{"id":27372,"date":"2024-06-27T09:27:16","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T16:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=27372"},"modified":"2024-06-28T11:08:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T18:08:46","slug":"cartoon-honest-miranda-warnings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=27372","title":{"rendered":"Cartoon: Honest Miranda Warnings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-27373\" src=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-590x593.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"593\" srcset=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-590x593.png 590w, https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-300x302.png 300w, https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-768x772.png 768w, https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system-940x945.png 940w, https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/miranda-warnings-rights-criminal-justice-system.png 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Honest Miranda Warnings  - Timelapse video of me drawing a comic\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/d40F6UsqKz0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>The U.S. justice system is completely awful, and most Americans have no idea. And it&#8217;s not just the cops. Our entire justice system is unfairly skewed in a myriad of ways, and it feels like there&#8217;s always some new terrible thing to discover.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, I only recently learned <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brennancenter.org\/our-work\/analysis-opinion\/americas-dystopian-incarceration-system-pay-stay-behind-bars\">about &#8220;pay to stay&#8221; laws<\/a>, laws that charge prisoners for every day they&#8217;re in prison. This serves to guarantee that after serving their sentences, prisoners will be badly in debt (and<a href=\"https:\/\/www.rutgers.edu\/news\/states-unfairly-burdening-incarcerated-people-pay-stay-fees\">\u00a0sometimes sued by the government<\/a>), making it even harder to restart life after prison. The exact details vary from state to state. In Connecticut, the charge can be as much as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcconnecticut.com\/news\/local\/at-249-per-day-prison-stays-leave-ex-inmates-deep-in-debt\/2860653\/\">$249 a day<\/a>. In Florida, the rate is &#8220;only&#8221; $50 a day &#8211; but convicts are charged for the entirety of their sentence, even when they&#8217;re released early for good behavior. For instance, Florida recently charged a woman<a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2024\/04\/24\/she-only-served-10-months-behind-bars-florida-still-slapped-her-with-a-127000-bill\/\">\u00a0$127,000 for a ten-month prison stay<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s some good media out there &#8211; warning, &#8220;good&#8221; in this context means enraging &#8211; countering the &#8220;greatest justice system in the world&#8221; narrative. I&#8217;ll recommend two of them here: If you like podcasts, I highly recommend <a href=\"https:\/\/serialpodcast.org\/season-three\">Serial season three<\/a>, which takes a detailed look at the nitty gritty of how &#8220;ordinary&#8221; crimes are processed by our system, humanizing the people involved at every level.<\/p>\n<p>And for prose, <a href=\"https:\/\/radleybalko.substack.com\/\">subscribe to Radley Balko<\/a>, a reporter who has spent years covering the deficiencies of the justice system with well-written intelligent analysis. Balko&#8217;s ongoing <a href=\"https:\/\/radleybalko.substack.com\/p\/the-perpetual-crisis-in-indigent\">series on the state of public defense<\/a>\u00a0directly inspired this cartoon.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Regarding panel two: The pressure on all defendants, regardless of guilt, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2023\/02\/22\/1158356619\/plea-bargains-criminal-cases-justice\">to accept a plea bargain<\/a>\u00a0is enormous.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In any given year, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain \u2014 a practice that prizes efficiency over fairness and innocence, according to a new report from the American Bar Association.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Regarding panel three: I&#8217;m pretty sure that it&#8217;s unrealistic to show a DA visiting a prisoner like this. Call it artistic license; I wanted to show them both in the same panel, and I wanted the setting to show the protagonist having moved further inside the carceral system with every successive panel.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This cartoon has four panels, each panel showing a different scene. A caption under the cartoon says HONEST MIRANDA WARNINGS.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PANEL 1<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>On a litter-covered city sidewalk, a cop is pushing a prisoner. The prisoner, a young Black man wearing an orange t-shirt with a cartoon cat on it, has his hands handcuffed behind his back.<\/p>\n<p>COP: You have the right to remain silent. I have the right to brutalize or kill you, and even if there&#8217;s a video I&#8217;ll probably get away with it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PANEL 2<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We are in a tiny windowless room, where the arrested guy from panel one is sitting at a table, opposite a balding man wearing a suit. The arrested guy listens with a blank, somewhat surprised expression while the suit-wearing man talks to him, one palm held open in a &#8220;let me explain this&#8221; gesture.<\/p>\n<p>SUIT GUY: You have the right to be provided with an insanely overworked public defender like me. I won&#8217;t have time or resources to defend you as well as I&#8217;d like, and I&#8217;ll tell you to take a plea bargain even if you&#8217;re innocent.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PANEL 3<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re in a prison visiting area, the kind with a sheet of glass between prisoners and visitors. The same young man is on the prisoner&#8217;s side of the glass. On the visiting side of the glass is a woman with her black hair in a bun, wearing a business jacket over a black blouse and blue pinstriped pants. She&#8217;s pointing at the prisoner, and grinning as she talks.<\/p>\n<p>WOMAN: As your prosecutor I have the right to lie in court to withhold key evidence, and basically to do everything I can to destroy you while I remain totally unaccountable.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PANEL 4<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re in a prison cell. There are two prisoners here, our main character, who is still looking stunned, and his cellmate, a bald man whose arm and neck are covered with tattoos. The cellmate is lying with his eyes closed on the lower bunk of a bunk bed, and speaking. The main character is sitting on a plastic chair.<\/p>\n<p>CELLMATE: We&#8217;ve got the right to be beaten by other prisoners and by the guards. We&#8217;ve got the right to be charged $50 a day for this crap.<\/p>\n<p>MAIN CHARACTER (thought): Sometimes I want fewer rights.<\/p>\n<p><strong>CHICKEN FAT WATCH<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Chicken fat&#8221; is an outdated cartoonists&#8217; expression for unimportant but hopefully amusing little gags and references in the art. Lots of chicken fat in this one, for some reason.<\/p>\n<p>PANEL 1<\/p>\n<p>On the main character&#8217;s t-shirt is a picture of Jiji, the cat from Kiki&#8217;s Delivery Service.<\/p>\n<p>The cop&#8217;s tattoo shows a tic-tac-toe game in progress. &#8220;O&#8221; is a terrible player and &#8220;X&#8221; is guaranteed to win.<\/p>\n<p>Graffiti on the wall behind them says &#8220;Barry was here.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A newspaper page lying on the sidewalk says &#8220;Local News: Litter Bug Drops Paper.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Other little scraps of paper say &#8220;Don&#8217;t read this&#8221; and &#8220;or this.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a single glove lying on the sidewalk. That&#8217;s not much of a gag, it&#8217;s just that I always see single gloves &#8211; or worse, single shoes! &#8211; lying on the ground and wonder how that came about.<\/p>\n<p>PANEL 2<\/p>\n<p>A sheet of paper the lawyer brought with him has the heading &#8220;Blah Blah&#8221; at the top.<\/p>\n<p>The main character is wearing the same t-shirt, but the character on the shirt is now a different Studio Ghibli creature &#8211; a susuwatari from &#8220;My Neighbor Totoro.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>PANEL 3<\/p>\n<p>A sign on the &#8220;visitors&#8221; side of the glass partition says &#8220;do not give prisoners cigarettes porn or hope.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>PANEL 4<\/p>\n<p>Four books are stacked on a wall shelf. Their spines say &#8220;Snoopy&#8221; &#8220;Charlie&#8221; &#8220;Lucy&#8221; and &#8220;Linus.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A poster on the wall behind the bunk bed shows an angry\/determined looking superhero flying through the air in the classic Superman flying pose. The caption above the hero says &#8220;Super Hero Film Franchise.&#8221; The smaller caption below the hero says &#8220;The only kind of story anyone needs!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A poster on a different wall shows Andy and Ellis from the movie &#8220;The Shawshank Redemption.&#8221; The large caption above them says &#8220;Please Don&#8217;t Move Poster.&#8221; The smaller lower caption says &#8220;There&#8217;s no hidden escape tunnel honest.&#8221; (The poster is <em>obviously<\/em>\u00a0hiding a tunnel, we can see the sides of the tunnel where it&#8217;s wider than the poster.)<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/106648528\">Honest Miranda Warnings | Patreon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. justice system is completely awful, and most Americans have no idea. And it&#8217;s not just the cops. Our entire justice system is unfairly skewed in a myriad of ways, and it feels like there&#8217;s always some new terrible &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=27372\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,149,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics","category-police-brutality","category-prisons-and-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27374,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27372\/revisions\/27374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}