Terry, people are let out on technicalities because the police screwed up and violated their (our) constitutional rights to due process, to protection from illegal search and seizure and self incrimination, and because either they could afford a good attorney or they lucked out and got a public defender who wasn't overworked, stupid, or jaded. Plea bargains happen because of overcrowded courts, overworked prosecutors, jammed jails. There are far more people in prisons who don't belong there than there are those on the street who should have been locked up. I was once in a jury panel for a trial of a black man who had been charged with burglary--he had been arrested for shoplifting in Lafayette, an upper middle class suburb, but was himself from Richmond, the old town of which consisted mainly of abandoned storefronts (this is California, of course). I was dismissed from the panel when I responded to voir-dire questioning that I was having difficulty with the concept of felonious intent to commit a misdemeanor. My assumption was--and is--that the defendant had been charged with a felony to scare him into accepting a plea bargain to avoid wasting time on a trial.

--seed(who can't understand why the questions of the song are addressed to "Mr. Lincoln" unless the idea is to call into question the end of slavery)