Give me your money or your life!
“Ignorance is a condition that those who would feed upon us like vampires require. It’s time we make better choices.” Daniel Horne.
The Accidental Felons the book is named for are the families of people who have been sentenced under Minimum Mandatory Sentencing laws. However, the book's premise goes deeper. It shows how mandatory minimum sentencing effectively promotes a police officer to prosecutor and the prosecutor to judge. It shows real-life examples of how a predatory lawyer with little practical experience uses the citizens he is sworn to protect as nails to build a political resume and promote his career.
You may think that most felons are like the people you see on television, but they aren’t.
Heinous people, that rape, murder, and rob others. That may have once been true, but that was before 1980. Since 1980, seventy-five percent of all arrests have been accidental felons --- people like you except that they are the victim of fate, or unable to deal with the stress of life. People who have chosen to numb the pain of life with some drug.
This is nothing new, such people have been among us from the beginning of time. It is only in the last 30 years that we have chosen to make them criminals. What’s changed? Why now do we want to spend $30,000-$50,000 every year to incarcerate these men, women and children? My guess is that if we knew the truth about them --- as do workers in the criminal justice system --- we would choose a more noble path.
Americans have now reached a decision point.
We have incarcerated over 2 million of our population. We have placed another 5 million under penal control l --- that is we have placed them on probation, parole, or some sort of judicial supervision --- and those numbers, which equate to 1 in every 31 adults in America, are still growing.
If you pee outside of a toilet, you may be charged as a sexual predator.
II met a man incarcerated for peeing on the side of the road. Have you ever done such a thing? What is the right punishment for this crime? This man was charged as a sexual predator which carries mandatory minimum prison time. Someone saw him urinate, and now the man will spend the rest of his life a registered sex offender. His career is ruined, he is an outcast to society, and must forever explain himself to a disbelieving public. Have you ever peed outside of a toilet?
If an 18 year old has consensual sex with a 17 year old and gets caught, it means years in prison.
I have a neighbor whose son was 17 when he had consensual sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend. The parents caught them and the frightened the girl with hell and damnation if she did not say that she was forced. When the boy turned 18, the county prosecutor charged him as a sexual predator facing mandatory minimum sentencing. Did you have sex before the age of 18? How many years should you have spent in prison for it?
If your child has a harmless mischievous moment at school, you entire home's equity might be stripped from you.
I have another neighbor whose 13-year-old child was accused of setting a roll of toilet paper afire in a bathroom at school. Now, there isn't much that will burn in a ceramic and steel bathroom, but the fire alarm rang and the school was evacuated. What should be this young boy's punishment? A week at home from school? Not any more, this young man was charged with arson, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of seven years in prison. How much of your home's equity should you be required to pay a lawyer because you don't have perfect children?
You don't have to intentionally prey upon anyone to face life in prison.
I had an automobile accident. No one was seriously injured, but I was charged with a crime of intentionally attempting to kill someone and seriously injuring them. A crime which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. Now there are more details to the accident, but let's stop here for a second. I have never been arrested. My worst crime in 55 years was an occasional speeding ticket. I was the Chief Financial Officer of a mid-sized corporation. I own a home in a nice neighborhood. My friends are similarly well-educated professionals. I have a wife, and two young children. What makes me such a danger to society that I have to be treated like a career criminal and face mandatory prison time in order to receive a trial by a jury of my peers?
The book is filled with real-life examples of Accidental Felons.
I’ve written about real people, people in many ways just like you, that will prove it to you. If you live in Arizona, and some other states, you will find more examples all around you. The only reason you don’t know about them is that you, and your neighbors, have been shamed into silence.
You don't live in the world you learned about in school.
Something has replaced that world with another one. Many people think that "thing" is television, or more specifically continuous streams of violence on television. There is a certain logic to this. We evolved over thousands of years relying on our physical senses to survive in a world filled with dangerous creatures stronger than us. It is not normal for us to hear the scream of someone in pain, to watch as someone is slaughtered, and to feel the intensity of danger without physically reacting to it. Television fills our vision with danger, deafens our ears with danger, and bombards our skin with the vibrations of danger. Our biology reacts; we get anxious -- scared --- tense.
Politicians, and businesses, have long taken advantage of us using television.
That's not new news. What is new is a new type of politician and business, one that seeks to prosper by preying upon the public’s anxiety. These politicians confirm our anxiety that we live in a dangerous world. They show us facts that prove it. A world that requires them, and only them, to protect us. What we don’t think about is that these people who show us facts that prove our danger, are the same people who pass, and enforce, laws that manufacture the statistics they are waving in front of our face. The result of ninety-eight percent of the ordinary people charged with a crime that carries a mandatory minimum sentence who choose to accept “Trial By Prosecutor” rather than to the tried on the facts of one crime and sentenced under the rules of another, more serious, crime.
Because "Trial By Prosecutor" averts juries, and muzzles judges, predatory politicians have their acts of abuse hidden from public view.
All we see are violent crime statistics skyrocketing. It doesn't occur to us that these same statistics are being manufactured by the people who most who most benefit from them. We think we are in danger, and we are, but not from the people we think threaten us. We are in danger because some of the people we elect are preying on us.
Let's examine the crime of DUI.
It is an easy crime to get angry about. We have been conditioned to believe that people who have been drugged with alcohol-laced liquids are killing 17,000 innocent men, women, and children every year. What the data actually shows, is that the government, and businesses, create, promote, and allow people to drink liquids that are known to make people do stupid things. The fact is that many of those people then make a stupid decision and drive their car. To 80% of them, that is of the 17,000 people who die, have alcohol in their blood. It is true that all the people who die are innocent victims, but the majority of them are the victims of predatory politicians and businesses that make a profit from misery. If you examine the data from 1980 to today, you’ll notice that the numbers never trend down. What they do is vary around an average of 1.5 million arrests, and 17,000 deaths every year for 30 years. This isn’t a war against this behavior, as we are led to believe, but rather a harvest of human beings for profit.
It is not difficult to confirm this truth for yourself. In this case, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Alcohol Fact Sheets supply the data. It is on the Internet. It is free. Nevertheless, how many of us will choose to learn the facts for ourselves before we attack our neighbor as our enemy? The true predators among us depend on our ignorance to prosper. The problem for you is that unless you do not consume alcohol-laced liquid, do not take prescription medication, do not have illnesses of aging (such as diabetes or hypoglycemia), and do not have minor children, you are the target.
How you fix this problem is simple enough.
It does take some effort on your part. You need to break up the monopoly on information, curtail the stranglehold that attorneys have on society, and use something other than television as your source of information. If you do these three things, you will steer our nation away from the danger you face. If you don’t then you too will one-day be asked to pay with your money or your life.
If you think that this problem is bigger than you, you are right.
However, remember the avalanche that began life as a single small pebble rolling down a long hill. Be a rolling pebble. It may save your life, or the life of someone you love.
