Would you enjoy being stuck in jail, with no way to get out, and without being officially convicted? For a year, two years, even three years of your life that you can never get back? Would you enjoy knowing, that despite all of the effort our founding fathers put into making a fair court system, the government is not seeing you as “innocent until proven guilty.” What’s even worse is that this is happening in, “the land of the ‘free’.”

            New Jersey politicians are trying to pass an amendment to “allow courts to order pretrial detention to a person in a criminal case.” They want to keep people safe, but in the process they violate the 5^th Amendment to the US Constitution. The amendment states, “No person shall…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

            This means that it is illegal to keep a person in jail without bail before he or she is convicted by a jury. Pretrial detention does just that. It deprives a person of his or her liberty, slowly ruining their spirit, their reputation, and their chance at success, without due process of law.

            On top of that this amendment is very vague. It allows courts to order pretrial detention to “dangerous individuals” who are considered a “threat to society.” Yet both of these terms are left undefined…

            English Jurist William Blackstone once said, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.” America has executed innocent people, whose innocence was only proven after they died. What price must we pay to keep our posterity both free and safe? Is safety more important than freedom? Maybe one day we will know, but today isn’t that day.