At fed / felony level, a commissary bonus might have to flex to cover expected length of guilty time, same for a "pay me for any private lawyer instead of overloaded public defender on indigent". Maybe there is a buy in price threshold that would result in significantly more trials than some marginally lesser price. You'd have to research that among pre / pending / current / post offenders. A similar fun scheme... Minor traffic tickets, like speed / equipment / heed traffic control / paper, may average $150, even if pleading not guilty just for sake of standing your day in court and losing for fun. These are essentially fixed cost fixed maximum penalty trivial offenses, so unlike fed / felony cases there is literally zero additional risk to pleading not guilty and losing, compared to pleading guilty. No matter the outcome, it's $150 or less. So a gift of $10M is 66k tickets worth of "full coverage" repayment regardless of outcome, or 33+k worth if also covering the average lost wages of the two half days it takes to arraign and have a laugh trial. That's enough to saturate even the largest of jurisdictions for years. Include education pamphlet about possible lower cost outcomes... dismissed lack of witness, negotiated down, jury nullification, etc and a well heeled $10M protester could have a lot of laughs. And reaches far more people with your message in their hands than the same $10M would at the fed level. Or blend it... $3M for traffic, $7M to any of those offenders that ever end up committing a fed later on. With unused fed funds pending are to be invested for growth, income peeled off and sent to the traffic / education fund, etc.

(Please put 2 blank lines between each paragraph - it's really hard to read your emails when they're all jammed up together... TIA :) On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 07:44:46AM +0000, jim bell wrote: ...

How?  Well, let's go to the statistics.  Last year, there were 77,152 new criminal defendants in the Federal criminal system, see   http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/28/federal-criminal-prosecution...   .   According to    https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/resea...  , "In fiscal year 2016 the vast majority of offenders (97.3%) pleaded guilty."  If that figure can be believed, then there were presumably no more than 2.8% x 77,152 criminal trials, or only 2160 trials.  Perhaps this statistic would surprise most people.  I think the average sentence is about 3 years.

The ability of the Federal criminal system to actually put on criminal trials is very limited.  There are only a limited number of courts, and judges, and prosecutors, and this system must share space and time with civil trials.  It is quite possible that it would be very difficult to put on much more than those 2160 trials.  That court space has to be shared with civil cases, as well.   All, or at least most of those people had a right to a jury trial.  If all, or most of those defendants were somehow motivated to demand such a trial, rather than plead guilty, havoc would ensue.

Many of us have had this thought over the years, and in some scenarios it could work - say if every single person receiving a "road toll ticket" for "driving on a public road which is being “lawfully” encumbered by a private corporation", then the quasi-criminal, "summary" jurisdiction, "justice" system would literally collapse under the weight, and road tolls would disappear in a month. Literally. This is quite literally the prisoner's dilemma problem in operation - and the sheeple are so f##king lame and uneducated, fearful and cowardly, that the few who do balk at the violation of our rights are buried by the weight of the system, rather than the system being buried by the weight of the collective voice of the people. This is today's reality here in Australia. Secondly, those who try to play the "I'll take a small stand for the greater good" side of the prisoner's dilemma "game", unless they stand on the foundation of righteousness and without requirement for money (i.e., conduct their own case), the legal bills are ultimately crippling - people DO fork over their homes to "legal professionals" in the face of their own fear. $10 million? $1 billion? Trivial amounts for "legal professionals" to soak up with their big, expensive legal teams for your "high profile human rights matter"s. And here's the second problem - the sytem bands together - the courts get their court costs too you see - and the more people there are being processed by the system, the more efficient the system shears the sheeple. I've seen this with my own eyes - look at any large municipal court complex with a dozen or four dozen courts, sit in one of them on a sitting day, and watch the frenzy of lawyers and the occasional self represented person get processed every hour, hour after hour - even "just" $180 court costs for every one of those 30 or more cases processed every hour, means $18,000, per hour!!! So, the more cases they have to process, the more the courts rake it in. And the more they rake it in, the more courts they build and the more judges/magistrates get employed. So, sorry to say, your proposed solution of "throw shekels at the problem" is absolutely doomed to failure.

Even if the number of trials could increase, say to about 3000, then the remainder, 77,152-3000, or 74,152, would have to walk free,

Absolutely not true. With a few adjournments, court cases can EASILY run out to 2 or 3 years in duration, and that's PLENTY of time to build new buildings, and there's abundant commercial real estate they could lease as well.

because the system could not possibly try them all.  The

I wish you were right, but sadly, that's where you're wrong.

limitation is not merely court space:  Trials are "expensive" in preparation, research, and evidence.

That goes for both sides though, and the system will absolutely buckle down and improve efficiency if we throw money at the system - kinda goes with the territory. The other side of the problem is the defendants - to run a trial well requires either lots of money and hope you don't get a (((compromised lawyer))), or do it yourself with a few mates and say goodbye to the next couple years of your life... I am well acquainted with the DIY approach, and it can be intense, is incredibly time consuming, and can drain your soul -- at the best of times -- I'd wish it on no one. Again, I wish it were otherwise.

And that led me to yet another "awfully wonderful, wonderfully awful" idea, to paraphrase Dr. Seuss and the Grinch.  What would motivate all of these people to demand a jury trial? Well, currently they are threatened with much more punishment if they plead not guilty and demand a trial, and lose.  Like a variant on the "Prisoner's dilemma", each one is forced to conclude that it is better to 'take the deal' rather than resist, and demand a trial.

What would change this system around?  Well, the lot of a prisoner in Federal prison is poor, if he has no money.  No money, no commissary.  No drinks, cookies, crackers, soups, candies, etc.  I know:  I spent 13 years in prison, time I shouldn't have spent.  Many enter prison broke.  What if they were offered, say, $3000 if they agreed to demand a jury trial, and thus forced the government to actually put them on trial, form a jury, and put on a trial.  If the government dropped the case, or reduced the charges to something that didn't require a trial, the defendant would get nothing.  

You're dreaming if you think the average lower-middle class Westerner is going to accept such a deal for 3000 bucks. It's just not going to happen. You did time, notwithstanding your ostensible charge of tax evasion, for publishing a rather anarchistic study paper, AIUI. You had already published this paper, so at the point the system came down on you, you were entrained into the process, basically having no choice to back out. A very folks around (and I have the honour to have met a few here in Oz) make their principled stand repeatedly, in the face of ever increasing threats and carried-through threats (ultimately jail) by the system, against them - THESE are the kind of folks that will make a stand regardless of any money involved.

If we assume that the Federal court system could put on 3,000 trials, one defendant per trial typically, the cost for such a project would be 3,000 x $3,000, or 9 million dollars.  It would be limited by the number of actual trials the Feds could put on each year, multiplied by the dollar amount that would have to be paid to motivate a defendant to demand a trial.

There may be some merit to the statistical game you propose - the threshold amount to convince x % of additional defendants to go all the way through trial. I'm sure that could be studied, and relatively precise amounts, and even more efficient game could be determined (certain folks, $1K might be enough, others, $25K might be required, work out the average to affect the required outcome...). I'm just not convinced that this would be effective at causing the system to grind to a halt.

Tell each new Federal defendant that if he pleads not guilty, and insists on a jury trial, and if he actually gets that trial, he will be paid the $3,000.

It's probably worth getting some up and coming "entitled class" uni post-doc wanna be to do some proper stats on this, to determine the proper amounts. Then a Foundation could be established - perhaps other foundations like the Lock Her Up Foundation would cross-contribute (??)...

Guilty or not guilty, it won't matter.  Have a trial, get the money, simple as that.   I am merely guessing what the 'proper' figure would be, in order to motivate such people adequately.  But if most people were already demanding a jury trial, and tens of thousands of fellow defendants were being freed due to lack of ability to give them trials,

This part of the plan is not quite adding up. I guess you could analyse the "latency to establish new physical courts" vs the "delays causing statute of limitations to kick in", BUT, this all sounds like an attempt to exploit a (potentially) massive legal loophole, which any insane parliament would simply legislate to "fix" - surely?? And without handling this almost-certain parliamentary fix from your national state mafia, is there any reason to not consider this problem doomed from the start?

it shouldn't take a lot of money to induce these people to 'stand in line', and demand a trial.  After all, they would know that if they didn't get the money, that would mean that they would have been freed.  And that's the goal, isn't it?  At least for the defendant, that is.  

Game/statistic theory can tell us also the amounts involved for the scenario where defendants get the money regardless (those getting off would be asked to voluntarily contribute back). It is kinda cool to think about this idea...

You can imagine what would happen.  The Feds would have to ration trials.  Only the most "worthy" defendants would get prosecuted.  And yes, there are definitely some worthy defendants. I met a few!!   But the total number of people who could enter the Federal prison system per year would drop from perhaps 75,000 per year to 3,000 per year.  This year, there are about 185,300 Federal prisoners.  Drop the input to 3,000 per year, and the total population could easily drop to 20,000, and perhaps to as low as 10,000, after a few years.  Dozens of prisons across the nation would have to close, maybe well over 100.  

It costs approximately $40,000 to feed and house a Federal prisoner.  Most of that money probably goes to prison staff salaries and supplies, and most of the rest goes to prison construction.  Drop the total Federal prison population from 185,000 to 15,000, and they will save about 170,000 multiplied by $40,000, or about $6.8 billion dollars per year.

Doesn't this sound like a worthy goal?

Yes, the goal is worthy, but the full picture is far from certain. The Feds would change the legislation - this would be an upper bound on one part of the possible effectiveness window for this idea. The courts themselves would expand to accomodate to some degree - this is another mitigating factor.

We may speculate about who would be motivated to fund such a project.  Give them the ability to donate anonymously, and they might act.

Jim this one is not controversial - right to full, fair and public trial is politically correct for many folks - most would want to publicize, not hide, their support for this. The problem is elsewhere though (see above).

There might arguably be 200,000 people per year who fear some sort of Federal prosecution.  A donation of $50 per year, average, would raise $10 million.  It would not take many tax evaders, resistors, or avoiders to foot the bill.  People who resented a prior prosecution would add up, as well.  

Evidently this type of game theory works for some scenarios - such as e.g. the train-ticket group (Australia? or was it Germany or somewhere?) where everyone pays in $10 a year, and the non-profit foundation pays all legal fees, and no one ever has to buy a ticket, since the court cases work out, at the group level, cheaper. So it certain scenarios the crowd-economics works out. But even there it's a "my cabal" vs "your cabal" situation, where what I think is really needed is education for humans to teach them how to tap into their sense of righteousness/ right and wrong/ principles and ethics, and to assist humans to build their will to engage in even minimal sufference for a well-planned and well-reasoned cause, a cause which the political parties would ultimately have to bow down to, because, put simply, it's the right thing to do...