Kafka Excerpts, Elite Plus Schools, and Guns! Guns! Guns!

I. Kafka Excerpts
p. 81 - " 'Charge stacking' vastly increases the prosecutor's power in plea bargaining: the defendant faces very long consecutive sentences and a sometimes confusing trial where there are so many counts that a conviction on at least one of them is likely." "Because of the phenomenal growth in the number of offenses, even professors and practicing attorneys who have spent most of their careers wrestling with the intricacies of the criminal law are familiar with only a fraction of the statutes to which we are subject." "If knowledge of the criminal law consists in the ability to make reliable forecasts about what conduct will be punished, it follows that no one knows the law." [1]

p. 85 - "About 90 million living Americans have used an illicit drug, an activity for which many could have been sent to prison if detected and prosecuted. Even occupants of our highest offices have engaged in felonious  drug use... Second, astronomical numbers of young adults have engaged in music piracy. According to some estimates, 52 percent of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 21 commit this crime by illegally downloading approximately 3.6 billion songs each month..."

"The ownership of offshore Internet casinos that do business in the United States includes many of the most prestigious investment firms in the world: Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Golden Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others. Only prosecutable discretion prevents  criminal liability from extending to the highest reaches of mainstream society."

"Perhaps over 70% of living adult Americans have committed an imprisonable offense at some point in their life." "We are steadily moving to a world in which the law on the books makes everyone a felon." "If present trends continue, nearly one in 15 Americans born in 2001 will serve some time in n prison during their lifetimes... One in three black men, one in seven Hispanic men, and one in 17 white men."

p. 88 - In place of an earlier order in which criminal process involved many jury trials, and locally elected prosecutors responsive to poor and working class constituencies, we created prosecutors' offices characterized by 'bureaucratic detachment' "... "The consequences were poor crime control, rapidly changing punishment practices, and massive inequality. " 

p. 90 - "The increasingly lengthy sentences in our criminal codes together with the triumph of plea bargaining has led us to our shocking levels of imprisonment."

II. Elite Plus Schools
"In recent years, the Elite Plus' colleges have enrolled more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom half. They devote vast resources to educating these already privileged students. The most selective schools spend  almost eight times as much per student as the least selective ones, according to one  estimate." [2]

"Four fifths of the partners at the most profitable law firms in America graduated from the top five law schools. Elite schooling has become the dynastic technology of choice for the 1%." Education must become less hierarchical and less meritorious." "The shares of Americans age 25 to 29 to get a B.A. nearly quadrupled between 1940 and 1980, but the rate of growth then slowed dramatically and has now stalled."

III. Guns! Guns! Guns!
There are 393 million firearms in the United States, a statistic so staggering that it is necessary to render it in simple terms. For every 100 Americans -- regardless of age, criminal history, mental health, or physical ability -- there are 120 weapons. Last year nearly 40,000 people died in gun-related violence, two thirds of them from suicide." [3]

ADDENDUMS:
*A federal judge dismisses Trump's law suit seeking to bock the Manhattan district attorney from obtaining his  tax returns.
*President Trump has called for Mitt Romney's impeachment.
*In 2017, Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to intervene in the prosecution of a Turkish-Iranian gold dealer who was represented by Rudolph W. Giuliani.
*Sen.Lindsey Graham has called Trump's decision on Syria the "biggest blunder of his presidency."

Footnotes:
[1] Robert P. Burns, "Kafka's Law," University of Chicago Press, 2014.

[2] Daniel Markovits, "Less Elite, More Equal," TIME, September 30, 2019.

[3] Laila Salami, "Our Best Shot," The Nation, September 30, 2019.