Chapter 8. Justice Courts and the Supreme Court Constitution Elections Liability Crime, Criminal Policy, Law Enforcement and Prisons I. Introduction Courts and the Supreme Court Our recommendation is to appoint federal judges for a particular term of office, say 10 years. Appointing people to life often is counterproductive. Too many of them as they get older get more complacent and away from the mainstream. Instead of providing law according to the constitution or to the passed law, they provide opinionated law which agrees with their own interest but not for law. A fair system of court oversight should exist for the purposes of removing judges. Constitution The Electoral college needs to be overhauled. The popular vote winner can lose the election unless he or she has a majority of electoral votes. In fact as the 1992 election showed, one could win the electoral college and still not obtain a majority of the votes cast. The process provided if no candidate has a majority of electoral votes is outmoded, having the House of Representatives select the President from three top candidates and the Senate selecting the Vice President from the two top candidates. There is no requirement that legislators cast their votes as their district voted. The electors selected do not have to follow up and vote as elected. The proposal is to scrap the electoral college. If in an election, a majority of voters do not select a candidate, a runoff will be held within a month between the two highest vote getters. Perhaps both a President and Prime Minister is needed: The President would meet people and visit states, opening fairs, meeting foreign diplomats. The Prime Minister would conduct the business of government. Our present system of government often leads to divided government with one party with the presidency and the other Congress. No accountability therein results. We would seriously consider a return to the British system of Parliament with the majority party (in the United States case, each senator or Congressperson would count equally in determining the majority party) selecting the Prime Minister who would then run the government. Elections would be held every two to four years depending upon public opinion. A shadow government complete with designated opposition leader and shadow cabinet would exist. In this model, accountability exists. The party in command would get to make the decisions and get the credit and blame; the public would respond accordingly. First Amendment: Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants. — William Penn The first amendment to the Constitution is not about the separation of church and state. It, rather, guarantees the free exercise of religion, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It was inscribed to prohibit the establishment by government of a religion, to prohibit a national Mandatory religion was intent of founders, e.g., the Anglican church in England, Catholic church in Ireland; to prevent the establishment of one religion above all others. The Church of England was called an ‘established‘ church because the government taxed everyone even members of other churches to pay for it. If you were a member of the Church of England, you had legal privileges that other people did not have. The Constitution denied the federal government the power to set up any such privileged church in this country, to not have an official church vested with privileges denied other churches and supported by the public treasury. Congress could neither set up a national church nor interfere with the established churches in the states. The founding fathers wanted to protect religion from federal government interference not diminish its influence in our public. Religion played a intensely emotional part in the beginnings of this nation and the culture of the American people. This, however, does not mean that we should divorce government from any formal recognition of God. The Declaration of Independence said, “Creator gave man the right to liberty.” Man must therefore remember the one who endowed him with it. “Nature’s God” is in the Declaration of Independence. The United States was founded on Christian principles. James Madison wrote “ it is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages.” This is, after all, “one nation under God.” Thus, the American nation is certainly not a secular nation. The growing effort to separate religion from public life is not a good sign. It is being used against individual and corporate free exercise of religion, religions speech and civil protect. Gay and Lesbian student organizations can have offices on campus, can use public buildings for after hours meetings but attempts by students to have Christian meetings in public buildings have often been denied. Condoms yes, prayers no. We need not less religion in our lives, just the opposite, we could stand to have lots more of it. Surveys have ranked the law against prayer in the public classroom as one of the most unpopular in our history. Just the mere thought that God might be on someone’s mind at any time of the day while on public property can be reasons to threaten or sue. Georgia has a state law that mandates a one minute period of ‘quiet reflection’ at the start of the school day. A teacher was suspended for refusing to implement the policy because he believed the intent was to provide for silent prayer. The ACLU filed suit to disallow anything that looks like prayer in public schools. Just recently, a Michigan school board voted to revise its mission statement because it contained the word ‘God.’ The ever expanding reach of government has threatened the twin constitutional guarantees of the religion clause: free exercise of religion for all and establishment of religion for none. The price for accepting federal funds is to lose the religious integrity of the curriculum. The government’s expanding power to tax and spend thus chokes off religious independence. What seems to be occurring is the left’s cry of ‘Let’s force these fundamentalists to violate their religious principals to advance our religious principals, to shove our liberal values on them.‘ The danger is that religious persons will be required to pay taxes to support programs, such as abortion, in which as a mater of conscience they cannot participate. In Massachusetts, Catholic landlords who refused to rent to an unmarried couple were sued so as to force them to condone conduct their church considers sinful. The State of Hawaii went ballistic during the summer of 1993 when the graduating high school seniors wanted to sing the popular song “Friends.” The song, although quite innocent in today’s terms and promoting a proper set of values, contained the words “God” and “Lord” and thus was unacceptable to the powers to be--its lyrics may improperly advance religious beliefs and should therefore not be sung. Despite the official condemnation of the song, many seniors spontaneously sang the song during the graduation proceedings they had chosen to sing and which to them meant the good times during high school. Police were asked to break up a group of children praying in front of their school in open protest against the law which prohibits prayer in public schools; meanwhile crack sales down the street reach record levels and drive-by shootings are a daily occurrence; locals can hardly walk down the street without being accosted by gang members, prostitutes, drug sellers. But which is more dangerous for our society; the police responded within minutes to the call against the children, while often weeks go by before responding to ‘open-air’ drug markets. A public school teacher in Colorado was ordered by his superiors to remove his Bible from his desk where students might see it. He was forbidden to read it silently while his students were involved in other activities. His is probably the example, the role model we would prefer for our students. The United States is one of the most religious nations on this Earth in the sense that we have a deeply religious citizenry with its foundations well placed on religious values. We are also the most zealous in guarding our public institutions against explicit religious influences, it is fine to be religious in private but not so in public. It is our beliefs that more religion, not less, is needed in this country. The separation between state and religion, which was not what was originally desired by our founders, has exceeded all bounds. The current intent is not to separate religion but to abolish all signs of religion and religious beliefs within the government or any governmentally sanctioned activity. This too need be reversed. Elections Competency standards should be set for voters or politicians. We have too many people who don’t know what is going on that are voting. Ignorant people can only vote for their own ill conceived narrow interests; they are not able to be responsible citizens and make informed choices, even for themselves, let alone for the common good. The problem with universal suffrage is that a large segment of the population has no idea either about the issues or the candidates who are running for offices. The voting base should only be expanded when education warrants. Voting should not be a right. Is the vote of a college professor in Political Science who studied all the candidates equivalent to the homeless person on the street who is drug ridden, illiterate. Both can vote. Both votes count equally. But who makes the better decision? You have to improve the quality of the holder. IV. Liability You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people. — Will Rogers Strict Product Liability A company is guilty of negligence when it fails to use reasonable care in the design and manufacture of a product. Within the doctrine of negligence, the manufacturer could not be sued if a consumer misused/abused the product or caused injury to himself but the product performed as intended (no product defect). During the sixties and seventies consumer advocates believed the consumer was not being adequately protected from product deficiencies. The result was the creation of the doctrine of strict product liability, which switched the focus of liability law from the manufacturer to the product. If an injury occurs due to a defect, the manufacturer can be held liable, regardless of when the product was manufactured, the use or abuse of the product, or whether the manufacturer used the state-of technology at the time of production. The concept of Strict Product Liability (SPL) means, therefore, the product can be built according to the highest quality specification, have no manufacturing defect, and operate according to industry or government mandated standards but if it causes an injury, the company can still be held responsible. According to this concept, if the manufacturer issued insufficient instructions on how to use the product or issued inadequate warnings about its possible risks, the responsibility would still be with the manufacturer. Under the domain of strict liability, almost anyone who comes in contact with a product--designer, manufacturer, distributor or retailer-- can be held personally liable if the product was determined to be defective--unreasonably dangerous when sold. To add complexity, all parties are potentially subject not to a single standard of product liability but 50, one for each of the fifty states. Under absolute liability, a manufacturer can be held liable for failing to warn of the risks inherent in his product regardless of whether the risk was even recognizable at the time the product was manufactured. If the product was defective, lack of knowledge does not change the manufacturer’s responsibility. In essence, the manufacturer bears any and all risks for the product. Proponents of SPL believed full acceptance of the concept would have the result of spurring innovation as a means of increasing safety and minimizing law suits. The assumption was that safety and innovation would flourish under these new product liability laws, that manufacturers would seek out the best and newest techniques and materials to avoid liability. This has not happened. Safety improvements did not happen as the proponents had predicted. The old law encouraged safety improvements but did not condemn past shortcomings. Now, though, some companies even hesitate to introduce new improved models because this might indicate that the older versions could possibly have been unsafe (and hence present additional potential liability concerns). Each new improvement could possibly provide a standard by which your older products would be gauged. An improved technique today could well be an indictment of what you did less well yesterday. What product in use today is not many times safer than its counterpart of a decade ago?Companies that produce products designed to improve health or enhance safety are among those most likely to be sued; they are also the most likely to remove their products and not introduce new products. This undermined one of the stated purposes of product liability laws: to enhance the health and safety of American consumers. The increased emphasis on safety has caused prices of many goods to rise beyond the level the new benefits would have justified. One proposed safety standard for lawnmowers has been estimated to cost consumers from $240 million to $330 million per year and would return benefits of $163 million in accidents cost reduction. For step ladders, the addition of stickers illustrating how they should be set up and warning against the use of the top two rungs adds about 75¢, a 3% increase on a typical 5-ft aluminum ladder selling for $22. However, more substantial safety changes may cost 10-20% of a ladder’s purchase price. Benefits should be weighed against the costs in assessing product safety improvements. Tradeoffs among function, price and risk are commonplace in the design of a product but this is irrelevant under SPL. Manufacturers, knowing that the easiest product to defend is the one made exactly by the book (particularly an established book of standards or regulations), more often than not end up improving their designs only incrementally, evolutionary. As a result, radical innovation instead of being encouraged, tends to be discouraged. When liability insurance is plentiful, reasonably priced, and relatively inexpensive, companies are more willing to risk litigation and bring innovative products to the marketplace. This was the state of affairs for most of the century until 1980. Since the 1980s, the insurance industry has been in disarray; many insurers have withdrawn from the market or charged prohibited premiums and deductibles. The reasons for this lack of adequate liability insurance coverage are the unavailability of coverage due to the under reserved position of many insurers and the lack of desire of many to participate as reinsurers. It is difficult and sometimes nearly impossible for an insurance company to estimate its real risk in product liability coverage today. Claims can arise from situations created 30 or 40 years ago but which are judged by current values. Today’s products will be liable for safety for thirty or forty years hence but insurance coverage is only for today. In 1974, 1579 product liability cases were filed within the United States; by 1985 the number of cases filed had grown to 13,554-- a 758 percent increase in just 11 years. Measured since 1980, product liability claims have grown nearly 20% annually with a 401% increase in liability awards. From one multi-million payout in 1962, by 1975 there were 25, and by 1980 there were 360. In Europe and Japan, payments for all liabilities were no higher than .5% of their GDP; in the U.S., the liabilities from malpractice suits amount to 2.5% of GDP, five times higher. According to the Institute for Civil Justice, tort litigation costs were between $29 and $36 Billion in 1985. Of this amount, only $14 to 16 Billion, or less than half the total was paid to plaintiffs as damage awards, the rest went to lawyers and court administrators. The costs (in 1990) to the insurance industry of product liability amounted to over $80 billion annually, the equivalent of the profits of the top 200 companies in U.S. The average jury award climbed from nearly $500,000 to almost $2 Million; almost 2/3 of which usually goes to cover attorney fees and court costs. A study by the Rand Corporation of settled asbestos claims in the early 1980’s found the total spent on the average claim was $101,000 of which the average victim received but $39,000. Only 3 to 4 percent of all cases results in multi-million dollar awards but these account for almost half of the dollar amounts handed out. Compare this product liability lottery to the fact that the biggest damage award in the history of the British empire was only $1 Million. The high costs of awards are causing manufacturers’ insurance premiums to skyrocket. In 1984 one pharmaceutical firm paid $72,000 for $100 million in coverage; in 1985 it paid $85,000 for only $18 million in coverage; in 1986 insurers were asking for an annual premium of $1.8 million for that same amount of coverage. Product liability premium increases of 500% after four years for less coverage is typical. In many industries premiums have risen ten times or more for the same coverage, sometimes liability insurance isn’t available at any price. Just the threat of product liability can have devastating effects on a business. Today, only one company in America makes vaccines due to the inherent threat of liability awards. When the sole surviving manufacturer of DPT vaccine (Ledeerle Laboratories) decided in 1986 to self insure, it announced it would triple the price of one dose to ten times the price paid in 1980. When it raised the cost to cover the product liability costs, vaccination rates among the poor plummeted, causing future potential health risks. A dose of the DPT vaccine costs about 12 cents to manufacture and retails at 100 times that with 99% of the price going towards liability coverage.In 1986 Lederle faced 109 lawsuits, five times that of only five years earlier. These lawsuits were usually in response to reactions, most of which were fevers or mild convulsions. Only one in 300,000 doses of DPT result in permanent brain damage, a very low rate to pay for diseases which in an earlier era killed thousands of children annually. All vaccines carry some risk. One can never develop an entirely risk free biological agent; it would be like stop giving penicillin because one person had a serious reaction. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that nearly 25% of price of ride on a tour bus and 33% of a small piston plane’s price represent product liability costs (insurance premiums or awards). Product liability premiums cost many large municipalities as much or more than they spend on fire or sanitation services ( 1988b). Give credit to product liability for the disappearance of American-made safety equipment for football, hockey, gymnastics, scuba, and baseball. At one time 18 companies made football helmets, now just two do; the liability costs of football helmets can account for up to 50% of the total cost of the helmet. One-third of the companies surveyed by the Conference Board say that liability worries have forced them to cancel or postpone new products, 47% of respondents have discontinued product lines as a result of product liability problems, 22% decided against merger or acquisition, 22% lost market share as result of product liability risks, 25% indicated they have discontinued product research as a result of product liability, and 39% said they had decided against introducing a new product. Another effect is longer lead times and engineering times for testing and design.Therefore, many companies have little or no incentive to provide consumers with innovative products due to the risk inherent in it. A manufacturer can take few adequate precautions against future liability since it is impossible to predict where the future of product liability laws lead. An enormous amount of scientific and managerial energies that should be going into finding new cures for ailments or managing innovations to increase a company’s competitiveness are instead being wasted defending useful and properly made products. Certain technologies have been removed from the market, not because of sound scientific evidence indicating lack of safety or effectiveness but because product liability suits have exposed manufacturers to unacceptable financial risks. Due to this unacceptable liability exposure, patients have been harmed by the withdrawal from the market of important products and are forced to rely on a single manufacturer for certain essential products, such as some pediatric vaccines. The climate has also created strong disincentives to conduct research and development in certain high risk areas. Many U.S. companies now go abroad to sell or make their latest innovations. Strict product liability creates hostility to all that is technologically unfamiliar and jeopardizes that which has not yet been totally perfected and proven. SPL may increase a consumer’s right to sue, but in doing so is often limiting his choice to use or not to use a given product. Many manufacturers demand higher (sometimes prohibitive) prices, others withdraw from the market entirely; In some places a physician cannot be found to deliver a baby. Withdrawal of hundreds of good Samaritans to eliminate one bad incident hardly improves the safety of the injured victim left to die on a street. Modern behavior does not deter risk; it deters behavior that gets people sued, which is not the same thing. Doing nothing becomes safer legally than doing something, even if more dangerous physically. Product liability costs have prompted some manufacturers to abandon valuable new technologies, life saving drugs, and innovative product designs. Even when a company wins lawsuits against it, the cost of coverage, litigation and the fear of possible large judgment against it can persuade management that a product is not worth marketing. Baxter Travenol got out of the heart valve business largely to avoid the inevitable litigation that would certainly have resulted. Monsanto Company decided in 1987 not to market a promising new filter and insulator. The material from which they are made is certainly safer than the asbestos it would replace in brakes and gaskets, but safer is not good enough in today’s litigation climate. Business decisions have begun to be decided, not on profits and losses, but on advice from liability lawyers, weighing the possibility of lawsuits on a particular product. Companies are attempting to avoid problems and risks by staying out of markets with high liability records. The Competitiveness Center of the Hudson Institute estimated nationwide costs due to medical malpractice liability of at least $15 billion per year. Medical liability added $450 in direct and indirect costs for every admission, more than 5% of the hospital’s operating expenditures. The cost of medical malpractice litigation has increased at an annual average rate of 15%. For each admission, the hospital spends $123 directly on medical malpractice insurance, legal overhead and claims. The threat of liability forces physicians to order unnecessary tests and referrals to build defenses against every possible lawsuit; on average $327 of such tests were done for each person admitted to the hospital. U.S. firms pay much more in product liability premiums than do their international competitors. Dow Chemical has foreign sales of $7 billion versus domestic sales of $6 Billion yet domestic insurance costs were $100 million versus less than $20 Million for its foreign subsidiaries. In 1987, Dow was a defendant in 456 suits in the U.S. versus only 4 outside the U.S. American firms making baseballs and other sporting goods pay liability insurance eight times that of their Japanese rivals (manufacturing in Japan). This adds about 10% to the cost of an American product and could well spell the difference between a competitive product and perhaps a never introduced one. Many American companies are moving offshore to bypass these problems. An estimated 15% of the cost of the U.S. manufactured machine tools is now attributable to product liability costs; some machine tool and textile machinery manufacturers must support premiums 20 to 100 times as much as their foreign competitors pay. Union Carbide developed a suitcase sized kidney dialysis unit for home use but sold the business to a foreign competitor after determining that the size of potential damage claims and the probable costs of their legal defense made the project uneconomical. Many modern medicines have been available to Europeans years before Americans could use them; some will probably never be available in the United States. Product Liability has virtually destroyed the piston aircraft industry. Piper Aircraft estimates insurance costs add between $75,000 and 100,000 for every new plane built. From 18,000 aircraft assembled during in 1978-1979, less than 1000 units were built in 1988. In 1988 Cessna Company stopped manufacturing single engined small piston propeller-driven aircraft. Piper and Beech manufacture only one model each. Innovation in aircraft design typically is derived from advances in smaller planes and has been stifled because liability litigation has virtually eliminated small engine airplane manufacturing; the biggest production costs are liability related not product related. Small plane manufacturers’ payout of liability claims rose ten fold in less than eight years between 1977 and 1985; By 1989 they had paid a total of $210 million. As a result of these claims, Piper entered Chapter 11 in 1991. The small aircraft manufacturers curtailed or suspended production of new planes--they could no longer compete with used planes already on the market. Yet the new models kept off the market were notably safer than the older ones.The potential for aerodynamic research and innovation has come to an almost total halt except in governmental sponsored R&D for the military. Burt Rutan, the pioneering designer of the Voyager, the first plane to fly around the world without landing, sold construction plans for novel airplanes to do-it-yourselfers who would then build the plane in their garages. These planes once built had to be certified by a governmental agency before the plane could be licensed to fly. This should have lessened any liability. In 1985, he was so fearful of lawsuits if a homemade plane based on his designs crashed, he stopped selling the plans. (In a surprise move in August 1994, the General Aviation Revitalization Act was passed by Congress; as a result, lawyers can no longer sue manufacturers of small aircraft in accidents involving planes and parts over eighteen years old. It is a start, a small one at that, but a start in the right direction.) The Product Liability system imposes the heaviest burdens on small companies, those with sales under $100 million. While it also hurts giant companies whose major costs include legal fees, deep pockets, and management resources and attention are captured by legal issues, the big concern can afford it and accepts it as a cost of doing business. The small business often does not have the resources to deal with legal or liability concerns. Many small companies go without insurance and many promising entrepreneurs fail to start new businesses because they cannot afford to risk their personal assets. The FDA’s new ‘user fee’ tollgate tax requires companies to ante up to $100,000 with each new drug application, increasing to as much as $230,000 by 1997, thereby punishing small businesses. The small business is the keystone of American business competition, job creation and innovation. Radical innovation typically comes form small entities outside the mainstream of an industry. Product liability, though, discriminates against the smaller, less-endowed entrepreneur, a trend which favors survival of the mighty mature corporation at the expense of the fledgling enterprise. To survive against the legal system requires a large stable of lobbyists and liability lawyers. Only the larger companies can afford both the personnel to fight and the insurance premiums necessary to survive the system. The odds on smaller companies or entrepreneurial endeavors, already very high, will continue to escalate. An entire generation of new companies may be discouraged from entering the economy. The newer the technology, the more innovative it is, the greater the scientific uncertainty exists about its risks and benefits. The old technology has benefit of experience: of previous liability fights and knows and uses the accepted warnings, inspections, and designs to avoid or at least minimize future liability entanglements. Insurance companies base rates upon track records and accumulation of accident experience, something old products have. However, since new products have no such history, insurance premiums must be extremely high.This inherently tilts the liability system against newness (innovations). The inertia of government bureaucracy weighs in favor of the old and against the new. The old is grandfathered and a case must be built against it. The new must prove its advantages; ignorance of risk translates into the strictest possible regulation by any agency. The result is that incremental development is preferred over radical invention. Why is the system so tilted against innovation? Jurors are not experts about technology. Age, familiarity, and ubiquity are the most powerful legitimizing forces known. The inexpert juror identifies and crucifies novel, exotic, unfamiliar, or adventuresome technologies as unwelcome and fraught with danger. Mothers underestimate risks at home; individuals see too little threat in their cigars and bourbons; but overestimate the less familiar and understandable hazards of chemicals, nuclear power, air travel or high tech medicine. The familiar is safe no matter how dangerous in reality it might be; the unfamiliar is suspect, intrusive, and probably dangerous no matter how reassuring the statistics may be. If Henry Ford had to bring his Model T to market today instead of 1900, courts and regulators would have stopped him. The first automobile would have been declared too dangerous, one could break his arm cranking it, or it might scare a horse and throw a rider or cause a buggy to crash from a scared mount, or a dozen other possible injuries and accidents could easily come to mind. Horses too were dangerous but horses were an established technology, known and accepted. Human nature is predisposed to accept the old and familiar risk while rejecting the novel and exotic. Consulting engineers favor older design options in their specifications, fearing that the new ones will carry greater legal (not physical) risk. The system promotes the most trivial and marginal change; the bold leap forward is precisely in the riskiest area and almost always in today’s climate is left unleapt. The high costs of litigation to consumers and producers was also explored in Litan and Huber’s (1991) The Liability Maze: The impact of liability law on safety and innovation. Their findings indicate that where liability remains modest, it appears to have encouraged innovation-- an intuitively reasonable conclusion since a well functioning tort system will force a firm to internalize more of its products’ costs and thereby provide it with an incentive to adopt cost-effective changes. However, as liability and damages expand, the impact of innovation becomes highly negative. This effect seems to be strongest in the general (light plane) aviation industry with serious impacts as previously noted in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. Their findings indicate that “jury trials, contingency fees, long-tail liability, the sheer size of awards, and the stigmatizing effect of punitive damages, along with adverse publicity, market forces and regulation are at least equally important” as the specific liability rules. The laws, if left to Congress, will not in the near future change: For the fourteenth straight year in 1994, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America stopped the Senate last week from voting on product liability reform. Legal system costs US business roughly $132 billion annually-- a cost none of America’s economic competitors bear. Liability Recommendations The intent must be to create a truly level playing field, fair for both consumers and manufacturers yet one that eliminates the negative effects that have been induced by the current Product Liability Revolution. The common law concept of Negligence was for centuries adequate. The right to sue and seek recourse due to manufacturer defect along with the high degree of international competition that exists currently in the marketplace should be sufficient to guarantee high quality or else the demise of the offending business. Safer products come from constant improvement and innovation. Man must learn to take some responsibility for his actions, his misuse of products. Engineers can not be expected to be visionaries of fifty years in the future when politicians can’t see beyond the next election. Their professional endeavors to design and provide the safest products with today’s technology should suffice. Therefore the following recommendations towards leveling the liability playing field and correcting the excesses of the revolution seem reasonable: Revise liability laws á la Dan Quayle recommendations. The following recommendations towards leveling the liability playing field seem reasonable: 1) State of the art defense: a company could then claim it could not warn of the danger of a product since at the time the product was marketed the scientific knowledge and technology necessary to assess the danger did not yet exist and as such did not know there was a danger. (A similar law was passed by Great Britain precisely because the government did not want to impede innovations). 2) Approval by Federal regulators as an acceptable defense; strict adherence to regulatory standards would provide protection for manufacturers from liability claims, if not totally at least from punitive damages. New Jersey recently passed a bill that establishes compliance with government regulation as a statutory defense. The statute also establishes an absolute defense against punitive damages and creates a presumption that a product is not defective. 3)Federal standards on product liability need be issued to provide for a national set of standards manufacturers and insurers can work from, therefore resulting in one well defined federal standard of defectiveness instead of 50 conflicting ones. 4)State of Repose-- a period of time thereafter a manufacturer can not be sued (10 to 15 years would be reasonable). An EEC directive imposes a time limit of 10 years with a further time of 3 years for the claimant to become aware of the injury , defect, and identity of the producer. 5) Incentives for more (re)insurers to cover product liability of new products. 6) Assessment of liability only for negligence. 7) Abolishment of joint liability, market share liability, several liability and deep pockets mentality: Fair application of the several liability doctrine which assigns damages based on the defendant’s determined share of negligence rather than on ability to pay. If manufacturers were liable only for that portion of damage for which they were responsible, it would encourage safety improvement without deterring innovation. Only defendants who are actually at fault should be liable. End deep pockets lawsuits and awards. 8) Caps on punitive damages, on non-economic damages, and contingency fees system; caps on damages for pain and suffering; caps on lawyers fees and hourly wage scales. 9) Greater establishment of no fault compensation systems by government on emergency necessary items: for example, swine flu, childhood vaccines, and nuclear power industry liability, among others. 10) Adoption of the British practice on costs. In Britain, the party that loses a case normally pays not only its own costs but that of its opponents as well thus crimping the filing of frivolous suits. Such suits like the woman who sued McDonalds because she spilt hot coffee on herself (despite the fact that she was holding the coffee between her legs and traveling in a moving car at the time) (for such travesty and irresponsibility she was awarded nearly $3 million dollars) would be effectively eliminated. 11) Prior Contract: For occurrences like air crashes which are rare but inevitable, have a set amount to be given to victims and their families and eliminate tort problems. 12) Inclusion of Collateral Source Payments: where a defendant has first party health, disability, or workers compensation insurance to draw upon, this must be taken into account and awards , if any, to include these variables. The rules of evidence need to be reformed so that the fact can be admitted to court that the patient’s insurance company (or some other third party) has already reimbursed him for some costs. 13) Allow Plaintiffs to use Collateral Estoppel, that is when one lawsuit is successful against a manufacturer, that provides the basis for other claims. Defendants ought to be able to use the concept as well, to present the finding and proof of safety among his products in other lawsuits to current ones outstanding. 14) Warnings must be given only to experts, not the public at large, if the product is one that may be used legally only by or under the supervision of experts. In the case of prescription drugs these experts are the physicians or dentists. 15) Damage awards should be capped using a sliding scale, based on the type of injury suffered by the patient. 16) Defendants should be allowed to pay awards in installments. 17) A Single national standard for punitive damages should be established. 18) Spare companies from paying up if injuries are attributable to use of alcohol or illegal drugs. In return the manufacturer must accept responsibility to recall and retrofit older models when newer safety features become available, at only cost to users. Companies must also pledge to make every effort to design in and manufacture safe products at current state of art technologies. Lawyers The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers . . . Shakespeare In 1987, 23,011 lobbyists were registered, a hundred times more than in 1961. The number of lawyers listed with the District of Columbia Bar Association quadrupled during that same time to 46,000. Thirteen hundred corporations had Washington offices in 1986 compared to only 100 in 1968. The Number of trade associations headquarters had tripled to 3500 with a work force of 80,000. PAC donations increased a hundredfold. California’s state lawyers file about a million civil lawsuits each year, with each filing costing state taxpayers $500 and each trial costing them $8,000. One of the three most powerful democratic party donor affiliations is the liability and trial lawyers In a National Bureau of Economic Research Paper (working Paper number 3530), Kevin Murphy and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago’s Graduate Business School examined the relationship between growth, innovation, and various types of workers in the labor force. In particular they divided the workers into rent-seekers (law and financial services) who secure most of their income from redistributing income and into entrepreneurs who seek to create wealth by introducing new products, production techniques, or efficiency measures. They found a direct positive relationship between engineers (entrepreneurs) and growth and a negative relationship between rent-seekers and growth. Thus it does appear that the larger the number of lawyers in a country, the poorer the innovation picture gets. Professor Stephen Magee of the University of Texas in his book, The Invisible Foot and the Waste of Nations: Lawyers versus the U.S. Economy, has shown that the too many lawyers in the U.S. economy has caused a $600 Billion reduction (more than 10% of America’s GDP) in the U.S. economy every year. This $600 billion reduces the average compensation of each of the 125 million workers in the civilian work force by more than $2500 (in 1990 dollars). He has calculated the ‘Magee Curve” whereupon the optimum number of lawyers per thousand white-collar workers is 23. Too few or too many and growth suffers. The U.S. with 38 per thousand is on the downward side of the economic growth curve. In 1992, over 50,000 people passed the bar exam. Bill Clinton’s cabinet, designed to ‘look like America” has thirteen of eighteen members are lawyers, as is the president and his wife. One way they keep busy is to defend special interests--by writing rules to favor one client or by resisting rules to defend other clients. Japan (20) and Germany (27) were closer to the peak, that is closer to having the optimum number of lawyers in the economy. France (7), Hong Kong (7), and the U.K. (12) had too few and would have grown more if more lawyers existed in those countries. Spain (33), Indian (34), and Chile (47) were in the same league as the U.S., too many and grew slower than what they could have otherwise. The rising part of the curve measures the positive things legal systems do for economies, making property rights clearer, protecting individuals from harm-doers, and facilitating transactions. The declining part of the curve captures the negative effects of predatory redistributive conflict, excessive litigation, and the diversion of talent out of productive activity. According to the Magee Curve, forty percent of the U.S. lawyers are superfluous to the optimum needs of the economy (about 300,000) and subtract over $600 Billion a year from the U.S. GDP. In essence, each new lawyer over the optimum subtracts nearly $2,500,000 from GDP. That this is a recent phenomenon can be seen from the numbers. In 1960, the number of lawyers stood at 260,000, by 1980 541,000, and by 1990 there were 756,000 lawyers. Until 1970 the number of lawyers per 100,000 Americans had remained at a fairly constant 120. Currently, that number exceeds 300. The effect on lawsuits can be seen in the tripling of the number of federal lawsuits in the past three decades. The problem with having too many lawyers is that 42% of the politicians are trained as lawyers (far exceeding Magee’s 18 country average of 15%). Magee’s corollary suggests a strong negative correlations between the proportion of lawyer-politicians and the rate of economic growth. Japan’s approach to law differs considerably from the U.S. To become a bengoshi, or lawyer, in Japan, an applicant must secure a spot in the Legal Training and Research Institute, a government run school that admits only 2% of its 35,000 applicants annually. Japan has only 15,000 approved lawyers and adds only 400 per year, a far cry from the U.S.’ 780,000 lawyers and tens of thousands of new lawyers a year. In summary, America has 2 1/2 times as many lawyers per capita as England, 5 times that of Germany and 25 as many in Japan. And growing. The United States is the most litigious nation on earth. We can liken litigation as an economic cancer. Law drains talent from other pursuits. Forty percent of our Rhodes scholars go to law school to become wealth dividing lawyers rather than wealth creating scientists or engineers. Japan trains ten times as many engineers as lawyers, the reverse is true for the U.S. Americans are becoming less willing to accept certain losses as non-compensatory acts of God. We are increasingly believing we have a right to be compensated for every loss. We have come to view the legal system like the lottery--as our outside chance to get rich without working for it. The legal system, like the lottery, promises easy riches but the net effect is counterproductive to the long run future of the nation. V. Crime, Criminal Policy, and Prisons-- The Problem Punishment is justice for the unjust. — Saint Augustine An effective criminal justice system--one that holds people accountable for harmful conduct--simply cannot be sustained under conditions where there are boundless excuses for violent behavior and no moral authority for the state to punish. If people know that they are not going to be held accountable because of a myriad of excuses, how will our society be able to influence behavior and provide incentives to follow the law? How can we teach future generations right from wrong if the idea of criminal responsibility is riddled with exceptions and our governing institutions and courts lack the moral self-confidence? A society that does not hold someone accountable for harmful behavior can be viewed as condoning--or even worse, endorsing--such conduct. ––Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas America today imprisons more people than any country on earth--more people per capita than the former Soviet Union, South Africa, or China. Violent crime increased 52% between 1970 and 1990, despite the tripling of America’s prison population during those two decades. The billions spent on crime have crippled the criminal justice system by clogging courts, dangerously overcrowding prisons, and exacerbating race and class based inequities. Street crime--burglaries, robberies, larcenies--result in an estimated $11 billion in loses annually yet America spends over $45 billion annually to combat this form of crime. The cost of incarcerating over 1.2 million people throughout the U.S. is estimated between $20 and $30 billion annually. The average national figure of $20,000 it costs to feed, clothe, and house one inmate annually is more than double the annual salary of a minimum wage job and more than the tuition at top universities. Over half of the nation’s prison population were convicted of non-violent, petty crimes. Only 18 percent of the nation’s inmates have committed serious or very serious crimes. One popular explanation for crime is poverty and inequity. People are driven to steal, to rob, to murder because they have no other means to avoid hunger and deprivation or because of the spectacle of rich versus poor, a sense of injustice and unfairness. This is plain poppycock; Poverty is more prevalent, more degrading, more intolerable in India than in the U.S. Yet there is less chance of being mugged or robbed on the streets of Bombay or Calcutta at night than in New York or Chicago. If poverty is an acceptable excuse for theft, shouldn’t sex deprivation be an acceptable defense for rape? Compassion and empathy should not serve as substitutes for right and wrong. Another explanation is that criminality is a sickness that must be treated; therefore no one is responsible for any crimes that he or she may commit. This attitude, or more appropriately this excuse, has been caused by the shifting of personal responsibility from the individual to society as a whole (see Chapter 1). The perceptions of potential criminals have been influenced by the mass media. With the shifting emphasis from individual responsibility to societal responsibility, the view that people are the creatures of their environment and should not be held responsible for their behavior. If people who are poor hold the view that poverty is not their own fault but the fault of society at large, their perfectly understandable reaction is “I have the right to act against society and to take what I need or want.” This with the change in the character of the family, means values and standards of behaviors are not being properly instilled in our youth. As a necessary first step, behavioral changes must be made which would increase responsibility levels for our youth and society altogether. We need to exercise self control, respecting others, and accepting personal responsibility for one’s own actions. The rights of the community must be placed above the rights of criminals. Prisoners should work and pay restitution to their victims; the Supreme Court ruling that profits for books written in prison should be overruled so that the proceeds go the victims of the criminals writing them. VI. Recommendations Our recommendations on crime and the criminal justice system are as follows: 1) Legalize drugs. Experience with drug enforcement shows that prohibition of recreational drugs drives up prices, stimulates illegal activity, has only a moderate negative effect on consumption and imposes unacceptable costs in terms of high crime, expansion of prison populations and deterioration of relations with the foreign countries that supply the outlawed product. A better idea for currently illegal drugs would be to do what we do with tobacco and alcohol-- substantial tax rates, monitor their distribution and restrictions on sales to minors. With its easy access to low cost or no cost drugs, legalization would cut drug related crime because impoverished addicts would no longer have to rob and steal to support their habits. Legalizing marijuana could generate substantial revenue through taxation, like alcohol and tobacco. Many commissions have concluded that marijuana should not be subject to criminal sanctions since smoking did not cause mental abnormalities or stimulate criminal behavior. One certainty about legalization, decriminalization is that it will relieve court dockets and prisons now overflowing with drug cases. Since forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the youth, its likely usage will decrease. If drugs were legally available, prices would drop drastically as also would be the possibility of getting impure doses. The individual addict would be far better off if drugs were legalized--less cost and more quality. Addicts are usually driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs and they become criminals themselves to finance the habit. They risk constant danger of death and disease. One-third to one-half of all violent and property crimes in the United States is committed either by drug addicts engaged in crime to finance their habit or by conflicts among competing groups of drug pushers or in the course of the importation or distribution of drugs. Corruption among public officials and police would also drop. The desire to legalize marijuana and other drugs does not depend on whether they are harmful or not. However much harm drugs do to those who use them, prohibiting their use does even more harm both to users of drugs and to the rest of us. Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and improve law enforcement. As long as large sums of money are involved, it is literally impossible to stop the drug trafficking or to make a serious reduction in its scope. 2) Punishment does not deter crime if the punishment is delayed long enough, watered down enough, and applied only in a small percentage of the cases in which it is applicable. Opponents of the death penalty say it does not deter crime. The case of John Wayne Gacy shows why they may be right. Fourteen years after being convicted, countless appeals, books, 900 numbers, etc., he finally received his just penalty. If all this happened to the worse serial killer in the nation’s history, other criminals will take the chance, believing they will beat the odds; and chances are, in this day and age, they will be right. Credibility must exist to be effective. It is indeed ineffective to simply enact a death penalty without enforcing it. Large deterrent effects do exist when death penalties are enforced. Murder rates in the U.S. were going down for decades before the criminal justice system was revolutionized by judges in the 60s. East Palo Alto, was once the murder capital of the country in terms of its murder rate per capita; now the rate is down as are other violent crimes, it put more cops on the streets and more criminals behind bars. We must be credible. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, more usage of it and quicker usage should be performed. It would help cut back on crime as credible usage of punishment would certainly act as a deterrent. In fact, televised scenes of the death of a criminal might do wonders for crime. Repeat offenders should be punished quickly. Most of the crimes come from repeat offenders. First time offenders should be given probation, counseling, and special circumstances like boot camp for some. But those repeat offenders should be given little leniency. Once it becomes clear that the criminal system is serious, that you can’t get away with anything, and that it will throw the book at you, you have achieved credibility which will act as a deterrent to crime. 3) Prison should be used for criminals convicted of violent crimes. Besides the current categories of felonies and misdemeanors, crimes should be further divided between violent and non-violent. Violent crimes should have mandated sentences. Those otherwise should have to undergo strict counseling, probations, with the intent of repaying their victims. Only probation jumping and repeat offenders should be sent to prisons. This will free up prison space for serious violent criminal and repeat offenders. Prison should be oriented towards rehabilitation, therapy, education, and job training. Punishment is necessary but the point must be to prepare the criminal for the outside world in a reformed manner. Prisons should be for punishment. No television, no amenities, etc. Texas has already begun a program similar to this: a medium security, no frills facility that is more a dormitory than a prison (to house unarmed thieves and drug abusers) and a hard-core traditional prison for violent criminals, murderers, armed robbers, rapists, child molesters. Violent criminals now have to serve a minimum of 50 percent of presecribed time, half their sentence with no time off for good behavior. In essence the state is getting tougher on violent criminals and more lenient on others, to protect society against the worst criminals. Violent crimes in Texas has decreased considerably since the act was passed. The United States is the only country in the world that allows jury trials in a civil case. This should be eliminated as it would free up considerable legal resources that could then be devoted to criminal investigations. 4) Certain cardinal rules of justices—double jeopardy, self incrimination— need to be rethought as to their validity. The concept of Status of Limitations says that after so many years we should not be holding a man responsible for what he did and he is exempt from being tried and punished for the crime. However, the victim could be jeopardized for the rest of their lives, impoverished, handicapped, scarred. The criminal that commits the robbery is excused from punishment after several years of because it is unfair to let him suffer or worry if he is going to be punished some time later or because there isn’t enough evidence over a period of time to punish him. But if there isn’t enough evidence you can’t indict him. So the indictment aspect will defend him from that. He should not be excused from the crime he committed for any number of years. If sufficient evidence appears later, he should be able to be tried for the crime. 5) Double jeopardy need be reviewed. if a man is found innocent he can not be tried again, must also be rethought as a sacrosanct legal doctrine. Why should it not be, if new evidence is found. Why shouldn’t he be tried again? They say it is unfair for a man to have to go through the procedure twice. If a guy created a crime where does the fairness enter into it. What about his victims? The current system of double jeopardy says a man cannot undergo trial for the same crime twice. This needs to be reviewed. What is the advantage of double jeopardy to the innocent person, it tends to protect the guilty. We recommend three verdicts be available: 1. Not Guilty, which would preclude the state from retrying the individual for the same crime (innocent), 2. Not Guilty due to limited evidence or not proven, in which the individual may be retried but only through the normal procedure of being re-indicted and going through another new trial, or 3. guilty. Not guilty, lack of evidence means they can be tried again if more evidence surfaces. It merely says that because we have to move this case through quickly we have not found enough evidence. If years later than they have to reindite him with new evidence and unless the evidence is new you can’t reindite him. So he is protected from any abusive attack on him. Because a grand jury doesn’t know him from a hole in the wall, if they don’t have enough new evidence they just won’t indict him and the District Attorney can’t do anything about it. The excuse is that while the District Attorney may not like this guy he keeps picking on him all the time that is ridiculous; the Grand Jury is not going to reindite the same guy a dozen times no matter what the D.A. says. So he is protected by the law as it is now. Double jeopardy should be based on what evidence is available. 6) Laws of evidence needs to be overhauled to help convict the criminal--if you find a police department that abuses the laws of evidence i.e., one that breaks into a man’s house and finds something that they don’t have a warrant for but is of criminal nature and it is illegal and the man is obviously guilty by the evidence why not punish the policeman don’t let the man go free because some policeman who has nothing to do with with this man commits a crime. The criminal should not be released and make a man innocent it should merely continue to prosecute the guilty person but also punish the man that did the illegal act so the police will not be encourage to breaking unlawfully. But why would you release a guilty person because a policeman made a mistake. There are many items in our justice system that today really encourage the criminal to evade justice. They help him out. Things like that are not relevant anymore Many of these are based on Old English law which at one point protected us from a very tyrannical government which is no longer true because we now have open trials we don’t have stark chambers anymore we have open trials and it is very difficult for anybody to be unfairly treated. So the system must balance itself to many innocent people. Another thing is that whenever any criminal situation the victim has to be there if he is alive to present his evidence but the accused has to be silent. What sense does that make. Another words you are putting the victim through all the rigors of the cross-examination but not the accused. But my main point that I don’t understand is why a man if he incriminates himself why this has to be wiped out. If he has a confession why do you have to warn him to keep quiet. If he is guilty let him talk. How do you protect an innocent man? When can an innocent man convict himself by talking too much. Why would you stop it is so ridiculous this Miranda Law to tell an accused you have the right to keep quiet. Why not say, tell us the truth. Don’t force it out of him but say, tell us what happened. And if he admits that he did it, he did it. Rules of evidence need be changed. If evidence is found, it should be allowable, regardless of the circumstances. If it is illegal, the policeman that does the illegal search should receive censor or punishment, but the accused should not be let off. Today if there is an administrative or justice oversight, the accused, even if confessed and overwhelmingly guilty, will be let off. It should not result in a guilty person being released. This is another area which has gone overboard in its policies. 7) Self-incrimination concept needs to be reexamined as well. The conventional answer is the harm it will do the individual, about the individual being unfairly treated. If he is innocent, why should one care. If they are not innocent, we want them to talk. Why do we have to warn individuals to keep silent because they might incriminate themselves. If they do, they are guilty, and that is what we want to find out. If they incriminate themselves and they are innocent, they are either crazy or protecting someone and either it comes out in the trial or they should be responsible enough to accept the consequences. Everybody think that this is the most firm concept of justice. A person should not incriminate himself. If a person is innocent how is he going to incriminate himself. If he is guilty why shouldn’t you give him an opportunity. In other words, we defend the criminals rights to the point that we must encourage him to keep quiet and not admit that he did something. We ask him to challenge the state to prove that he is guilty. Rather than say, why don’t you admit what you have done and take your punishment. No, that is not giving him his due process. That is ridiculous. Any admission or incrimination should be admissible as evidence. The entire point of the legal system is to deter criminals; if that is not possible, to find criminals, try them, and convict them to a punishment worthy of their crime. We must adhere to original purposes. 8) Our whole attitude about innocence and guilt must change. The classical line goes: I would rather see 9 guilty men go then 1 innocent man convicted. That is ridiculous. Let’s take it to the extreme. If no one gets convicted, than that guarantees no innocent man would ever get put in jail. Is that what we want? This may guarantee no innocent man in jail but it doesn’t do a heckuva lot about credible criminal justice. What about those 9 guilty men you let go to protect that one innocent man? Those 9 guilty men will go out and kill 100 other people why not let 1 innocent man get convicted. When you send men out to war they are innocent and they get killed live is like that you can’t make it totally fair and still survive. If a man happens to be innocent and gets convicted it’s a tragedy and it is to bad. His conviction of an innocent man pays for all these guilty people that are put in prison and all other innocent people are saved. If by one innocent man going to prison you save maybe hundreds of innocent people who are the victims of these criminals, then his false imprisonment is not in vain. Zero risk, once again, can not be achieved. A movement called jury nullification indicates jurors should vote their conscience in determining innocence or guilt, despite facts that provide the defendants beyond the doubt have broken the law. Afro Americans indicate this may be the easiest and fastest way to empower the black community and becomes the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate black outlaws. Jury nullification should be made illegal; any juror who adheres to the concept and clearly disregards the facts involved should be held in contempt of court. Any juror who has his or her mind already made up regarding the innocence or guilt of the defendant should be excused from jury duty. 9) If one does not appear at his own trial, he can be indicted for contempt. It does not serve any purpose of an innocent person. The Defense Attorney is an officer of the court and the intent is to provide a fair trial but also to determine guilt or innocence. The purpose should be to provide justice, to get a fair trial. If he is guilty, he is guilty. It should be illegal for the defense attorney to coach the accused, not to develop alibis or stories, or creative defenses to abscond him of his guilt. The purpose should be to determine the truth. Information provided to defense attorneys should not be confidential or privileged. 10) No more babying juveniles. A sixteen years old juvenile was found guilty of raping a four year old girl but had his record expunged. Juveniles should be tried as adults for violent crimes, regardless of the age. Anyone over the age of 10 should know the difference between right and wrong. Letting a murderer get off because he was ‘just’ sixteen, does not do justice to the victim. Try them as adults. Make it very clear what his crime and the punishment will be. 11) Victims’ Rights should be enhanced and conferred. Right now the court system is set up to provide a set of rights to the accused; meanwhile the victim or the victim’s family is neglected. For non-violent crimes, those found guilty must provide some payback to the victims, it may not totally compensate for their loss but it would be a start. We also need a Victims’ Bill of Rights. 12) We think that the area of justice we have perhaps gone to much to precedence without exploring whether the precedence was relevant to today’s times and some of them are already in the constitution and seem to be sacrosanct shouldn’t be and the constitution itself should not be sacrosanct. Certain elements are obviously are good there is no question about it and the motives were good but, are they relevant, are they sufficiently explicit, can they we used as an excuse for negativeness The Founders understood that and that is why we have the right to have amendments. There are countries where punishment is very severe and where there is very little crime. Singapore is one such country. The caning of an American citizen was widely castigated in the United States. However, it is fair assumption that that young man will tend the straight path the rest of his life. It is also a fair assumption that those contemplating graffiti in Singapore have credible reasons to think twice, three times, and then not do it. We do not see anything wrong with punishment if it helps evolve the personality and create discipline. After all, fifty years ago spanking was the accepted form of discipline (nowadays spanking may well end up with the parents being charged with child abuse, indicted, and their children being sent to foster homes). We would dare say discipline was more prompt and satisfactory then rather than now. Credibility is extremely important and must be reestablished in our justice system. Now we don’t want to over do that either but we do want to develop an equitable system that protects the victim more but does not mean in some cases toward the criminal because we are so concerned about the protecting the rights of people. We see nothing wrong with an occasionally putting innocent person in prison anymore than a occasionally or many time innocent people dying in war. If the justice system works well then the public begins to discover and accept the need for that kind of a system and there is an attitude of honesty. 13)How can we better fight crime? By building community ties. Programs such as Neighborhood Watch and National Night Out are effective vehicles for teaching citizens how to protect their homes, pass on safety skills to children and work cooperatively with local police departments. Law enforcement agencies report substantial decreases in crime due to citizens’ self help education and preventive efforts.Opposing media violence. Many TV shows are so detailed and graphic as to be obscene. One third of young male prisoners convicted of violent crime say they were consciously imitating techniques learned from television.Building healthy families. Overwhelming numbers of prisoners report growing up in homes where indifference or terror or both reigned. Childhood abuse increases the odds of future criminality by 40 percent.Rehabilitating criminals. Those inmates who have received two years of education have a rearrest rate of only 10 percent versus six to seven times as many on average.Encouraging moral behavior. 14) Parents should be responsible for their minor children and the children’s actions, both monetarily and morally. Just as fair, grown children should be responsible for their elder parents. Parents giving all their money to their children so as to claim poverty and be eligible for government assistance for nursing home care is not right. Children must be able to contribute according to their abilities. 15) Businesses should be granted similar rights as individuals as concerns search and seizure and self-incrimination. Only those industries considered closely regulated such as alcohol or firearms should be allowed inspection privileges without warrants. Companies and proprietors should be given the same self-incrimination rights (Miranda) as for individuals. One’s own records should not be allowed to be used against himself without his expressed written approval. 16)Jurors too have rights. We must not allow the privacy rights of jurors to be eliminated in pursuit of rights of the accused. The goal of jury selection in the nineties appears to be to make sure that a panel in no way reflects the views and expertise that might be found in a random cross section of the population (all too often, prospective jurors get bounced for knowing too much about the events leading up to the trial, unfortunately leading to juries selected of the ignorant, the apathetic, the unexperienced). It is not unusual for jurors in major criminal cases to be asked hundreds of questions (75 pages in the Simpson case, 45 pages for the trial of Reginald Denny’s attackers) many of them considered personal (forms often demand information about religion, political views, organizational membership, income; items which if they were on a job application would be deemed illegal). This lack of personal privacy can lead to the topsy finding that defendants often know more about jurors than jurors know about the defendants. Refusal to answer personal questions have led to contempt of court charges;If a juror refuses to answer, he or she can be fined and sentenced to jail time (In one case in February 1994, a potential juror was found in contempt of court, sentenced to three days in jail, and a $200 fine, a ruling upheld on appeal). Our legal system hauls jurors in by compulsory processes, forces them to cough up details of their lives they may not even tell a spouse, sends them packing for no apparent reason, and condemns many to week and month long circus trials. The system inflicts on those innocent bystanders the kind of treatment it would never tolerate from anyone else. Jury questionnaires should be forbidden. Jurors should also have the right to refuse to answer questions. The Sixth amendment guarantees a defendant’s right to trail by impartial jury, not impartial jurors. Each of twelve citizens brings personal experiences and knowledge into the jury box; their verdict is not merely the sum of twelve independent votes but the product of deliberation of the interaction between twelve sets of experiences and knowledge. The solution is simple: abolish peremptory challenges, as Britain has done. A random sample of twelve men and women picked from the pool would be selected for juries. We should also Allow non-unanimous verdicts(10-2 or 9-3 allowed in Oregon and Louisiana). or smaller juries (six person juries in criminal and civil cases as in Florida). Interactive jurors should be able to ask questions of the judge or the lawyers., submitting written questions. Note taking should be allowed. Set time limits for jurors and trials. The approach toward todays justice seems to be to make it as difficult as possible to convict anybody. We need to turn that around so as to return to the original intent: to provide those with a fair trial, to determine innocence or guilt, and to punish according to their crimes. We also must ask ourselves: shouldn’t our justice system be relevant to todays society? Home Page Preface & Introduction Chapter 1: Responsibility Chapter 2: Leadership Chapter 3: Government Chapter 4: Congress Chapter 5: Regulations and Bureaucracy Chapter 6: Defense Chapter 7: International Affairs Chapter 8: Crime and Justice Chapter 9: Civil rights Chapter 10: Economic Chapter 11: Education Chapter 12: Health Chapter 13: Planning and National Goals Conclusions