Overloaded Courts Ordered to Shutdown!

by Ian | Jan 29, 2010 | 13 comments

Ever sat in an arraignment on a Monday or Tuesday morning in Keene District Court? The room is usually packed full of people, the supermajority of which have never harmed another person. They are there for harmless traffic tickets, drug possession, open container, or some other nonsense “crime against the state”, where there is no true victim. Well, correction, the people who are in court for these “crimes” are actually the victims of aggression by the people calling themselves the state or city. They shuffle in and line up to cut a “deal” with the prosecutor and pay in many cases hundreds of dollars just to make the awful experience go away.

You can almost hear the cash register ring to the tune of thousands of dollars each day. Most of the people who are being caught for these things certainly cannot afford to pay these fines whether or not the economy is doing well. Many of them have to go on payment plans, because they certainly don’t want to go to jail, which is what is done if they don’t pay up. You’d think that with all that cash rolling in from these victimless “criminals” that the system would be in the black. You would be wrong. This is bureaucracy we’re talking about, and they don’t have the ability to run efficiently, period.

The Keene Sentinel’s Phil Bantz reports that the courts are in such dire financial shape, they have to shut down – not completely, but enough to make scheduling and “speedy trials” even more difficult. Many trials of local liberty activists are already set into late spring, and may be delayed even longer with the pending shutdown.

Perhaps if the police would stop aggressing against peaceful people then the caseload would be manageable and they wouldn’t have to be going through this.

Can you imagine what would happen if 5-10% of the victims of state aggression stopped plea bargaining and took their cases to trial? The entire system would crash and burn. Their power rests on your obedience, so set the example and refuse to take a plea. Make them pay to schedule a trial and if you can afford to, take the jail time rather than pay them fines so it costs them even more.

Perhaps they’ll eventually do the right thing and leave peaceful people alone and only go after real criminals who harm others. Here’s the Sentinel story:

Already understaffed and overloaded with cases, Keene District Court and Cheshire County Superior Court, in the heart of the city’s downtown, are bracing for monthly closures and temporary layoffs.

Saying it was the saddest moment of his 37 years in the state’s judicial system, Chief Justice John T. Broderick Jr. met with judges and marital masters last Friday and asked them to take furloughs, an unprecedented request. (more…)