All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Lou Rockwell.
He's the chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute at mises.org and he's the author of the books Speaking of Liberty, which is a great collection of speeches, and also The Left, The Right, and The State.
Welcome back to the show Lou, how are you doing?
Scott, great to be with you as always.
Somehow I forgot to mention that you keep the best read libertarian news site in the world at lourockwell.com.
Well thank you very much.
Well thank you very much, I keep your blog open, well both your blogs now.
All day long I hit refresh, mostly for the Ron Paul news, but and for the rest of it too, it's great stuff.
And your piece that ran at the top of the page yesterday I thought was so important, I think I told you on the phone yesterday, I think this article should have been written a hundred times by a hundred different people in a hundred different places over the past many years, and it's just the kind of thing I don't see nearly often enough, especially when it's a problem that is just so obvious, and that is the abolition of the jury trial in modern day America, especially at the federal level.
Please elaborate.
Well there are virtually no jury trials, because the way our so-called justice system is set up, when they confront you with claiming that you committed a crime, you're offered a plea bargain.
And by the way, the defense lawyers are in the business, along with the judges and the prosecutors, because this is a bureaucracy, nobody wants to actually do any work, like every other bureaucracy.
So they offer you a plea bargain, where you plead guilty and they claim that they'll give you a lesser sentence, or sometimes they say no sentence at all, a suspended sentence, and then don't keep their word.
A little shock everybody, the government might not keep its word, or otherwise they threaten you if it goes to trial, they're going to kill you, they're going to put you in prison for life, they'll put you in the worst kind of prison, they'll do everything possible to punish you, and of course there's there's a vast, nobody ever talks about this, and it's an extremely unpleasant topic obviously, there's a vast amount of rape that goes on in prisons, and one of the ways that they control the prisoners they really hate, is they put them in a situation where that will happen to them.
So it's, you know, it's it definitely is a criminal justice system, and in the federal courts, if you do take it to a trial, one out of 212 defendants wins.
So the whole thing is set up, I mean the judges have horrendous rules about what you can say, you can't actually defend yourself the way you'd like to defend yourself, all kinds of lines of argument are ruled out, you may not mention them, for example constitutional arguments, but many many other kinds of things the judge will say at the behest of the prosecution, you can't mention that, because they all want to kill you, that you're making them work.
So the vast majority of people take these plea bargains, and their own lawyers talk them into it, of course they're terrified, as anybody would be in that kind of a situation, when they take you to the even though you know the local jail, these things are something out of Kafka, and the Soviet Union, and so we really have, especially at the federal level, but more and more at the state and local level too, they don't like trials, you know for one thing you're in effect saying to the government you're wrong, the government hates it when you tell them you're wrong, they're wrong, and they want you to agree they're right in prosecuting you or persecuting you, and so how many people in, because this is prison nation right, we have we have millions of people in prisons, I would guess the vast majority of them actually innocent, and my view is actually you know even the guilty are guilty of far less crimes than the government is guilty of, I mean how dare the government stand as if it's you know some kind of instrument of justice, when of course it's actually the instrument of theft and killing on a worldwide massive scale, so it's there you know they're there despite what you see in the movies, or you read in books, or you see in tv shows about the alleged court system, there are very few trials, and everything is designed to, you know once they once they once they point the finger at you, you're dead, I mean it's just like the soviet or a nazi kind of a system, they you're through, very very unusual for somebody to come out on the other side successfully, it happens but it's very very rare, of course by the way as libertarians we're all interested in the fully informed jury movement, and explaining to jurors, which they're putting people in jail for doing this now, explaining to jurors that under common law, the jurors are the judge of the law as well as the evidence, so that if you think that people should not be put in jail for say smoking a marijuana cigarette, it's perfectly fine, and I would argue you know moral and wonderful to find somebody not guilty on that ground, whether they actually smoke the marijuana cigarette or not, because of course the law is unjust, and as Saint Augustine said so many centuries ago, an unjust law is no law at all, so this is, these are not actually laws, they're just edicts from the government, and they want to suppress the fully informed jury movement, they want to get rid of juries, so they want juries that act like you know the grand juries, which are just instruments of the prosecution, exactly as a jury would be in you know what was under Hitler or Stalin, yeah or King George, the star chamber, yeah well you know actually it was we were freer under King George, that's another that's another story, but they did have a star chamber for you know political criminals, but probably their legal system in the 18th century was freer than our legal system today, certainly the taxes were far lower under King George, first thing that happened after the American Revolution, they tripled taxes, that's freedom, well and that's the thing, if anything he just didn't have the ability to enforce this much authoritarianism, you know we can afford a lot of government these days unfortunately, maybe you can't anymore, but they'll be the last ones to find out, no exactly right, all right well now so there's a lot to cover there, but I want to go back to where you start and you start in your article this way too, about an anecdote, someone that you know or someone you've heard of or something, this guy who was offered a plea deal and was told you'll only get this much and then they didn't even have to honor that, and but now he's pled guilty, now he'll never get out, the burden is on him forever and ever from here on, yeah well they actually promised him that and his lawyers are on it and everything, a lawyer urging him to take this, they promised him that he would get a suspended sentence, well instead he got sent to prison and he's still in prison and you know that's the end of you, I mean even when you get out you know nobody wants to hire ex-cons, I'll tell you one business that makes a, I love this business, one business that makes a practice out of giving ex-prisoners a second chance is Waffle House, it's very very open to people who want to, who you know, who've either been unjustly punished or or were actually guilty of something, but they want a second chance, so Waffle House is a great company, but of course very, most companies don't want anything to do with an ex-con and you know, it's the end of your life, this guy was a young professor and his life is destroyed.
Well now the part of this too I think is that, and I know him, I believe he's innocent and he says he's innocent but he unfortunately got talked into this plea bargain thing, on the other hand given the U.S. justice system, had he decided to go to court he might have been put away in a much longer sentence.
Right yeah, as you said only one out of 212 ever even get acquitted on this, but you know I think this is the kind of thing isn't it, where pretty much everybody knows we really have this problem and it needs addressing, like if you know an army guy or someone who was ever in the army they'll tell you, well you know the real truth is this and that about the war in El Salvador or whatever that you don't ever get to hear on TV, same thing if you know a guy who knows a guy who ever knew an FBI agent or something, they'll tell you, I can kill you by looking at you, I can have you locked up for 20 years on just whatever, no problem, any FBI agent can do this to any citizen he wants, I've heard that anecdote a hundred times you know.
Yes and of course these are the people who go in, you know that we also have to remember the kind of people who go into government are for the most part monsters, certainly those who rise in government, anybody who sets out to be a prosecutor maybe there's a decent person, but the vast majority of them of course, maybe there's actually somebody interested in some abstract conception of justice, but the vast majority of them want to step on people, just like you know there are human beings who like killing for example.
Well but how come the judges don't hate the prosecutors for making them work, that's supposed to be the deal right, the independent judiciary checks the power of the executive all the time and prefers us to them.
Well and one way there are of course a few decent judges but they have been hamstrung by all the laws that have been passed ever since the 1970s that restrict the power of the judge to give a lesser sentence to somebody he feels is being unjustly condemned.
Well that's a very important point to pick up on on the other side of this break, it's Lou Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute, keeper of lourockwell.com and a couple of blogs there too and a radio show, go check it out lourockwell.com, we'll be right back.
All right y'all welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio and you know I have a dream, seriously, that if we could just knock off the empire, never mind anarcho-capitalism and the very best way to optimize checks and balances in society that I like to see, maybe we could just work a little bit on reforming the criminal justice system in America, it's just so unfair in so many ways.
Lou Rockwell's new piece is called The Police State Abolishes the Trial and that's not hyperbole, that's not hyperbole, it's all plea bargains, they all, as Anthony Gregory wrote in another great article on lourockwell.com not too long ago, they charge you with a hundred things, they'll charge you no matter what, they can get every one of us on mail fraud for receiving junk mail in our mailbox and that they brought us that we can't say no to for anything, they can get anyone on anything and then at the break there, Lou, we were addressing, you were addressing the moves by the congress and the executive in the past, I guess, generation especially to remove the independence of the judiciary, basically to tie the hands of judges who might have a heart or the slightest bit of reason in their mind when it comes to some of these cases.
No, of course, not only have sentences been increasing, prison sentences, parole made much more difficult, parole made much more onerous too, but yeah, I first became aware of this under Nixon but it's certainly been a bipartisan thing, the republicans have been terrible, the democrats too, crackdown on crime, you know, stop liberal judges from giving somebody a soft sentence, you know, anybody who's been here in jail, one day in one of these places is not a soft sentence, I mean, these are really horrendous places and of course the U.S. also has, at the top of its prison hierarchy, the so-called supermax prisons, where it's perpetual solitary confinement, remember the days of the old prison movies, when you'd be put in the hole, the solitary confinement for some period of time was a horrendous punishment and it is a horrendous punishment and it goes on long enough, it's designed to destroy your mind, but at the supermax prisons where they would like to put Bradley Manning and similar people and where they put alleged terrorists, your meals are given to you, you see nobody, when you have your one hour a day exercise, the doors are open and you can go through this ant maze out into a little tiny yard, it's just blank walls but a sky on top, but everything is, you know, that's the rest of your life and so this is, the U.S. has the worst prison system in the world, the most people in prison and we've got whole, you know, it's like having the whole nations in prison, I mean the U.S. prison, most of these people again are innocent, guilty of things like drug crimes or other non-crimes, guilty of things like wanting to keep your own property from the government and similar things, but yeah, the judges and of course the judges, oftentimes the wisest is, you know, at least traditionally there have been wise judges, there still are some wise judges, if they see an injustice taking place, in the past they were able to, they couldn't on their own increase your sentence, but they could on their own decrease it because they felt that this was an injustice, that power has been taken away from them, their hands are tied and they're forced to impose these horrendous long, long sentences on people for usually the crime of doing something that, you know, bugs the government, not what anybody in private society would actually consider a crime.
Right, not a crime, an offense against the state.
Well, that's what counts, I mean they, you know, the state wants us all to bow down before it, to worship it, to treat it as a god and not to dissent from it, to support its wars, to support its socialism here at home and or fascism more properly, but you know that we're aware of totalitarian aspects like what goes on at Guantanamo about disappearing people, about the fact that Obama or Bush could just decide that somebody was a terrorist or connected to terrorism, which means resisting the empire, by the way, I mean people, people, guerrillas, fighters in say Afghanistan who don't want a foreign invasion of their country are terrorists, just that's their label.
Yeah, well and in America terrorist means somebody who an FBI informant made friends with, that's all.
Yeah, or it could mean somebody who has the wrong political views, as we know when we sometimes see these Department of Homeland Security documents leaked, people who have anti-government views are considered, you know, potential terrorists anyway, so it's, we know about these sort of police state things, but the fact that the we have a totalitarian court system, for the most part, not entirely, but for the most part, especially at the federal level, but getting worse and worse at all levels, nobody seems to, you know, a lot of Americans don't care about it because they think this will never happen to me, well that's of course not a good argument not to care about an injustice, but in fact it can happen to any of us, so it definitely is something we ought to be concerned about, not only because people are being treated monstrously and unjustly, and we're supposed to worry about, you know, the fact that people are treated unjustly in Iran, but not that they're treated unjustly in Virginia, right, I mean that's the rule, but we should care much more about what's happening in our own country, this is where we, this is the government we should focus on hitting the guts of, and here's an example, they have a, it is a, for the most part, a totalitarian legal system where you are innocent until they put you in jail, I mean that there's no innocent until proven guilty, you're guilty when they put the finger on you.
All right, now I want to read this short paragraph out of your article, The Police State Abolishes the Trial by Lou Rockwell at lourockwell.com, it's from yesterday, but you can find it right there from the front page, the US has the largest prison population in the world, 2.3 million people, that's more than one in 100 people, that's more than the population of Latvia or Slovenia, that's nearly the entire population of Nevada, that's Wyoming, D.C., North Dakota, and Vermont combined, if the prison population had congressional representatives they would have four seats, now that's a reality I don't think people really maybe have their head around, just how far this has gone, just how impossible it is that there are 2.3 million hardened criminals in this country who deserve to be in prison.
One of the things that, we could talk about many evil things the Republicans have done, but one of the evil things that the Republicans have done, so-called privatization of prisons, and of course privatization is a great principle if we're talking about something that should be done, delivering, you know picking up the garbage or whatever, but when it's something that shouldn't be done, whether it's say the IRS or the EPA or prisons, privatizing them actually makes everything worse.
Well there's a big difference too between a company operating in a marketplace and a government hiring a private company to carry out its function.
That, of course, and privatization typically consists of giving some private company a monopoly that bribes you, right, real privatization would be the government getting out and letting private competitors see who can serve the customer best, but one of the things the Republicans brought about private companies building and running prisons.
Now as bad as prison socialism is, it's, you know, they can't, it's less effective, so unfortunately when you have the fascist system of private government partnerships in building and running prisons, there's a huge incentive to have more prisons, because there are people making a lot of money off of it.
So that's happened, that we have these, you know, all these private prisons, and of course the government prisons are horrendous, and again people may think that, you know, China or whatever has more, you know, has a bigger prison system.
They don't.
U.S. is the worst, you know, it's the nation of inmates, the U.S., and it's hardly the land of the free anymore.
All right, now the founders all said that the linchpin of a free society is the jury trial.
That's what protects, at the end of the day, an individual, I mean assuming they don't just get turned over to the CIA to be tortured, but that's what guarantees an individual has a chance to be protected from arbitrary arrest by his government, and yet, as you brought up earlier in the show, most jurors don't even really understand their role.
I think a character on King of the Hill said it best, he said, you know, I have jury duty three times, and I did my duty and convicted all three times.
That's really what most jurors think they're there for.
In fact, I'll try to say this anecdote real quickly.
I know someone who really didn't want to convict someone of a drug crime on state charges here in Texas, but the judge said we had to.
If the facts said that the guy was actually in the room with the drugs, then he's in possession, so I had no choice, even though, of course, a juror has, I mean, unless they're guilty of accepting a bribe or something like that, they have complete immunity.
You cannot be prosecuted for failing to convict someone.
No, they did not have to convict, but thought they did, just could not get their head around the idea that they could stand in between the state and this guy's liberty.
You know, what a great thing it is, what heroes libertarians are, and other people who go into the, who allow themselves to be drafted, which is what it is, of course, a draft into the criminal justice system.
Everybody else is being paid, you're not being paid, and who put up with being on a jury, and also the psychological pressure that comes upon you from the evil other jurors, and stands up for the individual who's being persecuted, and won't convict.
I mean, that is one of the great acts for freedom and for justice that anybody could do, and really, it's heroic.
So, and I think more and more people know about it, but of course, they were still a very tiny minority.
Yeah, well, we need to keep working on it.
I recommend everyone go and find this article, post around on all your chat boards and everything on your Facebook page, get people reading this.
This is very important.
The police state abolishes the trial by Lou Rockwell at lourockwell.com.
Thanks so much, Lou.
Scott, thank you.
Emory, check out the Political Theater blog and the regular blog there at LRC too.
