Saturday, October 31, 2009

Courts also feeling the bite of cuts

Amber Paw over at Blue Mass Group has a post here about how the budget crunch is changing the court system. I think this is a problem but I don't have a suggestion as to how to fix it. What do you think can be done?

Jeffrey Manning wrote an article here about why it is so important to allow everyone to be represented by an attorney. He says,

This is the miracle of the Bill of Rights: To protect the individual from the potential oppressiveness of government. If we as a society are to be measured by how we treat the poorest among us, clearly, providing those accused with a lawyer to protect their basic rights as citizens is axiomatic.

I think most would agree

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bill,

The court system has a huge resource available for collecting money. First of all the magistrates should stop dismissing 85% of all tickets that are appealed. Honestly, when a person tells the magistrate that they committed the violation listed on the ticket, then the ticket and the fine should stand. That would make the courts millions of dollars.

Second punish the violators with FINES. It is a shame that a person who has driven around without insurance for 2 years gets less of a fine than someone that runs a stop sign.

The change I can believe in starts with finding the guilty responsible.

Anonymous said...

How about the DUI's that get slapped on the wrist and let go again, to do the same thing all over again, maybe even killing someone in the end. We know that's happened.

Anonymous said...

do the crime- pay the damn fine