Part of the premise of the criminal justice system is supposed to be that the system is designed to occasionally fail to punish the guilty if it protects the innocent. That’s often expressed as, “it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to prison.”

You might just have to accept that you can’t always be completely sure that someone’s internet usage is sanitized. Could they reoffend awaiting trial? Possibly. Same as letting an alleged mugger walk the streets until trial or an alleged rapist be around women. Innocent until proven guilty means that, as it stands right now until a verdict otherwise is returned, an innocent man and his family are having their right to use a very basic feature of modern existence, the internet, infringed upon.

It’s more efficient, certainly. But telling someone pretrial in 2023 they can’t use a computer isn’t realistic.

Oh totally. And they’re not even alleged to have done anything wrong.

The prosecutor will say “well they could have lived in a Four Seasons instead of with their father.” Prosecutors are seldom reasonable people.

Computers are remarkably efficient but at the dawn of the Gutenberg press, you could have made similar observations. For the first time with paper, it was possible to commit crimes in the privacy of your own home merely by writing things down and sending them to a publisher.

Absolutely.

In 1950, if you were told as a pretrial release condition, you weren’t allowed to use paper because your alleged crime involved a book, no one would have thought that reasonable. Today, devices are the equivalent of paper.

he chose to agree to be monitored and they chose to continue living with him” was uttered

That got me too.

“The alternative is that they could have rented a separate house while the breadwinner of the family was in jail. They agreed to it!”

Utterly absurd. I also think, especially for the 14 year old, that level of surveillance is itself a form of abuse.

Not to mention the fact that any reasonable person would say that its use constitutes a punishment in and of itself.

We need a standard for pretrial release where if any measure could, if taken in isolation, be considered punitive, prosecutors are not allowed to ask for it.

Prosecutors and judges really need a reminder of the concept of innocent until proven guilty.

The day her husband was released on bond, Hannah sat down with their kids and tried to explain how all of their devices were going to be monitored: The probation department would see anything they looked at on their phones and assume it was their father using the device. The constant surveillance had an immediate impact on the family, Hannah says.

And:

In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”

Any reasonable person would describe that as not just a punishment, but a pretty severe one.

And one that affects children. Having a teenager know that a person she never met, who she has no way to contact, is looking at her activity every minute isn’t just punishment in fact. It’s victimization.

Thus, I think we can conclude from this that the Monroe County, Indiana prosecutors office is victimizing children. Full stop. Time to make some arrests.

I think the DeVos family is probably doing just fine.

Part of Cory Doctorow’s point is that this pattern emerges with all kinds of companies, especially ones where investors are demanding an outrageous return on a hasty speculation.