"Evan" wrote in message
...
On Jul 22, 2:46 pm, "Robert Green" wrote:


You must either have a judge or a lawyer in the family. The description is
spot on. The only quibble I have is that yes, you will get a free
attorney,
but like anything free, you get what you pay for. Apparently, the Supreme
Court considers even a sleeping legal aid attorney "adequate counsel"

Nope... No judge, no lawyer... Just four years of criminal justice
classes in college...

More than most.

You are quibbling over those 10% of cases that actually go to trial
then, as 90% of cases are either dropped/dismissed or plea bargained out...

Yes, but, consider who advises those people to plead out. PDs or Legal Aid.
Imagine this. You are arrested for a murder *you* know you didn't do (play
along all you "they wouldn't arrest them if they weren't guilty" adherents).
You know now the system is capable of pretty serious errors. You're in
shock.

First they tell you that you could get 20 to life for the crime and let that
sink in. Then, your PD says instead of 20 years, they are offering you 1
year that's really going to be only six months due to overcrowding (which
they explain in detail to you). You have no money for a good attorney and
your Legal Aid lawyer has no resources to mount a trial should you opt to
not take the deal. Now, you are told about the maximum risk you face should
you go to trial in the same detail they explained the minimum to you.
They'll tell you that doing hard time is nothing like the county lockup
you've seen so far. Now there will be plenty of rightfully guilty people
taking those pleas and it's rare that they get 1st degree murder arrests
wrong, but it's happened and will happen again. The Atlanta bomber and the
Anthrax mailer initial suspects turned out to be innocent. Pretty high
profile errors, indeed.

People that already have a record aren't much punished by re-arrests. It's
the first arrest and conviction that does damage and that's something Legal
Aid does not explain well to its clients overall. That won't change unless
lawyers, in exchange for their licenses to steal, have to do a mandatory 2
year stint as public defenders before they are granted their full license to
practice. Imagine, all lawyers having to deal with the salt of the earth
before moving on to Saville Row suits, Mercedes and $600 an hour billing
rates. Ha, imagine world peace. Just as likely.

Arrest is a binary system - once you have a rap sheet, you're tainted goods.
Not enough parents explain to their kids how important it is to avoid
getting arrested for any reason. No good comes of it, but much bad can.
When I studied crim, I believe the stats were 1/2 of all American males
would be arrested at least once by age 35. For minorities it soared to
something like 2/3s, but much of that is attributable to other factors,
especially poverty.

Anyway, the moments between when a friend or family member is "picked up"
and when they are legally placed under arrest are as important to your legal
health as is a good *nearby* ER is to your medical health when you're having
a stroke (time=brain). The first few hours is when it's time to have a
well-known, local heavyweight lawyer weigh in on your side. Getting
arrested for something you didn't do is a pretty traumatic experience. A
federal jury awarded that "person of interest" $5.8 mil in the anthrax case.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun...n/na-anthrax28

Even the FBI gets it wrong, sometimes.

Anyone out there who's been falsely arrested knows that it's a psychic
earthquake. All our family members carry cards with names of multiple,
locally recognizable attorneys and instructions to call them before any
questioning takes place and to physically hand the card to an investigator
during an attempt at questioning.

Some diehards will laugh but it's what you do first that determines the
outcome. Cops just don't like having defendant lawyers there at every step
in the process because they know the lawyers are looking for any tiny
infraction to try to impeach them should it go to trial. An expensive
attorney appearing early in the process assures that the case will very
likely go to trial. That can cause the police and or DA/SA to re-evaluate
their case. I am sure they would have arrested the mom in the Jon Benet
Ramsey case had the Ramseys had not wedged lawyers in that process as early
as humanly possible. Heck, a lot of people learned from that case that you
can absolutely refuse to answer or even see the police about almost
anything.

You get your free lawyer appointed for you at your arraignment if you do
not have your own counsel arranged at that point...

Sometimes that appointee is a regular old trial (hopefully) lawyer being
asked (well, told) to accept low state reimbursement rates. He then often
does a job commensurate with his sudden reduction in fees. It's only human
nature.

So my gut feeling is that people who can afford good lawyers get good
outcomes more often than the people who can't afford good counsel. As the
saying goes: "Justice may be blind, but she can sure smell money."

Right... In my area of the country some "mid level" lawyers with good
reputations even have "menus" meaning a certain type of case will
cost x-amount of money to take on plus billable hours...

We call them McLawyers. "Will you have fries with that uncontested
divorce?" In some ways, that's actually good for the clients. I know of
many, many people who didn't realize how fast billable hours stack up until
they got the huge bill.

Fortunately, every once in a while even the best lawyers money can buy
won't
be able to help if you're as weird and despicable as Phil Spector. It took
a second trial to nail him because he was so rich, but they got around to
eventually. Sadly, when someone like that fights the system as hard as he
did (like Walmart) we all pay because the government has to match the
defendant's experts and "papering" point by point or risk being
"outlawyered" and losing the case.

How is pushing the government to defend its position on some sort of
administrative law which was not written by anyone you elected to
office . . .

Most laws these days are written by lobbyists. That's how ex-Senator
Hollings got his name "Senator Disney" . . . by pushing for changes to the
copyright law written by them (actually a cabal of similar corporations)
that benefitted them. These multi-million dollar judgements awarded against
song-sharing grannies are showing just how much companies stacked the deck
in their favor with the DMCA.

. . . nor are the people who wrote such administrative law easily
influenced by anyone which you could realistically approach like a US
Representative or US Senator...

If you have anywhere near the clout with your reps that Disney or BP does,
then you are one powerful SOB, Evan! (-:

Making the government defend its positions on administrative law makes its
future application more
transparent and understandable by those outside of the agency involved just
like case law in the other courts makes civil or criminal laws easier for
some people to understand how the laws apply in the legal situations at bar
and what your responsibilities are in such a situation if you were to ever
find yourself in it...

*IF* that's what's happening. But I doubt it. Wal-Mart is more likely be
doing a variation of what for years has been known as a "strike suit"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_suit

with the purpose not really being to win or lose, but to drag the opponent
"over the hurdles" with so many motions, depositions, hearing, reviews,
appeals, etc. that they are literally "papered to death."

It makes sense, that Wal-mart, one of the country's largest employers, is
flexing its muscle because it is large enough to basically say "we can
absorb the costs of a protracted legal battle better than you can." As
someone else noted, IBM stalled for ten years, Exxon stalled for more than
twenty. Wal-mart is trying to make itself poisonous to regulators. "Dare
to fine us and we will fight you into the poor house." That's the part that
I think is bad for us because the Feds *have* to expend whatever it takes -
and more - to discourage that kind of challenge.

I would guess from what I read that this method was in play by BP to hold
off Federal regulators from enforcing any sanctions against them - they were
fighting regulation just like Wal-mart. Let's hope Wal-Mart doesn't explode
as a result, but stampedes can kill a lot more than one person.

From what I recall from reading about the original stampede, the issue
here's quite like the scalding hot McD's coffee. Wal-mart knew from past
experience that Black Friday sales crowds have stampeded before. A death
was a reasonable outcome of them offering incredibly low sale prices to a
unusually large-sized crowd without providing for an orderly means of
entrance to the store. Stadiums, theaters and other venues that frequently
deal with a crush of patrons have all developed standard means of crowd and
entry control (rope, barriers, numbered tickets, etc). Wal-mart was
experienced enough at the corporate level to have foreseen an issue with
crowd control but they failed to act responsibly.

It was a foreseeable event. For instance, shouting fire in a crowded
theater comes with a reasonable expectation of a stampede. If you yell it
out in a real fire, you could be saving lives. If there's no fire, you
could easily kill someone.

--
Bobby G.