Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

9 Strake DT Neg

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Strake+Jesuit/Thorburn+Neg

CP Reforms (Transparency)

Counterplan Text: The United States federal government should require that prosecutors

1) State the reasons for plea offers on the record to create transparency

2) Collect and share data about their offers to expose any disparities

Solves disparities in criminal prosecution – prosecutors have way too much power. Only transparency solves – there are too many alt causes otherwise (I’m only reading the blue)

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta and Alice Fontier 17 Jenn Rolnick Borchetta is deputy director of the impact litigation practice at The Bronx Defenders, Alice Fontier is the managing director of the criminal defense practice at The Bronx Defenders, New Research Finds That Prosecutors Give White Defendants Better Deals Than Black Defendants, 10-23-2017, Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/new_research_finds_that_prosecutors_give_white_defendants_better_deals_than.html

- Yellow if no uq – blue otherwise

Prosecutors wield enormous power and total discretion in deciding whether and how to charge people, whether to request pre-trial detention or money bail, and what plea to offer. One factor guiding this decision is whether the attorney believes the person will be held on bail. Frequently, people charged with misdemeanors accept pleas just to go home. A young black man from the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, may have almost no chance of paying bail, so the only option is a criminal record and probation. Contrast that to a wealthier white man who knows that if the judge sets bail he can pay his way out. This man has no pressure to accept a plea, and his lawyer can investigate his case and negotiate a better plea. Immediate interventions could stem racial disparities in pleas. New York must eliminate money bail for misdemeanors to end the threat of pretrial incarceration that disparately extracts guilty pleas. Prosecutors should state the reasons for plea offers on the record to create transparency and be required to collect and share data about their offers to expose any disparities. It is only through established facts and data that we can educate prosecutors and judges, as well as work to combat implicit and overt bias. Prosecutors have virtually unchecked power in the plea bargain process. It’s the power to take away freedom, destroy livelihoods, and tear families apart. Ultimately, it’s the power to devastate low-income communities already suffering from aggressive and discriminatory law enforcement tactics. In a place like the Bronx, unfair police and prosecutor practices combine to create a situation in which nearly all of the people facing criminal charges are black or brown men, even though one-third of the population is white. This power must be grounded in fundamental principles of fairness rather than the drive to rack up convictions. Otherwise, the criminal justice system simply administers punishment, rather than justice, and in the process continues to destroy communities of color and further erode its own legitimacy.

Coercive plea deals are those held in the shadows—transparency solves.

Caldwell 11 Coercive Plea Bargaining: The Unrecognized Scourge of the Justice System H. Mitchell Caldwell, Fall 2011, Volume 61, Issue 1, Article 2, https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/andhttpsredir=1andarticle=1003andcontext=lawreview

Although one can approximate the number of cases resolved through some manner of plea bargaining, there is no reliable data approximating the percentage of dispositions that were products of coercive tactics.141 Plea bargaining is often undertaken in the shadows—in phone calls and e-mails between lawyers or in the corridors outside the courtroom.142 Little or no evidence documents the give and take of this bargaining on the record. At best, records will serve as a testament to the original charges, disclose that a defendant pled to one count, and document that the prosecutor dismissed remaining counts;143 however, the record would be devoid of any particulars as to what took place between these events.144 Such a bargain could have been a coerced plea, but there would be no trail to reveal its true nature.145 Coercive plea bargaining must necessarily take place out of view, as prosecutors cannot have such misconduct brought to light by disclosure.146

DA Crime (Organized)

Organized crime in the US is not going down anytime soon and pose threats, but it is manageable for the meantime.

Kristin M. Finklea 10 (Analyst in Domestic Security). “Organized Crime in the United States: Trends and Issues for Congress”. Congressional Research Service. Dec. 22, 2015. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf

As mentioned, organized crime in the United States has taken on an increasingly transnational nature. This shift has been facilitated by factors such as economic globalization and improved communications technology.55 Organized crime activities across the globe do not appear to be waning, and the National Intelligence Council has estimated that by 2025, the “relative power” of criminal networks will continue to rise, and some countries could even be taken over and run by these networks.56 The section below provides a detailed discussion of the organized crime groups that operate in the United States, the activities of these groups, and the domestic industries that have been and may continue to be threatened by organized crime.

Plea bargaining is key to deterring crime – it allows proper allocation of resources and produces key testimony.

Turner 17 Jenia I. Turner, Plea Bargaining, Academy For Justice, A Report on Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform, Erik Luna ed., 2017, Forthcoming, SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 348

As the Supreme Court recently acknowledged, in the U.S., “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”1 More than 95 of convictions in the federal and state systems are the product of negotiated guilty pleas.2 Roughly every two seconds during typical work hours, a person pleads guilty.3 In some jurisdictions, individual prosecutors may practice for months without trying a case.4 Courts, policymakers and scholars for the most part view plea bargaining as an inevitable feature of our criminal process. The general assumption is that without guilty pleas, the criminal justice system would grind to a “screeching halt.”5 Even if the system could afford to provide more contested trials than it currently does, many believe that plea bargaining helps allocate resources more sensibly—away from trials of clear-cut cases and toward more valuable programs, such as probation, parole, and reentry.6 Another stated advantage of plea bargaining is that it helps the prosecution to obtain cooperation in complex cases. Informants are often indispensable to uncovering the operation of organized crime, for example, and plea discounts can be critical to obtaining their cooperation.7 Plea bargaining has also been defended for sparing reluctant and vulnerable witnesses the ordeal of testifying and for providing victims with closure more quickly than trials do.8 Some courts and commentators have also stated that guilty pleas can facilitate the rehabilitation of defendants by encouraging them to accept responsibility and by leading to the swifter imposition of punishment.9

New York DOJ proves – the link is massive.

Gowdy 2k Bryan Gowdy (J.D. University of Florida Levin College of Law), Leniency Bribes: Justifying the Federal Practice of Offering Leniency for Testimony. Winter, 2000 Louisiana Law Review

Additionally, since Singleton I, law enforcement officials have stressed the significance of leniency bribes to crime-fighting. The DOJ announced that "the department relies on accomplice witness testimony in thousands of cases each year," and if Singleton I had been upheld, it "would have crippled enforcement of federal criminal and civil law." n241 One former prosecutor commented that "the prosecutions where the government does not use informants are few and far between." n242 Furthermore, current prosecutors believe accomplice testimony is beneficial. In a recent survey of eighty-eight U.S. Attorney s offices, testimony at trial was the only type of assistance for which all eighty-eight offices would grant a § 5K1 departure to an accomplice. n243 One writer claims that in the last five years, the U.S. Attorney s Office in the Southern District of New York has solved 250 gang-related murders and convicted 300 persons on almost exclusively accomplice testimony.

This turns case – increasing crime rates kills CJS reform

Willick 15 “Violent Crime Wave Could Swamp Prison Reform”, American Interest 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/09/02/violent-crime-wave-could-swamp-prison-reform/

We aren’t criminologists at Via Meadia, so we won’t wade into the fierce debate about whether or not the “Ferguson effect” is real. In any case, focusing tightly on the relationship between crime and the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray strikes us as too narrow an approach. Even as these protests gained a lot traction this past year, the public had already begun to turn against many of the harsher elements of the U.S. criminal justice system, from stop-and-frisk to draconian prison sentences. Many state and local governments—including some of the ones mentioned in the Times story—have been scaling back certain tough-on-crime policies for the last several years. Theories about the sources of the 2015 crime boomlet abound, but we wouldn’t be surprised if changes in criminal justice policy have played a role, at least in some cities. It may well be the case that the nationwide crime crackdown that began in the 1970s—as destructive as it was for many communities—really did help keep a lid on the crime rate. And it may well be that the steps taken toward reform in states like California—as salutary as they may be, overall, as a matter of policy—have caused urban crime to rise somewhat. For the purposes of public opinion, however, it may not matter whether the statistics in the Times article can be traced to the ‘Ferguson effect,’ changing prison policies, the availability of guns, or simple random variation. As we’ve written before, this is America’s prison reform moment. Politicians on both sides are united around the moral and fiscal imperative of curbing mass incarceration—and in particular, enacting more charitable policies toward drug and other nonviolent offenders. However, we only got here because the country has enjoyed historically low—and steadily falling—crime rates for the past decade. If the latest crime boomlet turns into a boom, the criminal justice reform consensus could evaporate in a heartbeat—no matter what the source of the boom may be.

Crime tanks US soft power.

Falk 12 Richard (United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights) “When soft power is hard” Al Jazeera July 28th 2012 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201272212435524825.html

This unabashed avowal of imperial goals is the main thesis of the article, perhaps most graphically expressed in the following words: "The United States can increase the effectiveness of its military forces and make the world safe for soft power, America's inherent comparative advantage." As the glove fits the hand, soft power complements hard power within the wider enterprise of transforming the world in the United States' image, or at least in the ideal version of the United States' sense of self. The authors acknowledge (rather parenthetically) that their strategy may not work if the US continues much longer to be seen unfavourably abroad as a national abode of drugs, crime, violence, fiscal irresponsibility, family breakdown, and political gridlock. They make a rather meaningless plea to restore "a healthy democracy" at home as a prelude to the heavy lifting of democratising the world, but they do not pretend medical knowledge, and offer no prescriptions for restoring the health of the American body politic. And now, 16 years after their article appeared, it would appear that the adage, "disease unknown, cure unknown", applies.

PIC Deportation

CP text: I defend the aff actor should a) abolish Plea Bargaining in the United States Criminal Justice System except for cases in which immigrants are being prosecuted and b) federally implement California Law Penal Code Section 1016.3 (b).

Green 16 clarifies

Green, Ross B. “Prosecutors Now Required to Consider Adverse Immigration Consequences in Plea Negotiations.” San Mateo CA Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog, RBG, 15 June 2016, www.rossgreenlaw.com/criminal-defense-attorney-blog/prosecutors-now-required-to-consider-adverse-immigration-consequences-in-plea-negotiations. bracket is in original article SJ DT

Under a significant change in California law, Penal Code Section 1016.3(b) mandates, “the prosecution … consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences in the plea negotiation process as one factor in an effort to reach a just resolution.” Prior to the enactment of this new law, district attorney offices across the State would refuse to make adjustments to plea negotiations to alleviate immigration consequences. In fact, some prosecutorial offices had written policies that expressly prevented the consideration of collateral consequences, such as deportation.

Prosecutor’s use this law to prevent the deportation of non-legal US residents: Gonzales 17

Gonzales, Richard. “Prosecutors Protect Immigrants From Deportation For Minor Crimes.”NPR, NPR, 31 May 2017, www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530929936/prosecutors-protect-immigrants-from-deportation-for-minor-crimes. SJ DT

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Prosecutors have wide latitude when negotiating plea deals. It typically depends on the facts of each case. In several U.S. cities now, prosecutors are using their discretion to protect defendants who are immigrants. They want to ensure that immigrants, whether here illegally or seeking citizenship, don't get deported for minor crimes. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports. RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: In 20 years as a prosecutor in Brooklyn, one case stands out for Eric Gonzalez. The defendant was a legal permanent resident from Haiti arrested on a trespassing charge. Police also found a small amount of cocaine on him. ERIC GONZALEZ: He did not plead to the trespass charge. He pled to the drug charge. GONZALES: The Haitian got community service and stayed out of trouble, eventually getting married and holding down two jobs. But that plea deal would come back to haunt him. In 2010, he returned to Haiti to check on his family after the devastating earthquake there. On his way back, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents noticed his drug conviction. GONZALEZ: And when he came back home, he landed in Florida, and he was detained by ICE and put into removal proceedings based on, you know, over 10-year-old drug conviction. GONZALES: Gonzalez says the man's deportation might have been avoided. If he had pled guilty to the trespassing charge instead, he wouldn't have run afoul of federal immigration laws. Gonzalez is now the acting district attorney in his native Brooklyn and the state's first Hispanic district attorney. About one-third of the New York borough's residents are immigrants. GONZALEZ: And with the current climate that's coming from D.C. and the immigration policies that President Trump has been pushing out into the community, there's been great fear. GONZALES: Gonzalez believes non-citizens can face a sort of double jeopardy, - getting deported sometimes years after serving their sentences on criminal charges. So he recently instructed his staff - about 500 prosecutors - to consider a defendant's immigration status when negotiating plea deals for minor nonviolent offenses. Baltimore prosecutors recently received similar instructions. They were told to consider the collateral consequences of prosecuting immigrants for minor crimes. In California, a state law goes even further. It instructs prosecutors to consider the immigration status of defendants in plea negotiations regardless of whether it's a misdemeanor or felony. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently blasted local officials who don't prosecute immigrants to the fullest extent possible. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JEFF SESSIONS: It troubles me that we've seen district attorneys openly brag about not charging cases appropriately under the laws of our country so that - provides an opportunity for individuals not to be convicted of a crime that might lead to deportation.

Theory Spec PB

Interpretation: The affirmative must defend that on balance, plea bargaining ought to be abolished. To clarify, this means that the aff must not specify a particular type or form of plea bargaining that ought be abolished.

Abolish is defined as

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abolish

Definition of abolish transitive verb: to end the observance or effect of (something, such as a law): to completely do away with (something): annul abolish a law abolish slavery

Vote neg –

First, limits – there are over 300000 different classes of crimes the aff can spec.

Reynolds 15 Glenn Harlan. “Reynolds: You Are Probably Breaking the Law Right Now.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 29 Mar. 2015, www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/03/29/crime-law-criminal-unfair-column/70630978 SJ DT

"Regulatory crimes" of this sort are incredibly numerous and a category that is growing quickly. They are the ones likely to trap unwary individuals into being felons without knowing it. That is why Michael Cottone, in a just-published Tennessee Law Reviewarticle, suggests that maybe the old presumption that individuals know the law is outdated, unfair and maybe even unconstitutional. "Tellingly," he writes, "no exact count of the number of federal statutes that impose criminal sanctions has ever been given, but estimates from the last 15 years range from 3,600 to approximately 4,500." Meanwhile, according to recent congressional testimony, the number of federal regulations (enacted by administrative agencies under loose authority from Congress) carrying criminal penalties may be as many as 300,000.

Solvency advocate does not check. Anyone who feels wronged by any one of these plea bargains can write an article or be interviewed about their experience with the cjs

Impacts:

analytic

analytic

analytic

Second, accuracy – the res is a generic statement without qualifiers – i.e. there’s nothing speccing types of plea bargains. That means spec is bad on common usage – generic, non-count nouns such as “plea bargain” are used without specification.

Byrd “Generic Meaning,” Georgia State University, Transcript of lecture given by Pat Byrd (Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL).

Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, two of the authors of the Longman Grammar, have written about what they call "seemingly synonymous words." They have shown how the adjectives big, great, and large are used differently in academic writing from in fiction. Their point is that when a language has forms that seem to be synonyms--the forms are likely to be used in different ways in different settings. One can't just be substituted for another without a change in meaning or a violation of style. A big toe isn't the same as a large toe. And I don't think I know what a great toe might be. Or, for another example, a political scientist would call Georgia a large state but not necessarily a great state. But a politician from Georgia is likely to talk about the great State of Georgia.¶ A similar process is at work with the use of these generic forms in context. We have a set of sentences that seem to have very much the same meaning. It is probable that the uses of these forms do not entirely overlap. However, we do not yet have a complete picture of how generic forms are used. But the use of computers for linguistic research is a new field, and we get more information all the time. ¶ Here are some things that we do know about these generic noun phrase types when they are used in context:¶ 1. The + singular: The computer has changed modern life. ¶ This form is considered more formal than the others--and is not as likely to be used in conversation as the plural noun: Computers have changed modern life. ¶ Master (1987) found in the sample that he analyzed that this form with the was often used to introduce at topic--and came at the beginning of a paragraph and in introductions and conclusions.¶ 2. Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers have changed modern life. ¶ Probably the most common form for a generalization. It can be used in all contexts--including both conversation (Basketball players make too much money) and academic writing (Organisms as diverse as humans and squid share many biological processes). ¶ Perhaps used more in the hard sciences and social sciences than in the humanities. ¶ 3. A + singular: A computer is a machine. ¶ This generic structure is used to refer to individual instances of a whole group and is used to classify whatever is being discussed.¶ The form is often used for definitions of terms. ¶ It is also often used to explain occupations. My sister is a newspaper reporter. I am a teacher. ¶ Use is limited to these "classifying" contexts. Notice that this form can't always be subtituted for the other: *Life has been changed by a computer. *A computer has changed modern life. ¶ 4. Zero + noncount: Life has been changed by the computer. ¶ The most basic meaning and use of noncount nouns is generic--they are fundamentally about a very abstract level of meaning. Thus, the most common use of noncount nouns is this use with no article for generic meaning. ¶ Zero Article and Generic Meaning¶ Most nouns without articles have generic meaning. Two types are involved.¶ 1. Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers have changed modern life.¶ 2. Zero + noncount: Life has been changed by the computer.

Impacts:

a) Ground – the topicality rule outweighs – immediate guaranteed abuse of a semantically non-topical interpretation outweighs its speculative fairness and education gains.

Brandon Merrell 2015. Back to its roots – accuracy as a litmus test for topicality standards

Additionally, even if altering the topic could the- oretically provide access to preferable ground or education, those benefits will not materialize in the current debate round. Switching the topic without providing fair warning to both teams sacrifices pre- dictability, impedes preparation, and reduces the quality of clash. Moreover, the non-topical ground and education that one team seeks cannot be used in the current debate because the issue of topicality has already subsumed the entire focus of the round such that the new ground cannot be accessed and discussion has been diverted away from the issues that would provide additional education. Finally, resolutions change from round to round and thus a precedent for redefinition of the topic in the ad- vocated manner cannot be set for future rounds. Thus, the immediate and guaranteed abuse that occurs as a result of reinterpreting the topic vastly outweighs speculative benefits that are unlikely to materialize.

That’s supercharged in the context of this topic: obviously there are certain types of plea bargains that are really bad, like letting child molesters off easy, meaning the aff can just pick one unturnable plan. This also specifically turns research incentives arguments – the aff will just pick one unrutnable aff instead of debating whole res and frontlinining neg args, meaning they do on the whole less research.

Analytic

Theory “Possible Interps”

Note: these are not all the interps I am restricted to but these are a good baseline for possible interps

A: the negative may not read a plan inclusive counterplan

A: the negative may not fiat an alternative actor to the Aff's actor

A: the negative must clarify the status of their advocacy in a delineated text in the 1nc

A: the negative may not defend an act omission and read turns to the aff

A: the negative may not read two theory shells and deny the 1Ar an RVI

A: the affirmative may not read more than one theory shell and deny the negative an RVI

A: the 1ac may not read no Neg Rvi's and in the 1Ar read a new shell that is drop the debater

A: the negative must weigh between T/Theory and K in the 1nc

A: the negative may not read only reps links

A: the negative may not contest the aff ROB

A: the negative must concede Aff framework

A: debaters must disclose their standard text

A: if a debater reads an analytical framework then they only have to disclose their standard text

A: debaters must disclose all framework analytics