The criminal justice system is often - maybe usually - an injustice to victims.
The very proper emphasis on a fair, constitutionally guaranteed trial for the accused has warped into unimaginable delays and outright carelessness towards the rest of society.
Today states like New Jersey and Illinois which ended cash bail treat violent offenders - like murder homicide - to the least restrictive bond arrangement (home custody, hospitalization, half-way house, etc etc) which will still result in their "likely" appearance in court to answer charges.
This sort of absurd rose-tinted mentality has spread to all facets of the criminal justice system.
Including the case management for felony charges, including murder.
The US DOJ issued a study in 1986 that showed the average time to dispose of a felony case in America was a little over 7 months.
It is now averaging between 3 and 7 years!
The reasons offered are many, but they are largely bullshit. Such as the often-cited "DNA testing excuse". For a nuclear DNA test for a criminal court, it now only takes between 2 and 10 days on average for the WORK to be done at the lab. So that excuse is crap.
So what's the hold-up?
Let's examine Ohio's criminal justice atrocity regarding unprocessed rape kits as old as 1993 still not fully processed until 2021. A backlog during that time of nearly 14,000 Ohio rape kits! It took various funding grants and legislative earmarking to relieve the backlog. Those repsonsible for the delays at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification didn't suffer. The women did.
Women who got sexually assaulted by predators, incested by sick blood relatives, and human-trafficked as sex slaves while rape kits sat on shelves for nearly 30 years.
But tweedle-dee, tweedle-dumb. The State of Ohio clapped itself on the back for clearing up the backlog, only to ignore the decades of death and torture while rape cases were not pursued in real time. Then once the kits were analyzed, the second injustice for women bloomed: Waiting more years for prosecutors and cops to go do something about it. When you break a log jam, the river overflows the banks. And so many perps walked, unarrested or even statute-limited from prosecution.
Lately, a local Ohio murder story has emerged with a 20-year old mistakenly released by a "clerical error" (think that clerk will lose his job?) who had shot his mother and murdered a 26-year-old man back in April 2021. He had been allowed all this time to lolligag under home confinement until - guess what - his fentanyl habit killed his 1-year-old son. The clerk let him out after his re-arrest for the infant's death, and surprise-surprise, police say he shot and killed a 21-year-old at a gas station while on the lam. So now a total of 3 killings and his mother wounded by the same coddled-on-bail maniac.
Got the part about him being court-released to goof off at home while his murder case was in abeyance for well over a year? I guess who cares. Just an infant killed during his bail playtime "house arrest". No biggie.
We obsess over celebrity crimes and deaths of pretty people. And we should. But we should also obsess over the killings of non-celebrity inner city people.
There's no big special on the networks about Columbus' 4 lives, like there is for 4 co-eds in Idaho.
No sir, we'll have Columbus city council squawk loudly about "guns" and "fentanyl" and "violence against women". But it's all fake. They haven't done a thing to bring criminal cases to a timely resolution. They want the grandstand without doing the real work.
Oh, yes, there are national model standards for dispensing with felonies, promulgated by the ABA and affiliated legal organizations. It is 1 year for 98% of cases. But wait! It's 6 months for 90% of them, and 3 months for 75% of them. Something is seriously wrong, per the National Center For State Courts and its Effective Criminal Case Management "Timely Justice" data manual. Three months to dispose of 75% of felonies? We did that in 1986 per the DOJ. Per the ABA's own model targets set in 2011, we are now in a vacuum of justice denied.
The judges, lawyers, prosecutors, expert witnesses, lab techs, and cops get paid either way. Slow or fast.
The rest of us watch as felonies went from 7 months to resolve to now up to 7 years! And the ABA target at 3 months for 75% of those cases, with 1 year being the goal for nearly all the rest!!!
If somebody told you your internet, your phones, your car, your wait in line at the grocery store, or any other facet of modern life was going to be 10 times slower "just because" of incompetent back room machinations having nothing to do with fairness, you'd flip out.
"Justice too long delayed is justice denied", said Martin Luther King Jr. in his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail".
Martin flipped out. I am too.
