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This article brings up one of the biggest problems I have with our justice system. When someone is falsely suspected or accused of a crime, they typically have

This article brings up one of the biggest problems I have with our justice system. When someone is falsely suspected or accused of a crime, they typically have to hire a lawyer and take time off work and out of their lives. This can cost thousands of dollars that many people can't really afford to spend. The police or court may eventually say, "oops, our bad," but the accused typically has no way to recover what they spent on their own defense. The whole situation is asymmetric given that investigators, courts, and prosecution don't have to spend personal funds to conduct investigations and try people in court.

EarthIsHome 7y ago
It's because our justice system is an instrument of the wealthy. It works for them with little friction, and it doesn't work for most people without disrupting our lives, or even ruining them (e.g. bails and bonds that most people can't afford to pay).
barrkel 7y ago
There's also the fact that the courts are driven by narratives; the prosecution just needs a credible story to tell, and doesn't have much of an incentive to find out the truth - it's up to the defense to tell the counter-narrative. Over time, as more tools become available to find people with precise overlaps with a crime, the stronger the narrative is for innocent people (as well as the guilty). IMO a more inquisitorial approach which tests the counterfactual of each evidentiary point rather than relying solely on defense ought to hold up better in the future.
- hedora 7y ago
  I doubt better surveillance tools will lead to more accurate prosecutions unless individuals also have direct access to the tools. Police and prosecutors in the US are notorious for leaving out evidence that exonerates the accused, even though they are supposedly required to provide the defense with all evidence relevant to the case. Also, well-connected victims’ cases are investigated much more carefully than normal victims. For instance, some SFO luggage handlers were stealing stuff from bags. People repeatedly reported them to the police, but nothing happened until they stole from a retired cop. An investigation was launched and they were arrested the next week. Similarly (based on personal experience with multiple incidents in multiple cities with multiple victims), they normally won’t bother to pull location database records for successful burglaries, even if they have exact timestamps of the incident (up to and including video), even in remote areas in the middle of the night involving literal truckloads of loot (where the location records would be a slam dunk, and the evidence would take a while to dispose of).
sneak 7y ago
It's worse. They can blow up your infant children with explosives because they got the wrong house, and suffer no consequences: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acquitted-after-flash-bang-grenade-hurts-toddler-n479361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui... Policing in the US is entirely out of control.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  US police can rape women on the job and walk with a suspended sentence: https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2020/01/31/-/4625724002/ https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2020/01/31/-/46... That shapes the culture. It's kind of anti-Spiderman. With great powers comes no responsibility at all.
xyzal 7y ago
As an Eastern European with some experience with autocratic government I quite look up to the U.S. as to a champion of democratic culture, but among two major things that baffle me (healthcare being the other) is why there is such a high cost associated with litigation even for the innocent party. In continental Europe, the "loser pays" principle seems to hold quite well, while also having the benefit of discouraging people from frivolous lawsuits.
- notRobot 7y ago
  > I quite look up to the U.S. as to a champion of democratic culture It really isn't. Look towards Scandinavian countries for that.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    Or Finland.
  - Legogris 7y ago
    Scandinavian here. Keep looking.
    - gruez 7y ago
      What are the ills there?
      - notlukesky 7y ago
        Acceptance of torture: https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-ban-cia-rendition# https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-...
        srtjstjsj 7y ago
        > The United Nations’ ruling that Sweden violated the global torture ban which has nothing to do with democracy.
jeffdavis 7y ago
In theory, this is why there are stages with increasingly-high standards. Hearings, grand juries, etc. In practice it doesn't always hold up very well. Do you have an alternative suggestion? Would the government always pay for the entire defense? Or reimburse if the accused is acquitted? This is also why gun violence restraining orders are bad. Large costs to the defendent with no standards or hearing or even an accusation of a crime.
- runarberg 7y ago
  In most democracies if you loose a court case you have to pay all the legal fees, plus damages and reimbursements to the other party. This holds true in criminal or personal cases, and even when the loosing party is the government or the police.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > you have to pay all the legal fees "Reasonable fees". If You sue me, I win and my lawyer sends me a bill for a billion euros that I pass on to you, no judge will consider that valid. As for damages and reimbursements: hardly. If you arrest a highly paid consultant and keep him in jail during his trial, he's not getting paid his hourly fee * 24 * days in jail.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
>The whole situation is asymmetric given that investigators, courts, and prosecution don't have to spend personal funds to conduct investigations and try people in court. It's worse than that. Litigation is literally what puts bread on their tables. They are rewarded financially for inconveniencing the layperson and making them jump through the hoops they have built.
pragmaticalien8 7y ago
I would also add: Immediate judgement by people online who read headlines and make up their minds. The media will never report on dropped charges as much as they do an arrest. Stigma will live on via Google search forever, because you know "Free speech" and all.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  The media will never report on dropped charges as much as they do an arrest. They will do that from time to time, if you are wealthy and well-connected enough. We had a case like that at my institution, an attempted rape. Don't rely on the government for protection, arm up.
ta1234567890 7y ago
And this applies to the whole justice system, regardless if it's a criminal or civil issue. In civil cases this is used as leverage by wealthy people. The wealthy can sustain a legal battle for as long as they want. They know that if their opponent isn't as wealthy, they'll be forced to settle, even for an unreasonable amount, just because they won't be able to afford defending themselves properly. For reference, a decent civil attorney in a major city in California will charge $250-500/hour, which ends up being around $5k/month to defend pretty much any civil lawsuit. A lawsuit that goes to trial will take 18-24 months, so you'll end up paying $90-120k just in legal fees. There will also be $10-20k in additional court fees and other expenses, not to mention your time. At the end of the day, if you defend a civil lawsuit and you flawlessly "win" the case, after about 2 years of manufactured stress, you'll be down $100-150k. That's what it costs to prove you are innocent and walk away "free" (free to be sued again). Btw, in civil cases, if you cannot afford a lawyer, the system won't appoint one for you, you will have to defend yourself (which judges and lawyers hate, and will very much play against you in court). Also, even if you can represent yourself, the court fees won't necessarily be waived ($2-3k), and you'll have to fund your own discovery (which can be insanely expensive, depending on the case). Then if you are defending as a corporation (llc, c corp, etc), you must have a lawyer. So basically if someone knows that your company cannot afford to hire a lawyer, they can sue you and force you to pay up or go bankrupt - then during bankruptcy they can keep going after you personally, and even after bankruptcy they can sue you again.
- indymike 7y ago
  In civil cases this is used as leverage by wealthy people. The wealthy can sustain a legal battle for as long as they want. They know that if their opponent isn't as wealthy, they'll be forced to settle, even for an unreasonable amount, just because they won't be able to afford defending themselves properly. Hmm. Every civil case I've been involved with was decided not by relative wealth, but by the strength of the case. In every case, the less wealthy party won, and the wealthy party got stuck with legal fees. In many cases, the less wealthy person was represented by a lawyer who was paid mostly on contingency.
  - ta1234567890 7y ago
billfruit 7y ago
May be some kind of insurance product to protect and cover costs in such no-fault cases should cover it.
hypersoar 7y ago
My sister is a lawyer who works with poor clients with criminal cases (though not a defense attorney). She believes strongly that most people are better off with their public defender than with private council. I asked her if she could square this with the general perception that the criminal justice system is stacked for with wealthy, she answered that the, most of the time, the connections matter more than the actual money. There are a lot of bad private lawyers out there, and it's hard for most people to tell them apart from the good ones. For a lot of us here, if we suddenly need a lawyer, then we'll ask our friends and family to help us find a good one. But if you don't know anybody who knows anybody who knows a lawyer, what do you do? Look at online reviews? If I were freaked out about criminal charges, needed a lawyer now, and didn't have my connections, it'd be up to blind luck. That's the reality for most criminal defendants. They'll hire private council and think that because they're paying for it, it's better. But it's often not. For a typical defendant with an aggravated assault charge, a public defender has handled dozens of similar cases before. Moreover, they'll have done it with your judge and your prosecutor. A private lawyer probably won't have that. Granted, this probably holds a lot less for the HN comments section. I'll add that there is no right to defense council for civil cases. These can have consequences just as dire as a criminal case, as in immigration or eviction proceedings. An indigent defendant with no lawyer has a very poor chance. There's a movement to create this right [1]. The current Supreme Court, however, seems more likely to weaken Gideon v. Wainwright than expand it.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Federal public defenders have a very good reputation. State public defenders, less so. Mostly because many public defenders offices are deeply underfunded.
- irjustin 7y ago
  This is very insightful and makes a ton of sense. I'm not related to the company, but this is exactly what avvo.com is solving. I have known others to use it for traffic infractions all the way to criminal defence. In general they speak positively about the experience. I don't know any particular lawyer's connections, but I can see the reviews/self-reported-track records. But, this creates a new problem - gamification of reviews. But now that it's in the "reviews" space, I know how to at least manage that problem as opposed to something I know zero about such as judging a lawyer's relationships and effectiveness.
fluidcruft 7y ago
If companies want to collect and amass surveillance data for profit, they should be the ones providing compensation for abuses their data hording enables.
ta1234567890 7y ago
It also happens with taxes. Tax agencies target people and companies that don't have the means to defend themselves, because then they can collect on them. Whereas they usually stay away from wealthy/legally savvy individuals/companies, because the cost/benefit of going after them is not worth it. A few years ago there was a big push in California to go after food trucks. They were the perfect target, small businesses run by individuals or families with few resources or legal sophistication. At some point the media got involved, as well as some advocacy groups. The issue ended with the BOE (California's tax agency), changing the way food trucks had to calculate, report and collect their sales tax. However, many non-wealthy food truck owners ended up with very unfair personal tax liabilities in the thousands of dollars, which they might still be paying today. I was involved in defending one of these food trucks and putting together their case. They were being assed $60k in taxes and being proposed a payment plan that would have meant them paying a total of around $100k over the course of 10 years. In the end the liability was reassessed to $0. At the beginning of the dispute, every accountant and tax lawyer consulted said the tax liability was unavoidable. Tax agencies are scary.
HenryBemis 7y ago
> don't have to spend personal funds No, they spend taxpayers funds!
syshum 7y ago
One of the ways people have tried to solve this is with legislation that requires the public defenders office to be funded at the same level as the Prosecutors office. it will not eliminate the inequality, for sure, but it would be a step in the right direction and in some area's the public defenders get less than a dime for ever dollar the Prosecutors office receives in public funding

EarthIsHome 7y ago

It's because our justice system is an instrument of the wealthy. It works for them with little friction, and it doesn't work for most people without disrupting our lives, or even ruining them (e.g. bails and bonds that most people can't afford to pay).

barrkel 7y ago

There's also the fact that the courts are driven by narratives; the prosecution just needs a credible story to tell, and doesn't have much of an incentive to find out the truth - it's up to the defense to tell the counter-narrative. Over time, as more tools become available to find people with precise overlaps with a crime, the stronger the narrative is for innocent people (as well as the guilty). IMO a more inquisitorial approach which tests the counterfactual of each evidentiary point rather than relying solely on defense ought to hold up better in the future.

hedora 7y ago
I doubt better surveillance tools will lead to more accurate prosecutions unless individuals also have direct access to the tools. Police and prosecutors in the US are notorious for leaving out evidence that exonerates the accused, even though they are supposedly required to provide the defense with all evidence relevant to the case. Also, well-connected victims’ cases are investigated much more carefully than normal victims. For instance, some SFO luggage handlers were stealing stuff from bags. People repeatedly reported them to the police, but nothing happened until they stole from a retired cop. An investigation was launched and they were arrested the next week. Similarly (based on personal experience with multiple incidents in multiple cities with multiple victims), they normally won’t bother to pull location database records for successful burglaries, even if they have exact timestamps of the incident (up to and including video), even in remote areas in the middle of the night involving literal truckloads of loot (where the location records would be a slam dunk, and the evidence would take a while to dispose of).

sneak 7y ago

It's worse. They can blow up your infant children with explosives because they got the wrong house, and suffer no consequences: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acquitted-after-flash-bang-grenade-hurts-toddler-n479361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui... Policing in the US is entirely out of control.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
US police can rape women on the job and walk with a suspended sentence: https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2020/01/31/-/4625724002/ https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2020/01/31/-/46... That shapes the culture. It's kind of anti-Spiderman. With great powers comes no responsibility at all.

xyzal 7y ago

As an Eastern European with some experience with autocratic government I quite look up to the U.S. as to a champion of democratic culture, but among two major things that baffle me (healthcare being the other) is why there is such a high cost associated with litigation even for the innocent party. In continental Europe, the "loser pays" principle seems to hold quite well, while also having the benefit of discouraging people from frivolous lawsuits.

notRobot 7y ago
> I quite look up to the U.S. as to a champion of democratic culture It really isn't. Look towards Scandinavian countries for that.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Or Finland.
- Legogris 7y ago
  Scandinavian here. Keep looking.
  - gruez 7y ago
    What are the ills there?
    - notlukesky 7y ago
      Acceptance of torture: https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-ban-cia-rendition# https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-...
      - srtjstjsj 7y ago
        > The United Nations’ ruling that Sweden violated the global torture ban which has nothing to do with democracy.

jeffdavis 7y ago

In theory, this is why there are stages with increasingly-high standards. Hearings, grand juries, etc. In practice it doesn't always hold up very well. Do you have an alternative suggestion? Would the government always pay for the entire defense? Or reimburse if the accused is acquitted? This is also why gun violence restraining orders are bad. Large costs to the defendent with no standards or hearing or even an accusation of a crime.

runarberg 7y ago
In most democracies if you loose a court case you have to pay all the legal fees, plus damages and reimbursements to the other party. This holds true in criminal or personal cases, and even when the loosing party is the government or the police.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > you have to pay all the legal fees "Reasonable fees". If You sue me, I win and my lawyer sends me a bill for a billion euros that I pass on to you, no judge will consider that valid. As for damages and reimbursements: hardly. If you arrest a highly paid consultant and keep him in jail during his trial, he's not getting paid his hourly fee * 24 * days in jail.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

>The whole situation is asymmetric given that investigators, courts, and prosecution don't have to spend personal funds to conduct investigations and try people in court. It's worse than that. Litigation is literally what puts bread on their tables. They are rewarded financially for inconveniencing the layperson and making them jump through the hoops they have built.

pragmaticalien8 7y ago

I would also add: Immediate judgement by people online who read headlines and make up their minds. The media will never report on dropped charges as much as they do an arrest. Stigma will live on via Google search forever, because you know "Free speech" and all.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
The media will never report on dropped charges as much as they do an arrest. They will do that from time to time, if you are wealthy and well-connected enough. We had a case like that at my institution, an attempted rape. Don't rely on the government for protection, arm up.

ta1234567890 7y ago

And this applies to the whole justice system, regardless if it's a criminal or civil issue. In civil cases this is used as leverage by wealthy people. The wealthy can sustain a legal battle for as long as they want. They know that if their opponent isn't as wealthy, they'll be forced to settle, even for an unreasonable amount, just because they won't be able to afford defending themselves properly. For reference, a decent civil attorney in a major city in California will charge $250-500/hour, which ends up being around $5k/month to defend pretty much any civil lawsuit. A lawsuit that goes to trial will take 18-24 months, so you'll end up paying $90-120k just in legal fees. There will also be $10-20k in additional court fees and other expenses, not to mention your time. At the end of the day, if you defend a civil lawsuit and you flawlessly "win" the case, after about 2 years of manufactured stress, you'll be down $100-150k. That's what it costs to prove you are innocent and walk away "free" (free to be sued again). Btw, in civil cases, if you cannot afford a lawyer, the system won't appoint one for you, you will have to defend yourself (which judges and lawyers hate, and will very much play against you in court). Also, even if you can represent yourself, the court fees won't necessarily be waived ($2-3k), and you'll have to fund your own discovery (which can be insanely expensive, depending on the case). Then if you are defending as a corporation (llc, c corp, etc), you must have a lawyer. So basically if someone knows that your company cannot afford to hire a lawyer, they can sue you and force you to pay up or go bankrupt - then during bankruptcy they can keep going after you personally, and even after bankruptcy they can sue you again.

indymike 7y ago
In civil cases this is used as leverage by wealthy people. The wealthy can sustain a legal battle for as long as they want. They know that if their opponent isn't as wealthy, they'll be forced to settle, even for an unreasonable amount, just because they won't be able to afford defending themselves properly. Hmm. Every civil case I've been involved with was decided not by relative wealth, but by the strength of the case. In every case, the less wealthy party won, and the wealthy party got stuck with legal fees. In many cases, the less wealthy person was represented by a lawyer who was paid mostly on contingency.
- ta1234567890 7y ago

billfruit 7y ago

May be some kind of insurance product to protect and cover costs in such no-fault cases should cover it.

hypersoar 7y ago

My sister is a lawyer who works with poor clients with criminal cases (though not a defense attorney). She believes strongly that most people are better off with their public defender than with private council. I asked her if she could square this with the general perception that the criminal justice system is stacked for with wealthy, she answered that the, most of the time, the connections matter more than the actual money. There are a lot of bad private lawyers out there, and it's hard for most people to tell them apart from the good ones. For a lot of us here, if we suddenly need a lawyer, then we'll ask our friends and family to help us find a good one. But if you don't know anybody who knows anybody who knows a lawyer, what do you do? Look at online reviews? If I were freaked out about criminal charges, needed a lawyer now, and didn't have my connections, it'd be up to blind luck. That's the reality for most criminal defendants. They'll hire private council and think that because they're paying for it, it's better. But it's often not. For a typical defendant with an aggravated assault charge, a public defender has handled dozens of similar cases before. Moreover, they'll have done it with your judge and your prosecutor. A private lawyer probably won't have that. Granted, this probably holds a lot less for the HN comments section. I'll add that there is no right to defense council for civil cases. These can have consequences just as dire as a criminal case, as in immigration or eviction proceedings. An indigent defendant with no lawyer has a very poor chance. There's a movement to create this right [1]. The current Supreme Court, however, seems more likely to weaken Gideon v. Wainwright than expand it.

roywiggins 7y ago
Federal public defenders have a very good reputation. State public defenders, less so. Mostly because many public defenders offices are deeply underfunded.
irjustin 7y ago
This is very insightful and makes a ton of sense. I'm not related to the company, but this is exactly what avvo.com is solving. I have known others to use it for traffic infractions all the way to criminal defence. In general they speak positively about the experience. I don't know any particular lawyer's connections, but I can see the reviews/self-reported-track records. But, this creates a new problem - gamification of reviews. But now that it's in the "reviews" space, I know how to at least manage that problem as opposed to something I know zero about such as judging a lawyer's relationships and effectiveness.

fluidcruft 7y ago

If companies want to collect and amass surveillance data for profit, they should be the ones providing compensation for abuses their data hording enables.

ta1234567890 7y ago

It also happens with taxes. Tax agencies target people and companies that don't have the means to defend themselves, because then they can collect on them. Whereas they usually stay away from wealthy/legally savvy individuals/companies, because the cost/benefit of going after them is not worth it. A few years ago there was a big push in California to go after food trucks. They were the perfect target, small businesses run by individuals or families with few resources or legal sophistication. At some point the media got involved, as well as some advocacy groups. The issue ended with the BOE (California's tax agency), changing the way food trucks had to calculate, report and collect their sales tax. However, many non-wealthy food truck owners ended up with very unfair personal tax liabilities in the thousands of dollars, which they might still be paying today. I was involved in defending one of these food trucks and putting together their case. They were being assed $60k in taxes and being proposed a payment plan that would have meant them paying a total of around $100k over the course of 10 years. In the end the liability was reassessed to $0. At the beginning of the dispute, every accountant and tax lawyer consulted said the tax liability was unavoidable. Tax agencies are scary.

HenryBemis 7y ago

> don't have to spend personal funds No, they spend taxpayers funds!

syshum 7y ago

One of the ways people have tried to solve this is with legislation that requires the public defenders office to be funded at the same level as the Prosecutors office. it will not eliminate the inequality, for sure, but it would be a step in the right direction and in some area's the public defenders get less than a dime for ever dollar the Prosecutors office receives in public funding