Sandra Day O'Connor
It does a lot of things right. We're fortunate here because we do have a very strong right to jury trial. And if you have a fairly selected jury, I think it's a great assurance to the defendant, if the defendant decides to go to trial, that it can be heard in an appropriate manner. So you can't, I think, criticize that too much. there been a lot of cases dealing with exclusion, for instance of African Americans from juries when there is an African American on trial. And I think the courts have dealt pretty well with that. And I've tried to prevent that from happening. So I think that works quite well. And that would be the major thing, but we have a decent appellate system in the United States. And criminal defendants who are convicted have an opportunity to appeal if they're convicted, and State court through the state court system. And then they still have a right for some kind of review and the federal courts after all, that's over. So that's pretty impressive. If you review it comparatively with other nations,
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Sandra Day O'Connor
You know, that's, that's important, because what's happening nationwide and through the states initially, and then also the federal government is just start enacting mandatory minimum sentences. I used to be a trial judge in the state of Arizona. And when I had a felony case, my jurisdiction gave me the right to punish the defendant if it were a guilty verdict, with anything from probation to life imprisonment. Well, that changed and starting about 1980s legislatures began enacting mandatory minimum sentencing. And they did it. Initially in drug cases, they were upset about drug use. And they thought, aha, the thing to do is to make sure that anybody caught with drugs that could be sold out to get 20 years minimum in prison, no excuse, no difference. Well, it has resulted in these huge numbers of people in prison. If you compare the percentage of our citizens who are in prison today, with those of other Western nations, I mean, we lead by 80% or more. It's just staggering
Unknown Speaker
It's something like one in 100.
Sandra Day O'Connor
Yeah, well, it's amazing. And these are primarily drug cases. These tend not to be violent crimes, but they're crimes of some kind of drugs that might be for sale. I mean, that's predominantly it. And we just have to make a decision in this country. Whether we want to continue that pattern or not? Other nations are not doing it. And I don't advocate making drug use legal. But I do advocate examining our system to see if we need these long mandatory minimum sentences.
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Host
It certainly is a political, it became a tremendous political cause that lots of people ran on, on on reducing crime–
Sandra Day O'Connor
Get tough on crime, and particularly drug crime. Interestingly, today, many states have big deficits between income and their budgets and expenses. And part of that expense is running prisons. And now we're seeing a little pressure on the other side to try to reduce the expenses of prisons, which might mean not having as many people in prison, and in some cases were reading, it means going from three meals a day to do. I don't know what we're going to But anyway, people are beginning to look at it.
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Sandra Day O'Connor
There's a shocking lack of rehabilitation efforts these days, in prisons, with criminals, particularly those serving long terms.
Host
Why is that?
Sandra Day O'Connor
I don't know. It's, it's expensive to do. And I think many states think they don't get a good return on their money anyway, because the statistics on people who get out and commit crimes, again are not encouraging. But if you don't do any rehabilitation while they're there, of course, the statistics are apt to be higher. And I think prisons in other countries and Western nations are trying to do much more than we are in terms of rehabilitation. We need to work on it.
Host
Let me ask you about this question of money. One of the one of the huge contributing factors to concerns about the justice system is the is the relative levels of incarceration of minority people to to white people. What about money? is raised more important than money. Is money more important?
Sandra Day O'Connor
I don't understand your question.
Host
Well, if you I assume that if you are if you have the money, you can afford a better lawyer. You can afford investigators.
Sandra Day O'Connor
Well, maybe, maybe not. I don't think you're talking about a lot of people have high income levels, who are getting away with something. We saw one yesterday who just got 150 years for heaven's sakes. So I, you know, I don't think that's the argument at all. I think the main thing is whether we're going to do some rehabilitation, whether we're We're going to stop this long term mandatory minimum sentencing. And whether we're going to change what we do in the area of drug offenses a little bit.
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Sandra Day O'Connor
Well, we have a pretty good public defender system and not all nations have that. I think that's one of the positives is that in this nation, we've established public defenders in every jurisdiction. And these are highly qualified people. For the most part, let me tell you an experiment I'd like to see tried in this area. I'd like to see some jurisdiction, which pays both for public prosecutors, they pay the bill for that, and they pay the bill for public defenders. Have those people change roles every five years and the public prosecutors become a public defender and vice versa. Believe me, it would work!