In many of his books, Thomas Sowell criticizes how the Warren court's rulings on criminal justice allegedly led to a great spike in crime. For example, the requirement to give Miranda warnings or to provide people who cannot afford a lawyer one free of charge.
While Sowell claims that these rulings had no basis in the Constitution, which may well be the case, I'd like to discuss the substance of the matter.
Given the persecution being faced by Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump and the January 6 protesters, I wonder if the Warren court protects the rights of defendants enough, because it does not seem to be doing much to protect people's rights.
The government can spend tens of millions of dollars 'investigating' you, frivolously indict you, and if you manage to beat the charges, you have bankruptcy to show for your pains. Because if you have been a responsible citizen and saved money, you won't count as impecunious and the government isn't going to pay for an ineffective lawyer for you. So you lose all your money as well as years of your life being dragged through a court.
Basically, they can destroy a man de facto if not de iure, and that only if they do not manage to find a sympathetic judge and jury.
Counterarguments could be of course, to point out in Sowellian style that more rights for criminal defendants is not a 'solution', but merely a trade-off. While you hedge against tyranny and make fewer innocent people go to jail, you also further undermine the ability of the government to prosecute legitimate criminals who terrorize neighborhoods.
I think this issue, like many issues, can be boiled down to the same thing: institutions cannot survive infiltration by communists. If your government has any power whatsoever, communists will abuse and expand it until they successfully collapse it or you forcibly remove them from it.
In the case of protections for the criminally accused, the rights and laws in place will either be just or horrific depending entirely on who is leveraging them.
In the end, government has more to do with who is in charge rather than any structural considerations.
The problem is that you guys keep calling your opponents 'communists', when they are 'neoliberals'. It's fun to use it as an attack on them the way they use 'Nazi' on us, but it's not accurate. I've seen some ham-fisted arguments to try to justify it, but none of it makes sense.
I'm tended to agree, but at the same time: what would Biden and Garland be doing if there were no safeguards or constitutional protections at all?