In addition to what you've said, the maximum penalty for whatever crime someone is charged tends to be about 10 x higher than anywhere else on the planet (probably because of the stacking), and many things have been declared serious crimes in the US that would be minor offenses and barely be persecuted elsewhere. See Aaron Schwartz.
And the US has started to demand extraditions of people as fugitives, even though they've never set a foot on US soil and their company falls under a completely different jurisdiction. See Kim Dotcom.
If you ask me, that's crazy. Then again, for someone living in the US it's probably just normal. Anyway, if you wear a tie and are white, there's not much to worry about in the US ... unless you're some sort of leftist hacktivist or reverse engineer a device you've purchased or develop p2p software, of course.
> In addition to what you've said, the maximum penalty for whatever crime someone is charged tends to be about 10 x higher than anywhere else on the planet (probably because of the stacking), and many things have been declared serious crimes in the US that would be minor offenses and barely be persecuted elsewhere. See Aaron Schwartz.
The penalties in the American justice system parallel the pricing of medical care and the rationale used to justify them is the same as well.
# Health care :
"WTF?! My 1-hour doctor's visit came out to $18,000?!"
"Nah don't worry! Nobody actually pays that amount. The doctor just put that there as a starting point when negotiating with the insurance company!"
# Criminal justice:
"WTF?! The penalty for stealing a loaf of bread is 10 years in prison[1]?"
"Nah don't worry! Nobody actually serves that amount. The prosecutor just put that there as a starting point when negotiating with your legal representation!"
[1]: I have no clue what the actually penalty would be, and it would vary state by state, but you get the idea.
...or any citizen activist, really. The citizen journalists who broke the Planned Parenthood story last year were indicted with "tampering with government records" for faking identities so they could go undercover.
And two years ago, a story broke that the IRS was targeting certain nonprofits because of their names and political leanings.
Nobody has been held criminally accountable or 'overzealous' prosecution in either case. There was one early retirement (not even officially a resignation) after the IRS scandal.
+ If by "the Planned Parenthood story" you mean the allegations of selling body parts from fetuses, the story was fake from the get-go and the "citizen journalists" [sic] edited their recordings to push their right-wing agenda. [0]
+ Contrary to what right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed, the IRS wasn't targeting conservative nonprofits specifically; it was looking at other characteristics based on keyword searches. [1]
I disagree about your characterization of the stories, but that's really a digression from the conversation at hand: corruption of the American justice system. I'm providing examples from the other side of the aisle on purpose, to show it's not a partisan issue.
In the first case, prosecutors were waging political battles with at best tangential tick-tack charges. In the second case corruption (even bipartisan corruption!) was ignored, again, for political reasons.
If you want more examples, the mayor of Houston subpoenaed sermons of pastors a couple years ago as part of a political witch hunt. Thankfully, there was some political rebuke afterwards, but, again, no criminal charges were filed in the aftermath after that abuse of power.
In all cases, the punishment is entirely political, so it's clear that there are no consequences to this sort of injustice if the action is politically popular enough. The point of the Bill of Rights is that there are some things that are wrong, even if they're popular.
The IRS isn't idiots. Nor is any gov't agency. Any agency that audits compliance will scrutinize whoever has more degrees of separation from whoever they answer to. It's a scaled up cousin to why town selectmen never get traffic violations, they have power over the $ pipeline.
> In addition to what you've said, the maximum penalty for whatever crime someone is charged tends to be about 10 x higher than anywhere else on the planet (probably because of the stacking),
s/tends/seems/
The US (at the federal level...I don't know if this happens with state/local charges too) uses a completely brain dead algorithm for coming up with the maximum penalty used in Department of Justice press releases announcing indictments which results in a great exaggeration in most cases.
The article "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS" [1] has a good explanation of this.
> See Aaron Schwartz.
(Swartz, not Schwartz) Here's an article that looks at how actual sentences are calculated, as opposed to how press release sentences are calculated, as applied to Swartz: [2].
> And the US has started to demand extraditions of people as fugitives, even though they've never set a foot on US soil and their company falls under a completely different jurisdiction. See Kim Dotcom.
You make it sound like this is something new and/or that it is just the US that does this. In fact, it is old and common. In general if you do something against the laws of country A affecting people in country A, from country B, and those things are also against the law in country B when directed against B's people, and A and B have an extradition treaty, it is quite common for A to request extradition from B and for B to agree.
Contrary to popular belief on the Internet (not meant to imply that you have this belief...I'm speaking generally here), the US is not the only country with copyright laws or whose copyright laws criminalize large scale commercial infringement. The acts Dotcom is charged with and for which the US is requesting extradition are acts that are also illegal in New Zealand.
And the US has started to demand extraditions of people as fugitives, even though they've never set a foot on US soil and their company falls under a completely different jurisdiction. See Kim Dotcom.
If you ask me, that's crazy. Then again, for someone living in the US it's probably just normal. Anyway, if you wear a tie and are white, there's not much to worry about in the US ... unless you're some sort of leftist hacktivist or reverse engineer a device you've purchased or develop p2p software, of course.