That was fun to read. I feel like it should be in a textbook somewhere, except that it's better than textbook writing.
/hijack
I have spent most of my legal career trying to talk my clients down from incredibly stupid positions. So no, I don’t parrot anything. OTOH, if your client wants you to make an argument, or in a negotiation take a position, that is not legally unsupportable, you pretty much have to do it. And in litigation, the lawyers don’t (usually) get to create the facts. You gotta dance with what you brought. So frequently your arguments are based on the client’s factual claims–and many of those are made before you had a chance to tell them to keep quiet.
Didn’t some accounting corporation execs just get off because the court said they couldn’t possibly have known that a law was being broken? Maybe if was the high-and-mighties of Anderson or some such accounting firm.
“You Liberals”? I’m a liberal, and I don’t think mrrealtime’s idea is a good one at all. The one thing this country’s got going for it is that we have laws protecting us against government abuses (at least the ones that haven’t been pillaged by the current administration). The last thing you want to do is entrust that to the government. It’s conservatives that are always lawyer-bashing.
I wish laws were less complicated. Most absolutely don’t need to be worded as opaquely as they are. They need to be precise, but not inscrutable. However, that’s not the lawyers’ fault, it’s the politicians who make the laws.
Not knowing a crime is being committed is not the same as not knowing the law. You are generally not culpable if someone is commiting a crime and conceiling from you.
In the case of Andersen (e not o), the firm had been accused of obstruction of justice because they shreded documents. The conviction was overturned because the judge decided that the prosecution failed to prove that the INTENT was to hide some wrongdoing from an impending investigation.
That’s kind of the reason we have complex laws and lawyers. So people can’t just make vague assertions. What law was broken? Was there intent? etc etc
Is case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic. So you basically turned sarcasm “off” for your reply.
So it seems that the only time an ignorance plea works is if the law is so vague that it doesn’t draw a clear line between what is prohibited and what is not.
It’s a little more complicated than that. I know there are some previous threads on the subject, but I can’t find them right now. Here is a quick summary.
The Andersen case did not hold that anybody didn’t prove anything. The court held that the jury was misinstructed on the meaning of the terms “knowingly” and “corruptly”
The guilty verdict is flawed, but Andersen is not out of the woods. Andersen can be retried. The evidence quoted in the court’s opinion suggest there might be enough there to get a conviction.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=FT&Date=20050531&ID=4855442
Here is the actual text from the New York Penal Code defining Murder in the Second Degree (which is the “regular” kind of murder). It sounds complicated, but from my post above you can see why it needs a lot of explanation. That said, I don’t think there’s anything in this law that a person of average intelligence wouldn’t understand.
And quite a number of the politicians making laws written in such a way as to *require * lawyers are themselves…?
That would be a lot more compelling if it weren’t for the fact that you went into a profession directly connected to a positive constitutional right. If we had a right to have our cappuccino made for us, then baristas would be doing a lot of pro bono work, too.
As for the OP, laws are often poorly written. Very poorly written. Ever heard of a legal draftsman? They’re the people who are trained specifically to write legal documents—if you’re interested you can look for books by F. Reed Dickerson.
But even poorly written laws can be interpreted accurately by non-lawyers: I do it all the time as a zoning administrator. Our ordinance is poorly written, but rarely do I come to a situation where the ordinance is not quite clear when I apply logic to the text. Many of my problems seem to arise from the inability of others before me to think logically and I end up stuck with a long-standing policy that violates the ordinance; other times the result is clear but irrational (e.g., a banner sign on a building is proscribed, but the identical sign on plywood is perfectly acceptable).
Another source of difficulty is the poor grammar, punctuation, and diction of those writing and reading laws. I am now fully convinced that every law (or set of laws) should have specific grammar and style guides defined as the guides by which the laws are written, and our society needs to adopt a far more strict adherence to what is proper English. The language liberal may say that the language is a living thing that needs to change; I say that such sentiments mean that more of the guilty will go free and more of the innocent will be screwed.
Finally, try writing up a piece of law, post it, and see how we all can abuse it. When it reaches a form that is difficult to abuse, you’ll see just how readable it is. I’ve been through this and it ain’t easy.
If anything, I’d say that the volume of law is ridiculous; however, just a little thought demonstrates how stupid such a claim would be. We have a trade off: be a nation of laws or a nation of arbitrary decisions. We’re a nation of laws, and we’ve got to take the fleas with the dog.
This is from the township’s new junk ordinance which is in accordance with the model that the prosecutor said is the only junk ordinance he’ll enforce:
Interesting point, but the constitution does not say that you get a free lawyer who is unpaid, that would violate a different constitutional provision. http://www.bristolcpcs.org/Champion2002.html. It is the state’s responsibility to provide indigent defendants with counsel.
http://www.state.il.us/defender/isba.html
Pro bono service is not tied to any constitutional right but to the need for legal assistance. http://www.courts.state.mn.us/lprb/95bbarts/bb1095.html;
Moreover, it is exactly in the cases where there is no constitutional right to counsel that* pro bono * lawyers is most important. The state has to pay lawyers to represent indigent defendants–they get represented.
At Legal Aid, for example, we would not take cases where people had a right to counsel (criminal, and termination of parental rights, mostly) because those people could get appoionted counsel that was paid out of the appropriate budget. If we represented them, we would be squandering valuable grant money for somebody who could get a lawyer that some other entity was required to pay for.
The problem with the legal system in NZ (may be the same in the US) is that it generally relies on affidavits, ie: peoples word.
People lie!
I just wish law involved more impartial investigation and common sense and less reliance on affidavits.
I hope I’m not out of line with this, but isn’t the basic answer to a relatively basic question is that there’s a major difference between “can’t interpret without a lawyer” and can’t be bothered to interpret without a lawyer?"
Just my two cents, DESK
The same thing seems to be the case here. I want to hear a reasonable defense of the weight given to eyewitness testimony when it seems to have been demonstrated as inaccurate or biased in many instances.
There’s a line in Richard Mitchell’s Less than Words Can Say, contrasting societies with few laws, which everyone knows; to societies with many laws, all of which no one knows. He was not pleased with our legislative & jurisprudential traditions.