Legal Reform
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents from all across the country understand that our society has become litigious to an extreme degree. Texas has been active for years at improving this problem behind Texans for Lawuit Reform. Since 1994, TLR has worked to pass lawsuit reforms that have made the Lone Star State a model for the nation. TLR describes the problem best on their website www.tortreform.com. "We are small business owners, homemakers, and community volunteers. We are lawyers who want our profession back, and plant managers who want our companies to expand facilities to create jobs for Texans. We are consumers who want to eliminate the wasteful "tort tax" from the products and services produced in Texas. We are ranchers and teachers who have anguished over needless lawsuits. We are doctors and nurses who have seen our colleagues abandon their chosen professions because of the emotional and financial toll imposed by legal assaults. We are the citizens of Texas who want a better future for ourselves and our children." The ability to bring suit for a grievance is an important right in America that must not be abused either from limitation to use or excessive use. Today it is excessive use. The Overcriminalization guide prepared by The Heritage Foundation is an eye opener.

Our plea bargain system can make the innocent admit guilt. Enter Michael Flynn.

5/20/20
from The Washington Post,
5/20/20:

The Cato Institute’s Clark Neily ..., , a member of the American Bar Association’s Plea Bargaining Task Force and head of its subcommittee on impermissibly coercive plea bargains and plea practices, concludes that ... a process that “routinely” coerces through plea bargaining. [Defendants] probably would experience “intolerable pressure designed to induce a waiver of his fundamental right to a fair trial.” Plea bargaining is, Neily argues “pervasive and coercive” partly because of today’s “trial penalty” — the difference between the sentences offered to those who plead guilty and the much more severe sentences typically imposed after a trial. This penalty discourages exercising a constitutional right. A defendant in a computer hacking case, Neily says, committed suicide during plea bargaining in which prosecutors said he could avoid a trial conviction and sentence of up to 35 years by pleading guilty and accepting a six-month sentence.

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