We see the super-rich being able to get off when the common person would not, as the rich can afford the best lawyers, and to crawl though the legal code to find any little crumb. It does give them a unfair advantage but OTOH…
They stop the innocent from being railroaded, open doors by establishing precedents, that the rich can only afford to establish and win, but once that door is open the common man can play that card. One such example is the OJ case. OJ was able to challenge DNA evidence against him and one. Such evidence from my understanding was ironclad, now it can be called into question. It does seem like OJ used his money to buy that door and to get out (many people beleive unjustly), but he did open the door for suspects to bring that forth if they were accused unfairly or set up.
You’re probably right about the rich’s ability to find loopholes that then benefit anyone, but the problem is most poor and many middle class folks can’t afford a lawyer. They have to go with a public defender. The way that generally works is, if a DA decides he wants to prosecute you for a crime, he offers your public defender a deal: generally, pleading to a lower charge and serving a lighter sentence if you accept the deal. The DA does that because he has far too many cases on his desk to take them all to trial – plea bargaining offers him a chance to make everyone’s workload lighter.
It’s a very nice option if you are guilty. Problem is, if you are innocent, you are screwed. Because if you insist on going to trial, the DA will have a lot more resources to throw at your case than otherwise, because of all those other plea-bargained cases. your chances of being convicted are very high. Often, public defenders will encourage clients to accept a plea bargain even if the client insists he or she is innocent, because he or she knows that conviction rates for DAs around the country are well above the 90 percent mark (all those plea bargains).
It’s actually a pretty good system, unless you are innocent and poor or middle class.
Regardless of the “trickle-down” benifits, (I can’t think of a better term for what the OP describes) every time the public sees a rich person get off where a poor person wouldn’t, it threatens the general public’s faith in the system.
Historically, most of the really important precedent-setting criminal-law cases have not involved rich defendants. See Ernesto Miranda,Clarence Earl Gideon, etc.
Any system of justice in which the final decision is made based on who has more money is a flawed system. It’s wrong in the handful of cases in which a defendant is a millionaire and it’s just as wrong in the majority of cases in which it’s the district attorney who brings the most money and resources to the case.