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THREAD: A federal court just affirmed a *9 year* prison sentence for a blind man in Los Angeles for failing to inform authorities supervising him "within five working days" that he had become homeless. (1)
Very few documents you'll ever read better capture the everyday cruelty of the mass incarceration bureaucracy. (2) https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2021/01/20/20-55073.pdf
One of the banalities of evil we see every day: courts have concocted many ways to prevent themselves from doing justice. In this case, the court refused to even reach the question of whether it is constitutional to cage this man for 9 years. (3)
Instead, the court found that the blind, houseless man had "defaulted" his claims because he didn't properly raise the argument in time since he didn't have a lawyer. (4)
How could the court do this? Because of a 1996 law that Clinton forced through when Democrats/Republicans demanded more government powers after the Oklahoma City bombing. Using that crisis as an excuse, prosecutors got Clinton to basically kill habeas corpus. (5)
But these "terrorism" laws, demanded by powerful people in times of crisis, are never necessary and are then used in perpetuity against the most vulnerable people. (6)
I wrote about a case in which the Obama DOJ kept a person in prison on an illegal sentence because prisoners can't file *two* petitions for release, even though the court mistakenly denied the person's first petition! (7) https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/opinion/president-obamas-department-of-injustice.html
Make no mistake, the punishment bureaucracy at every turn is a brutal system that powerful people use to serve their own interests. (8) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy
Thanks to @G_Padraic for highlighting this perfect example of the evil of the criminal punishment bureaucracy (end) https://twitter.com/G_Padraic/status/1352275352165478403
Given the attention this is getting, if you're interested in more general background check out my longer explanation of how all this works in the criminal punishment bureaucracy. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy
