Tiered justice system

In December 2012 HSBC admitted to laundering money for Mexican and Colombia drug cartels. The bank was fined $1.9 billion (5 days of revenues) and not a single person went to jail.  On the other side of the drug trade, you have the story of Anthony Smelley: 

Early on a morning in January 2009, Smelley, who is 22, was pulled over while driving along I-70 in Putnam County, Indiana. Months earlier, he'd been in a car accident and won a $50,000 settlement. He states in court documents that he had taken around $17,500 with him that January day en route from his home in Detroit to St. Louis, to buy a new car for his aunt. 
Smelley was pulled over for making an unsafe lane change and driving with an obscured license plate. He was also driving with an expired driver's license. His traffic stop should have ended with citations for those infractions. Instead, the police officer asked Smelley to get out of the car and patted him down, finding the cash. The officer then called in a K-9 unit for a sniff search of Smelley's car for drugs. The dog alerted twice. Smelley and two passengers were arrested, and the police seized Smelley's money. 
A subsequent hand search of Smelley's car turned up no illicit drugs, and no criminal charges were ever filed against Smelley or his passengers. Smelley produced a letter from a Detroit law firm confirming he had been awarded the $50,000 from the accident. That didn't matter. Putnam County has since held Smelley's money for more than a year. The prosecuting attorney said, “We can seize money if we can show that it was intended for use in a drug transaction at a later date…”

So if bankers launder money for drug cartels, shareholders pay a fine but not a single banker is prosecuted for jail time or pays any fees. Meanwhile, Smelley’s money can be confiscated because there is a chance he may buy drugs in the future? For a long time I used to think the inequalities in the American legal system were noise in an otherwise beautiful system. But the more you read, the more you realize that we have three legal systems. The one for the middle of the country operates reasonably well and is the envy of the world. There is a second one for the rich and white collar criminals. And there is a third for the poor and blue-collar criminals. 

Here is another example of how the criminal justice system works if you're poor via stop and frisk in Miami Gardens, FL: 

Earl Sampson has worked for nearly three years at the 207th Street Quickstop, a convenience store that has become the epicenter for police stops. Earl, 28, says he’s been stopped more than 200 times by the Miami Gardens Police Department (MGPD). According to records obtained by Fusion, MGPD stopped him and filed a field contact report 181 times. In addition, Earl was arrested 111 times. Seventy-one of those arrests were for trespassing at his place of work. "They walked through the door, grabbed me and just take me out,” says Sampson. "I told them I work here and they said I don’t care.” Quickstop owner Alex Saleh says he was so appalled that he installed video surveillance cameras in his store - not to record crime but to record police misconduct. In January 2012, Alex says he gave his employee, Earl Sampson, a place to live inside the store to protect him from the police. But even that was no deterrent..police are seen storming into Earl’s bedroom in the back of the store. 

Matt Taibbi contrasts the top and bottom tiers of our judicial/legal system in greater detail in his book American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap and I highly recommend reading his book. Learning about our vastly different tiers of our justice system is heartbreaking and infuriating. And as economic inequality rises, the tiered nature of justice in America could increasingly define us.