user
Accomplished Advocate
This seems to be the biggest problem to me.
1) There are those who "try" to be law abiding but run afoul of the system.
2) There are those that "are" law abiding and a foul-system runs them over.
3) Then there are simple criminals.
I would think that the first two would deserve consideration and even the ones that break "bad" laws to try to change the law.
Being in Southern VA how would a NoVA office and staff handle the entire state? Hopefully case-load would be low but it seems like there are waves of incidents where 2-3 are running at the same time in different geographies.
Good analysis. I don't see this helping people who are actually guilty of crimes (category three), regardless of the rectitude of the law under which their offense may be defined - that's a legislative function. Not interested in funding plea bargains. Category one is sort of suspect, as well; it really doesn't matter whether one is trying to be a good person (or a bad person, for that matter): for most criminal offenses, it's the intentional commission of some act that makes the person guilty, not the intent to commit a crime. There's a difference between the intention to do X and the intention to violate the statute that makes doing X a crime. This doesn't apply to all criminal laws; there are some for which "specific intent" rather than "general intent" is required - those statutes say "willfully", "knowingly", or even "recklessly" or "intentionally". But most crimes just say things like the definition of assault: "acting in a manner that creates in the mind an ordinary person of reasonable sensibilities the apprehension of an immediate battery, without cause, justification, or excuse." You don't have to "intend" to assault someone. You have to intend to move your hand in such a way that the person reasonably thinks you mean to hit them.
I like category two, and I think there's so much of that (sit around in your local general district court for a few days and watch the criminal trials), that any resources we can scrape up will run out before we can deal with even a small part of it. The system depends on the great disparity of power between the state and "the criminally indigent". This is not good for the United States to be operating a system like that; it makes us weaker and will have disastrous consequences in the end. (Read the OT book of Amos and see what happened to Israel, for example.)
As to the last point: Well, first, I don't see this as a problem limited to Virginia. Secondly, I've got cases right now in Surry Co. and Alleghany Co., and while I'd prefer not to have to go to Dickenson or Wise Counties or the City of Danville, I'd do it if the case called for it. Plus, we've got these new-fangled telephone things that make it a lot easier to do stuff far away.