume (for the sake of argument here) that it's a general right everyone else has. Well, the question arises, which are those exact cases? What exactly should someone have to have done to lose those rights, and how long should they lose those rights? What compelling argument can we make that it is justified to put that person in prison for a crime that would not have otherwise been a crime?

 

But you are bringing up a different argument there. Let's save that for another thread and focus on my argument.

(I don't want to get into your argument here because it's a whole complicated contentious issue that could have its own long thread)

So please, for the sake of the argument in this thread, let's just assume there are some classes of people who no longer deserve those rights and protections under the constitution. Now we come to my argument about exactly who those people are, and what the laws we seek to enforce would accomplish.

Has someone who has committed a crime and done a moral wrong somehow committed another moral wrong if they don't follow the special laws that they have to follow but other people don't?

 

Okay.....but keep it in the back of your mind.

 

Yes, of course.

 

You are right. The essence of justice is a speedy trial before an untampered jury.

Our criminal justice system is contrived to coerce plea deals.

 

They have already proven themselves to be a threat to the law-abiding.

If they are caught with a gun (and the police should be spying on them), throw them back in the big house for a long stretch.

 

Equivalency fallacy. Not all of them have.

Again, if you think all convicted felons are robbers, murderers, rapists, that sort of thing, then you are wrong.

I don't have to tell you that there are an endless number of felonies that were not even crimes 100 years ago.

 

Even in the case of murder, I would argue that sometimes they do not deserve to lose their gun rights.
For example, a man who walks in on his wife with another man in bed and kills him with his bare hands and is sentenced to 15 years.
Due to the unique situation of the murder, I wouldn't necessarily say that that man has proven himself to be a threat to the law-abiding in general. That man is put in prison to punish him for what he did, not to keep others safe.

 

An embezzler is a threat to the security of the law-abiding.

 

Okay sure, you can make that argument, but again, not all of these people are thieves or fraudsters.

You seem to be painting all felonies with a very wide brush and drawing an equivalency fallacy.

Why don't we specifically define each of the type of crimes in which gun rights should be taken away, rather than just thoughtlessly and automatically attaching it to all felonies?

 

And since you're talking about fraud, I'll also point out that people working for employers are convicted of fraud all the time without clear evidence. The employers swindled people out of a huge amount of money, and the authorities just assume the employees were likely in on the scam.
Usually goes to plea bargain and the employees might get 1 or 2 years in prison.

That is how the system works.

Sometimes the crime is just working for the wrong people. The prosecutor would rather risk an innocent person spending a little bit of time in prison than let anyone go unpunished. (That's why they might only get 1 or 2 years) And besides, if they press charges against the employees they can turn those employees into witnesses to use against the employers.

Many of these type of situations are more about punishment than keeping other people safe.

 

Because we have passed a law saying that one of the consequences of being convicted of a felony is to lose certain rights, and one of those rights is gun rights. It used to be (in most of the country) we used to also take away voting rights from convicted felons. Rights can be taken away by due process (conviction in a court), otherwise we could never imprison or execute a criminal.