According to your own post, one felony ought to be enough to lock someone away for life, "the cost of second chances is too high."
I doubt that there are more than a handful that fall into the category you describe.
Well, too bad for them, then!
This isn't to say that there aren't overzealous prosecutors, but that is a separate problem with known remedies. Overzealous prosecutors can send innocent people to prison for a long time without a three strikes law.
Here, you conflate the issue of excessively harsh sentences for minor crimes, with the issue of sending actually innocent people to prison.
The BATFE agent's statement you referenced is a joke.
It was said in all seriousness. Remember that this the same BATFE that jails people for writing "Y" and "N" on a federal form instead of "Yes" and "No" and that burns innocent women and children to death, after gassing them with a gas banned under the Geneva convention.
Your next point was that a person must memorize the statutory law of all 50 states, federal gov., protectorates, and D.C. to ensure they never commit a felony.
On the contrary, it was that a person has to memorize the federal law and those of one state in which he resides. Still, an impossible task.
Hmmm? Poppycock. You again exhibit the belief that our prisons are full of innocent citizens being rounded up on unimaginably exotic charges.
If they have broken the law, they aren't innocent, are they?
Your example of a felony possession charge for a cartridge in a felon's house is a bit humorous given the leeway given to most felons in this arena.
You are obviously unfamiliar with Project Exile, which the NRA fully supports, and which has sent a lot of dubiously harmful people to jail for mandatory minimum federal sentences.
In any event, I've found the Ten Commandments, and a small amount of research on transporting firearms to be quite sufficient for the last 40 years.
You are obviously not familiar with the case of the person whose plane was diverted to NJ, IIRC, either. He had a gun on board, it wasn't his fault the airline sent him there (it wasn't his destination) but he got slapped with several felonies, all at once. Too bad, I can hear you reply.
I also have a lot more faith in a jury nullifying a Star Chamber prosecution on technicalities than you do.
No technicalities here: that man was a criminal in the state of NJ, despite the absence of any intent or even control over his situation.
There are and always has been abuses of the law by those charged with executing it.
But that's just it, these aren't "abusive" prosecutions, they're letter-of-the-law prosecutions.
You appear to want to give criminals a pass because somewhere there may be a bad cop working with a bad prosecutor, with an inept defense attorney, and an asleep judge that just might be unfair.
False, I want to remove so many thousands of laws from the books that are more a tool of oppression than a means of protecting life, liberty, and property.
Right here I'll tell you that I've never bought into the line that it is better to let one thousand guilty men loose rather than jail one innocent man.
A revealing comment from you, at odds with the founding fathers of this country.
The flaw in this logic is that those thousand criminals do an incredible greater amount of harm to hundreds if not thousands of innocent people.
The flaw in your argument is that the destruction of liberty is a greater harm than the crimes committed by these released guilty people. Governments kill a lot more people than ordinary criminals do, and they use the law as their tool to do so.
We must do our best to give people a fair trial with ample defense in front of a jury. However, upon conviction we must believe that person to be guilty.
You forgot something: applying just laws.
We should not punish the convicted with the precaution that they might really be innocent.
That is not, and has never been, my position.
Finally, you want to imply that drug possession isn't really a crime, by challenging me with the victimless crime line. Who's hurt? Everyone. The user, the user's family, their friends, their neighbors, me, and you.
I'll ask my question again. How, specifically, are YOU hurt by someone possessing drugs?
I don't see a great deal of difference between the person that steals and the person that knowingly purchases stolen property.
Assuming the thief was a burglar and not a robber (that is, it was a non-violent crime) I don't either. But I do see a difference between both of these crimes, vs. murder, rape, assault, robbery, pedophilia, and kidnapping.
When a DEA agent is killed by a smuggler, the users financed it.
There you go again, bringing explicitly violent crimes into a discussion about drug possession. For the sake of argument, suppose the drug possessor grew or cooked his own, for his own use. Then there is no money changing hands, no smuggler ring supported, no DEA agents risked unless they want to bust down his own door, because he's growing a plant. How are YOU harmed by this?
When the cost of enforcing our common law is increased by users, it comes out of everyones pocket.
The fault for that is people like you, who vote for drug war funding, who vote for long sentences that will cost everyone even though you can't articulate how YOU were harmed.
If you want to legalize drugs, then push for that, but I'm not willing to ignore certain laws that are constitutionally valid because some people don't like them.
Curiously, it took a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, but not to ban pot, or heroin, or cocaine. I don't think the laws are Constitutional.
But I suspect that you would then worry that someone, somewhere might benefit from their labor.
That's not a concern, but profiting from labor of prisoners is something Red China does, and I'm not sure we should do it here, unless the ones who profit are the criminal's own victims. If The State profits from violations of law, it will be in The State's interest to criminalize as many things as possible. It is now openly admitted that seatbelt laws and speed limits are foremost about revenue generation, and only distantly (and dubiously) about public safety. But the wool is over enough people's eyes like yours, that such laws have strong support. Drug laws are in the same category, especially when the harm that illegal drug USE (not, e.g. gang killings over drug sale turf) bring, compared to tobacco and alcohol use.
I wonder if you are aware that people used to machine-gun speakeasies during The Prohibition, but that somehow stopped when Prohibition ended, which means that the criminal activity associated with alcohol at that time was more associated with prohibition, than with alcohol. The killings over drugs today are likewise.