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Everybody’s fed up with crime and criminals getting off easy, and I think I’ve discovered the reason.

This country was founded by men who deliberately gave criminal defendants all sorts of rights, which kick in, believe it or not, from the moment someone is arrested.

I know – seems crazy – but, for example, from the moment the cops lay hands on you, you have a right to privacy. They can’t search you unless they can show in court they had a good reason to believe you were committing a crime.

If they can’t, none of the evidence they find can be used, period. Right there, that’s more privacy than innocent people get from Google!

You also have a right not to say anything. Even if you were caught with a stolen TV under your sweatshirt and bragged about it on Twitter, you can pretend you have no idea how it got there.

You also have the right to hire a lawyer who has to defend you even if he knows you’re guilty.

He can’t lie for you – that would be an ethical breach – but he has to do everything he can, short of lying, to convince the jury there’s not enough evidence to convict you. He can even have you dress your guilty self to look like a choir boy in court.

And if you can’t afford an attorney, you get a free one!

But the best thing is that your fate is up to 12 ordinary people. If your attorney can get them to like you, you go free.

If they do find you guilty, the judge can’t just send you to the gulag – the Eighth Amendment requires proportionate sentences as well as basic human rights.

So at your sentencing, if your attorney can convince a judge that you’re sorry and you’re ready to change your ways, you could be right back stealing TVs after a few months of free lodging and modest meals.

This is the system the Founding Fathers gave us, and I can sense that many of you have become fed up with our soft-on-crime Founding Fathers. I’ll bet many of you see then as the Founding Feathers since they’re so soft on crime.

But those men were conservatives. They did not trust government. They were so conservative that they didn’t even trust the government they had just created! So, they set up a system on the principle that it is better to let a guilty person go free than to lock up the innocent.

Yet even with all those protections, we know that innocent people do get locked up. So, I wrote this commentary to remind myself that as much as I want to get tough on crime, can I trust the government to get it right? Or should I think like the founders and make sure that when it comes to taking someone’s freedom, government must be limited?

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