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She was proven to have shot him in the back, withdrew her self-defense claim, and was found be guilty of voluntary manslaughter. In 2005, a rich Chinese lord had his 2 bodyguards beat up a peasant boy who now needs wires for his jaw and a nose job, was not guilty of anything and gets away clean.
htm In the same county a year before Cummings' trial, a cow killer was sentenced to 9 months in jail, woman who shoplifted got 135 days, a car thief 5 years, a purse thief 15 months, and a man who fired into an empty dwelling got 2 years. htm Vaccination Decisions Part one: Is it possible to assess vaccine safety? by Doug Collins The Crime of Being Poor part one by Paul Wright, editor, Prison Legal News "The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor t o sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread." The concept that no one is above the law is a noble one. Like many good ideas, reality usually lags far behind the rhetoric. Recent years have seen a growing criticism of the criminal justice system on the premise that that the system itself is racist. Proponents of thi s position support their argument by pointing to statistics that show th at black men make up 6 percent of the national population but almost hal f of the nation's prison population (see David Cole's No Equal Justice f or a detailed overview of this position). This is taken as prima facie e vidence that the system is inherently racist, at least in its outcome. No one, it seems, is willing to discuss the role that class plays in dete rmining who does and does not go to prison. If the law prohibits rich an d poor alike from stealing bread, and both steal bread, how come only th e poor go to prison for doing so? The proponents of the institutional ra cism theory do not claim that rich blacks and Latinos are being herded i nto prison and jail in vast numbers, because they are not. White prisoners tend to share one thing with the ir black and Hispanic compatriots: poverty. Most prisoners report income s of less than $8,000 a year in the year prior to coming to prison. A ma jority were unemployed at the time of their arrest. Tellingly, in a soci ety that measures everything, no government statistics are kept on pre-i ncarceration earnings and employment histories. Few researchers seem int erested in proving the obvious. Refusing to address the role that class plays in the criminal justice sys tem, and politics in general, makes it all but impossible to address the root causes of two million people behind bars in the US. To the extent that blacks and Hispan ics are disproportionately poor compared to overall society, they are di sproportionately represented in the prison population. Few studies have examined the correlation between race and class. One of the few that did, (cited in the Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America: Why the Solutions to America's Most Stubborn Social Crisis Hav e not Worked and What Will), looked at the crime, arrest and incarcerati on rates in a poor black neighborhood and a poor white neighborhood in O hio. The not-so-surprising conclusion was that it is the poor, regardles s of race, who bear the brunt of the "war on crime," which sounds better than a "war on the poor." This explains why many whites are in prisons and the relative absence of wealthy minorities in prisons and jails. One of the few recent books to discuss wealthy people accused or convicte d of violent crimes is Dominick Dunne's Justice: Crimes, Trials and Puni shments, which documents the inherent systemic bias in favor of the weal thy in the criminal justice system. Despite its subject matter and the s erious policy implications it raises, it is largely dismissed as a celeb rity biography. Dunne, a victims advocate, documents criminals "getting away with murder." This would normally be great fodder for the tough-on- crime crowd. But since the "criminals" in his book are all wealthy, the topic is best ignored. Class looms like a hippopotamus in a swimming poo l where all the dinner guests are too polite to mention its existence. Other authors have given excellent, book length expositions of how corpor ate crime is rarely policed and lightly punished when it is. The unspoken reality is that in America today there exist two systems of criminal justice. One for the wealthy, which includes kid-glove investig ations, lackluster prosecutions, drug treatment, light sentences and eas y, if any, prison time. The other, for the poor, is one of paramilitary policing, aggressive prosecution, harsh mandatory sentences, and hard ti me. Wealth, and the political connections inherent to wealth, is the det ermining factor in deciding which system one gets. This is most obvious when wealthy hip-hop artists and athletes, many of them black, are charg ed with serious crimes. Class trumps race every time, even if the wealth is newly found. It has been said that America has the best criminal justice system that m oney can buy. For the most part, the obvious corruption of third world b anana republics, with cash exchanging hands for not-guilty verdicts, is not present in the American justice system. Instead, we have the class-b iased judge or prosecutor, who is the legal equivalent of going to the c asino where the odds inherently favor the house and are unlikely to chan ge. The most seminal event in the criminal justice system in recent years was the trial and acquittal of OJ Simpson in Los Angeles for the alleged murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. Regardless of S impson's guilt or innocence, the trial clearly showed that class trumps race when it comes to the criminal justice system. At each step of the p roceedings Simpson was able to obtain different treatment and results th an he would have had he been penniless. This ranged from the obvious (th e "dream team" of lawyers who represented him) to the not so obvious (th e prosecution's decision not to seek the death penalty). The government has virtually unlimited resources to investigate and prose cute those crimes it chooses to pursue. An indigent defendant with a low -bid court-appointed attorney with no resources for expert witnesses or investigators is simply being "processed" through the courts and into pr ison, not defended. It has been estimated that OJ Simpson spent betwee n $3-5 million on his defense. That is what it takes to level the playin g field in a serious criminal case. It is also beyond the reach of all b ut the wealthiest of criminal defendants. Wealthy defendants frequently come from the same social strata and share friends and acquaintances with prosecutors. State prosecutors are all el ected officials and as such they rely on campaign donations to get elect ed. Does a wealthy campaign con tributor get prosecuted or judged differently if accused of a crime, com pared with the poor and politically unconnected? Just as legislators claim that major campa ign donors get no special treatment. After more than 16 years in prison I have yet to meet anyone who was weal thy when they were convicted. I long ago concluded that what people did, in the way of crimes, had no bearing on whether they came to prison. Some may disagree with this assessment a nd insist it is the criminal conduct of the poor that leads to our incar ceration but the evidence indicates otherwise. For the purposes of this article I am not going to discuss rich people ac cused of crimes for which they were later acquitted. Instead, I want to focus on wealthy people who are convicted of crimes, especially violent crimes, and note their experience in the criminal justice system. My research assistant for this article, Thomas Sellman, commented that hi s computer database search criteria of "violent crime" and "light senten ce" invariably turned up "wealthy defendant." Guilty of Murder, Go to Jail, Maybe Susan Cummings is a billionaire heiress. Her father, Sam Cummings, was a global arms trader who made his fortune selling weapons to guerrillas, d ictators and despots allied with the United States before he died in 199 8 On September 7, 1997, Susan shot and killed her lover, Argentine polo player Roberto Villegas,...
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