Fact-finding missions should happen before official charges are filed.

When I was growing up, every time that a person on death row or deceiving serving life in prison was found to have been innocent, it was the conservative talking point that the system did eventually work.

Since kids are idiots, I bought into that for a long time. We always think that we're so-far removed from criminal behavior that they'll never come for us. Once you grow up a little bit, you realize how depressing it is that an innocent person can spend twenty years on death row, be exonerated, and that we can regard that as the system working.

What does it look like when it breaks?

The thing is, people need to grow up even more.

Yes, I'm talking down to a lot of people, and I'm not focusing on one side of the political spectrum.

The focus on Daniel Penny being free for two weeks before the arrest warrant was issued and the charges were filed, while Jordan Williams was arrested and charged on the spot is a distraction from the real problem -- neither of the men should have been charged in the first place.

Jose Alba shouldn't have been charged in the first place. Kyle Rittenhouse shouldn't have been charged in the first place. George Zimmerman shouldn't have been charged in the first place.

The state shouldn't be there to get convictions. Prosecutors should be there to find the truth as it pertains to the law.

Of course, yes, if there's substantial evidence that a person committed a heinous crime, charges should be filed. That said, we shouldn't jump to charges filed and criminal trials as fact-finding missions. The fact-finding missions should happen before official charges are filed.

In both criminal and civil courts, the accused is facing a Hell that the other side doesn't face even if he or she is eventually found to have been in the right.

Rittenhouse wasn't even twenty-years-old before he was saddled with two million dollars in legal fees, and faced with the ten percent possibility of his life being taken away, all despite the fact that he was clearly and obviously innocent from the beginning. The case against him was so poor that the prosecution was breaking basic Constitutional law during the trial. One thing that people gloss over is the illegal possession of a weapon charge. All they ever needed to do to confirm whether or not the gun was legal was measure the barrel, and it took them more than a year to finally do that and have the charge dropped.

In the George Zimmerman case, the police actually did their due diligence. A detective actually lied to Zimmerman about the evidence that they had to try to coax Zimmerman into tipping his language in a way that would show evidence of wrongdoing. The conclusion was that Zimmerman's account was correct. The DA at the time resigned because he refused to pursue charges due to political pressure, and the district appointed a DA who would play ball and file the trumped up charges despite no evidence.

You can't say that these people aren't being punished just because the system eventually worked and found them to not be guilty.

Just like in civil cases, where if you're the person filing the lawsuit, you can generally file whatever you want for about $150 and find a lawyer who will represent you for nothing unless you win, while the person being sued, even if he or she does eventually win, will have to pay for legal council out of pocket -- so it goes with criminal courts.

Everything that can be bought by the DA with taxpayer money has to be acquired by the defense, either by the defendants money, or by the honesty and benevolence of the state.

Again, during the Rittenhouse trial, there was high resolution footage that the state had acquired. They only shared a low resolution version of the footage with the defense once the state decided to change its story out of desperation. This was illegal on the part of the state.

There needs to be accountability for prosecutors. This isn't me taking a soft on crime position. There are people who deserve to die in a cage. But, we have to understand that the simple scenario of even facing decades in prison is a punishment. It's a punishment that clearly and obviously people don't deserve. Right now, yes, I think that there's evidence that the illiberal left is (ironically) pushing for more trumped up charges than the right.