Regarding Internal Dictatorships

Zero Correlation Between Conviction and Accused Behavior

 

Any criminal conviction, whether by plea or jury trial, is rounded up to reflect criminal appearance greater than the actual statutory violation.  This is the result of a long tug-o-war between defendants minimizing their behavior for the lower convictions and sentences and prosecutors maximizing for the higher conviction and sentences.  It is a classic self-interest exercise of perception: a defendant believes that he stepped minimally over a criminal (statutorily defined) threshold and a prosecutor believes that all defendants live in breach of criminal statutes.  This is the model for the adversarial criminal trial system in the U.S. and has occasionally functioned.

 

If a conviction were achieved consistent with this adversarial model the correlation between the accused and the actual behavior would be a correlation of one.  Obversely, a conviction that has no consistency between accused and actual behavior has zero correlation.  Conceivably a defendant could have a zero correlation conviction less than his actual behavior- perhaps jaywalking in lieu of public drunkenness.  This implies that a prosecutor could restrain his fiat to charge and convict.  Any such act of magnanimity is unknown to this essayist, and would be antithetical to the prosecution machine we currently live under.  Most low or zero correlation convictions are biased for higher accused behavior than the actual offending behavior.  This is the case in all dictatorships, where the state has the over whelming authority to tell the story to produce a conviction – ownership of process.  Representing “the people” has become a guise whereby the D.A.’s office effectively prosecutes at will and produces convictions above the actual offending behavior of most defendants.  They are the dictator of all criminal proceedings.

 

This developed from a perceived need for more zealous prosecutions under Reagan, which induced a lack of – and a structural inability - to put on any defense.  This is manifest in cases like the West Memphis Three where omnipotence to convict was exercised initially. Then in the most rare of occasions that a false conviction (correlation= -1) is reversed, it was restored by the D.A.’s threat to use its unconstrained authority to conduct the same prosecution again!

 

This omnipotence is recognized and formalized in a precedent called an Alford Plea,  (Alford v. North Carolina).  This take-the-rap plea consists of acknowledging the prosecutions ability to achieve a conviction, and nothing more.  Thus accusation equals conviction and any correlation between offending behavior and conviction is lost…until the dictatorship is over thrown.