How About Some Speedy Trials?

This is Part 4 of Rule 6: Break up the Blue Zones.

As I write this, it has been over a year since the January 6th riot over the questionable election of Joe Biden. Many still await trial in jail. This is a travesty, albeit not a new one. Many poor people have been experiencing excessive pretrial punishment for years. The only thing new is that Republicans are getting a taste of this vile medicine.

Lately George Soros has been pushing for an unworkable remedy: get rid of cash bail. Jails now have a revolving door policy, and we are experiencing a true 1970s revival: exploding crime and inflation. All we need is a revival of funk and disco to complete the experience. (Forget Bitcoin, invest in leisure suits!)

The US Constitution has a provision for limiting pretrial punishment without letting rioters and shoplifters commit crimes with impunity: the right to a speedy trial.

Not only do suspects not have a right to a speedy trial these days, few go to trial at all. The legal system has become too complicated; only the Privileged can afford adequate legal representation. We have so many overlapping laws, many of which carry excessive punishments, that plea bargaining has replaced the trial by jury. The Fifth Amendment has been turned on its head. And our current system depends on plea bargaining. We do not have the legal system capacity to give every suspect a fair and speedy trial. We need to increase our legal system's capacity so that speedy and fair trials are theoretically possible. Perhaps we need more courthouses -- lot's of new courthouses.

Recall what I wrote about school boards. I went to the only high school in a county of less than 10,000 people. That county had its own courthouse and its own Commonwealth's Attorney. Imagine having a separate courthouse and DA for every 10,000 people in the US. That would be an enormous increase in the number of courthouses! Too enormous. But I submit that having a single courthouse for a county of a quarter million or more is too few courthouses. And one sheriff per quarter million or more is way too few. I want an America that's more like Mayberry.

It is long past time to split up some counties. Sure, old county lines carry a lot of history with them, but splitting up counties is also an old tradition. The Crown of England was splitting up Virginia counties in the 1600s.

Speaking of colonial counties, if you are out East, check out some of the really old county courthouses. Many courthouses built before the American Revolution are still in use today. True, modern additions have been made to the old courthouses, but those additions are often about the size of the original courthouse. In some counties I have visited the capacity has been upped by a mere factor of two to three since Colonial times. The number of laws has grown much more than a factor of two to three since those old courthouses were built, and in some of those counties the population has gone up considerably as well.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, but my intuition says that courthouse capacity should scale by law growth times population growth. I see nothing close to that! (Maybe the original courthouses had surplus capacity when built. Maybe court is in session much more often than in the old days. I'll leave that as a question for the historians and lawyers in the audience.)

I can say from experience that centralized courthouses in big cities can be an enormous inconvenience. I went to grad school on the edge of Dallas County and was called up for jury duty once. The summons said that no parking would be provided, but they could give me bus tickets. A bus ride from the edge of the county into Downtown Dallas is no small journey. Fortunately for me, students were entitled to an automatic exemption from jury duty so I avoided the inconvenience. But I dare say that many working parents have even less free time than grad students. And this inconvenience extends to defendants, plaintiffs, and lawyers as well. Either lawyers need to make the brutal drive and parking battle, or customers have to go downtown to consult with lawyers who have offices close to the courthouse.

These factors raise the price of justice. And the poor, and even middle class, cannot afford the cost.

Break up the high population counties.

Next: And Now for Some Truly Radical Federalism