I don’t speed.<\/p>\n
I mean, I set my cruise control at the speed limit (unless it’s icy or traction is otherwise bad, naturally), and keep it there. \u00a0I’ve never had a speeding ticket; I can figure many things I”d rather spend my money on.<\/p>\n
So in a way,, the latest teapot-tempest exercising the Strib editorial board is only of intellectual interest to me; they’re\u00a0\u00a0condemning the idea of allowing people with speeding tickets to pay a premium on their fine<\/a>\u00a0to keep their records clean:<\/p>\n Traffic tickets are supposed to serve as both punishment and deterrent for speeding motorists. Unfortunately, a growing number of those lead-foot drivers can buy their way out of trouble.<\/p>\n By paying extra, Minnesotans in some cities can keep speeding violations off of their driving records. Last year, more than 16,000 speeders took that route, according to data compiled for a March 25 Star Tribune story by Pam Louwagie and Glenn Howatt.<\/p>\n That number is alarming. Speed limits exist, not as suggestions, but for public safety.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And, let’s not forget, to try to enforce neighborhoods’ ideas of what life with cars should be like – I’m looking at you, Saint Paul – but that’s splitting hairs.<\/p>\n Here’s the part I thought was hilarious:<\/p>\n The legal system should also be fair in its application of the law. Minnesotans should bristle at any hint of a two-tiered justice system for speeders — one for people who can afford to pay more to make the violation go away, and another for those who can’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, that all sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? \u00a0Our justice system should <\/em>only have one tier to it – right?<\/p>\n Of course, that’s BS. \u00a0The more serious the crime, the more two-tiered our justice system gets. \u00a0For anything where you’re getting into misdemeanors and some of the lesser property-crime felonies, among others, the tiers are sharply divided at the point where defendants can afford defense attorneys. \u00a0Below that threshold, they get squeezed into plea bargains that may or may not be a good idea (or even accurate – not a few defendants who are perfectly innocent but not wealthy get buried by well-funded county attorneys<\/a>, and accept plea deals just to end the nightmare, or muddle through the best they can and occasionally get lucky<\/a>.<\/p>\n But I’m getting ahead of myself just a tad.<\/p>\n Anyway – the Strib <\/em>isn’t being especially daring in saying that there should just be one tier to our justice system.<\/p>\n Which is fine – except that whenever Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants to ratchet up penalties and wheedle down the limits for drunk driving, the Strib <\/em>is right on board with the most two-tiered, wealth-friendly law in the land. If you set out to design a explicitly designed to skew the legal system against the poor, you could try to design a system more focused than Minnesota’s “implied consent” law…<\/p>\n ….but you’d really be polishing a cannonball if you did.<\/p>\n Worse? \u00a0The Strib <\/em>editorial board was right on board with the rest of the Minnesota DFL’s chanting points bots in trying to ascribe Tom Emmer’s legislation to reform the system as some sort of unseemly payback for his own careless driving arrests, rather than the bipartisan effort to redress this classist inequity that it actually was.<\/p>\n So, Strib – <\/em>should our justice system always <\/em>be one-tiered? Or only when a DFLer gets exercised about it?<\/p>\n It’s hard to keep track with you people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t speed. I mean, I set my cruise control at the speed limit (unless it’s icy or traction is otherwise bad, naturally), and keep it there. \u00a0I’ve never had a speeding ticket; I can figure many things I”d rather spend my money on. So in a way,, the latest teapot-tempest exercising the Strib editorial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27345"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27375,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27345\/revisions\/27375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}