First a reminder that if you do make it to court, you will almost never have a trial with a jury of your peers. This is from a 2012 article in the NY Times.
I added bold for emphasis in quotations. There was no bold in the originals.
Stronger Hand for Judges in the ‘Bazaar’ of Plea Deals
For years, the nation’s highest court has devoted the majority of its criminal justice efforts to ensuring that defendants get a fair day in court and a fair sentence once a trial is concluded. But in two decisions on Wednesday, the Supreme Court tacitly acknowledged that it has been enforcing an image of the system that is very different from the real, workaday world inhabited by prosecutors and defense lawyers across the country.
In that world, 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Courtroom trials, the stuff of television dramas, almost never take place.
In our constitutional republic, one of our fundamental rights was to have a day in court. That has been for some time not been true,
but there is another part of the corporate coup that has taken away the right to even get to court.
It is worth repeating: we are blocked from the courts.
A 3 part series in the NY Times on The Fine Print, the forced arbitration clauses written into agreements from credit cards, rental cars, banking, employment, etc have quietly taken away our right to a trial.
Years ago John Roberts, Chief Justice of Supreme Court, argued cases for Discover card about arbitration but did not win. In 2013 he got the chance to get the Supreme Court to take away our right to trial when under arbitration clauses and few people noticed.
Yesterday I made a comment on Bernie News Roundup about the coup d'etat in this article and listed other aspects of the wide spread coup that has already happened in our country. One of the people who commented suggested that I write a diary after the three articles have been published. The second part is such a block buster that I decided to go ahead and publish a diary today.
Here is the link to my comment yesterday that has some additional insights.
another part of the coup - forced arbitration
Please continue beyond the orange squiggle for more
The rest of this diary will mostly consist of quotations from the two NY Times articles. Part 1 of the NY times series will be given first.
The sharp shift away from the civil justice system has barely registered with Americans. F. Paul Bland Jr., the executive director of Public Justice, a national consumer advocacy group, attributed this to the tangle of bans placed inside clauses added to contracts that no one reads in the first place.
“Corporations are allowed to strip people of their constitutional right to go to court,” Mr. Bland said. “Imagine the reaction if you took away people’s Second Amendment right to own a gun.”
And these clauses have reduced the ability of law enforcement to go after criminal behavior of corporations. We also had a coup when the justice dept refused to go after banksters crashed the global economy, but these arbitration clauses are everywhere and there is no place to hide.
Law enforcement officials, though, say they have lost an essential tool for uncovering patterns of corporate abuse. In a letter last year to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, attorneys general in 16 states warned that “unlawful business practices” could flourish with the proliferation of class-action bans.
We know how corporations and oligarchs are using treaties of "trade deals" which have wide ranging consequences of jobs, the environment and even can override the sovereignty of governments. Meanwhile the arbitration phase of the coup effects all of us through credit cards, phone service, car rental, etc., etc.
Bernie has told us about the 60,000 factories closed since 2000, and that has been aided by laws that favored outsourcing. These articles are not about specific laws, but aspects of the rule of law. So the Bernie movement will have a long fight just to restore our constitutional rights, like the right of privacy, and in particular the right to a trial by jury.
We often hear about the collapse of journalism which includes 6 corporations owning the corporate media, but we hear little about the collapse of the legal system with attorneys and the courts working for corporations and the oligarchs.
By banning class actions, companies have essentially disabled consumer challenges to practices like predatory lending, wage theft and discrimination, court records show.
“This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” William G. Young, a federal judge in Boston who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said in an interview. “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.”
The above quotations were from Part 1 of the times series and there are others like Elena Kagen's opinion opposing the 2013 supreme court decision. But because of space we move on to quotations from Part 2.
Over the last 10 years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops — have used arbitration to create an alternate system of justice. There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients, The Times found.
We have lost our right of having a day in court and justice system. like so much else of our economy, has been privitized
The change has been swift and virtually unnoticed, even though it has meant that tens of millions of Americans have lost a fundamental right: their day in court.
“This amounts to the whole-scale privatization of the justice system,” said Myriam Gilles, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “Americans are actively being deprived of their rights.”
what is known about arbirtation? and what are rules of evidence? How about that folks, a "legal" system without rules of evidence ....
Little is known about arbitration because the proceedings are confidential and the federal government does not require cases to be reported. The secretive nature of the process makes it difficult to ascertain how fairly the proceedings are conducted.
“What rules of evidence apply?” one arbitration firm asks in the question and answer section of its website. “The short answer is none.”
Is it even a system of justice? If it is of any comfort, there are Christian arbitration systems with the right of prayer.
“It’s not a system of justice; it’s a rigged system of expediency,” Mr. Caplin said.
I am happy to be retired with a defined benefit pension and social security. Here is what people face in the job market today as employment contracts contain arbitration clauses.
Graduates entering the job market can confront even more challenging terrain. For many people, when the choice is between giving up the right to go to court or the chance to get a job, it is not a choice at all.
Here are the two articles. What will be uncovered in the third article?
Arbitration Everywhere,
Stacking the Deck of Justice
In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization
of the Justice System’