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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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26 May, 4 tweets, 1 min read
THREAD: A homeless man who struggles with addiction and depends on recycling to survive has been sent to prison for *4 years* for damaging the Ferrari of a famous baseball player as he looked for shelter in the wealthy athlete's garage. A few observations: (1)
The man damaged the Ferrari when he broke the garage window with some rocks, "looking for shelter." The prosecutor was outraged, saying his behavior was "offensive" to other homeless people with mental illness and addiction who "commit no crimes." (2)fresnobee.com/news/local/cri…
The judge was "disturbed" because the homeless man had "asked for food and water" from another neighbor in the wealthy neighborhood. The judge punished him because he had a “lack of desire to conform to society.” (3)
The man will endure unspeakable physical and psychological horrors in California's notorious prisons at a cost of over $500,000 to the public, and all of the inequality, neglect, indifference, and lack of human connection that led to this incident will remain untouched. (end.)

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
28 May
THREAD: This is for students and new lawyers. Much of the history of US law is courts concocting doctrines to prevent themselves from doing justice. That's not normal, or inevitable, and you shouldn't accept it. It's part of a strategy. (1)
Legal elites in our society know that there is an enormous gap between the way the law is written on marble monuments and the way that the law is lived and experienced by the most vulnerable people. One of the roles of courts is to dress brutal state violence in fancy words. (2)
It therefore becomes important to powerful people that the legal system hide the gap between stated values and actual reality as much as possible, because a system that constantly fails to conform to its own basic values and principles would lose legitimacy. (3)
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
25 May
**Alarming News** Governor Cuomo has just nominated one of the most dangerous possible people to the highest court in New York. The state senate could block the nomination, but people rarely pay attention to judges. Please share widely. (1)
The nominee is the DA in Nassau County, one of the most notoriously corrupt offices in the country. She has led that office through an unprecedented era of family separation, mass human caging, and racial injustice. (2)
Before running the Nassau DA, Singas was a notorious DA in Queens during a time when the Queens DA office has been documented to have been engaged in rampant patterns of corruption. Nominating this person to serve as a judge is astonishing. (3) accountabilityny.org/about/
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
24 May
Thread: A few years ago, we uncovered an extortion scheme in which judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs worked with a for-profit "probation" company to extort cash from poor people by threatening to jail them if they didn't pay illegal fees. What happened next was shocking. (1)
We sued them and went to federal court for a hearing. During my cross-examination of the local judge, the federal judge interrupted me. The federal judge asked the local judge if he thought there was anything wrong with jailing people simply because they couldn't pay. (2)
The local judge, who had been jailing and threatening to jail thousands of people if they didn't pay illegal debts, explained better than anyone how the criminal system works in the United States. Here's what he said under oath: "money makes the world go round." (3)
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
24 May
This NYT piece is one of the most irresponsible acts of journalism you can imagine. The reporter declares an "epidemic" of shoplifting with his own cute personal anecdotes and quotes from cops but never fails to mention that "property crime" is at historic lows.
With **zero** evidence, @thomasfullerNYT then tells millions of readers that the fake shoplifting epidemic he declared is linked not to poverty, mental illness, lack of investment in community, etc. but to efforts to reduce barbaric family separation and sentencing laws. Shameful
**first tweet should read "never mentions" not "never fails to mention." he intentionally does not include any data or evidence (because it would undermine the copaganda story he wanted to tell)
Read 4 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
20 May
THREAD. A major scandal is happening right this moment on the House floor: mainstream Democrats are quietly trying to ram through a $1.9 billion *budget increase* to the Capitol Police, military, and DHS, supposedly because January 6 showed that they **need more funding.** (1)
For those of you new to this, of the many things that went wrong on January 6, insufficient funding for Capitol Police and bloated military bureaucracy was not one of them. (2)
This is part of a long pattern: police work with liberal reformers to use their own violence, waste, brutality, and incompetence to justify increased budgets. (3)
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
19 May
Thread: You hear a lot of talk about "public safety" from cops, prosecutors, and judges. Setting aside the many other problems with their conception of what "safety" means and who gets to be "safe," there's another hilarious flaw. (1)
As I have studied and fought cash bail for the past 7 years, this "public safety" mantra is everywhere. But it makes no sense. These bureaucrats would literally release every single person from their cages if they paid enough cash. (2)
So, there are many reasons cops, prosecutors, and judges do what they do. But literally **the one thing we know cannot be motivating them** is "public safety." (3)
Read 4 tweets

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