There is quite a bit of evidence that the cost and skill of defense attorneys make a large difference in whether or not a defendant is convicted, and what the penalty is if they are. Some state jurisdictions give the public defenders office sufficient resources to make a reasonable defense, others spend as little as they can possibly get away with. Some states don’t have public defenders, they underpay private attorneys to take indigent defense cases.
Say there’s a murder case. There are no eye witnesses or video records or anything definitive. The whole case against the defendant is based on expert opinions and lab work, and a chain of circumstantial evidence. It costs the prosecution a million dollars in forensics work, expert testimony, and a huge team of lawyers and assistants to slam the defendant for his alleged crime. His public defender gets a fixed $25k fee.
I’m proposing that the budgets should be equal. If the case is open and shut, the state shouldn’t need a vast budget to send the defendant to prison. But if they have to spend a million dollars, the odds are much greater that the defendant is actually innocent, and his defense team should have access to proportionally greater resources.
In a way, this lives up to the statues of Lady Justice with a blindfold and a scale that courthouses sometimes have. If the pile of cash on each side of the scale are the same weight, the scale should tip towards the side that has the defendant’s guilt on it (or as a counterweight, the theoretical right to be considered innocent until proven guilty).
I don’t see how anything else is remotely fair. The U.S. sends more of it’s citizens to prison than anyone else on the planet. Maybe not all of them are guilty.
I don’t believe the US sends so many people to prison because of how well the lawyers are paid. I am certainly willing to believe (and I think it’s been shown) that the poverty of the defendant has some bearing on the outcome of the case, but our sky-high prison populations are mostly the result of the War on Drugs.
It’s an interesting question, but my reaction is no, that should not be our policy. The defendant is entitled to competent representation, not a certain dollar amount. If you give $1M to Lionel Hutz, you haven’t leveled the playing field.
OTOH, if the defense simply cannot counter a specific strategy because of money (say they can’t afford a forensic test that might bring into question a key element of the prosecution’s case), that’s problematic IMO. Not sure at all what current law says about that, but if such a circumstance exists and is permissible, I’d have an issue with that. The defense can effectively be rendered incompetent if that’s the case.
So I’d be interested in what our lawyers have to say. IMO, it’s legitimate to question the disparity in funds on a case by case basis if it can be demonstrated that a specific defense, against a specific protection, was rendered ineffective because of the financial inability to counter a specific element. I don’t think a “they spent $1M so you get to spend $1M” policy makes sense, though it might sound fair.
It might sound fair, it might be a starting place to quantify fairness, but there are other key variables that come into play - quality of representation jumps out as one key variable. There might be a rough correlation between the hourly cost of an attorney and the quality / expertise of their work. I suppose that’s possible.
If all the expensive lawyers were defending the little guy, the market would get too tight for the wealthy and it would be too difficult for them to buy justice.
There is certainly a correlation between an attorney’s hourly rate and his/her reputation. But reputation is not always a marker for competence.
It says nothing, basically. Non-indigent defendants get no help with their defense costs at all. Indigent defendants get whatever portion of the public defender’s trial budget is assigned to them, which is to say nearly nothing. If you need something more expensive than some photocopies, you’re probably SOL in a misdemeanor case and not much better off in a felony case. Need your own DNA testing? It’ll cost you hundreds (and probably thousands), and thousands more if your expert winds up testifying.
The public defender system is in shambles in my state and the situation isn’t much better in most other states - but that’s a problem people do talk about.
The prosecution has a greater burden, since they have to prove guilt. The defense only has to raise reasonable doubt.
There are also practical considerations - most (not all) criminal defendents are factually guilty. It takes a lot more resources IME to contradict a strong case.
I think people are overestimating the ability of a lawyer to distort justice if paid enough money.
If a wealthy person is clearly, obviously, guilty of murder, I don’t think the highest-paid legal defense in the world can get him or her off scot-free in American court. Likewise, if a wealthy person is clearly, obviously, innocent of murder, I don’t think the highest-paid prosecution in the world can get him or her convicted in American court.
There are, of course, many more nuanced cases in between, but I think even the highest-paid lawyer runs into his limits.
Perhaps so, but I don’t think the discussion is really about the outliers but the general trends.
Wealth creates more positive outcomes in court, whether criminal, civil, or corporate. I find that obscene, and would absolutely support finding ways to level the playing field in the courtroom.
In theory, yes, but less so in practice. I think most prosecutors would be happy to tell you that the standard imposed by most jurors is somewhat less that what the law requires.
Also, this might start an unhealthy race to the bottom in cost-lowering. A defense or prosecution could purposefully spend as little as possible in a situation where technology, expensive resources etc. would work to the advantage of the opposition. This would force the other side to limit their spending.
A criminal trial in which neither side spent more than a few hundred bucks total doesn’t sound proper or thorough.
If you would like to respond seriously, please include
[ul][li]A cite that juries in general ignore the standard of “reasonable doubt”, and[/li][li]An explanation of why you believe spending more money on the defense will address that issue.[/ul][/li]Regards,
Shodan
Money spent is an easily quantifiable metric, so it’s got that going for it. Other than how easy it is to quantify, it isn’t a very good metric for how well your advocate worked for you. I mean, I can make you a $10,000 hamburger. It’s a regular hamburger, served on a paper plate made of shredded $100 bills. Was your $10,000 hamburger a thousand times better than a $10 hamburger?
You can’t just say “whatever the bill is, the taxpayers will pay it”. That’s ridiculous. The prosecutors don’t have an unlimited budget either.
Some times of legal proceedings cost a lot of money. Other kinds don’t. If the prosecution spends thousands of dollars on a DNA test that matches blood found at the crime scene to the defendant, should we hand the defendant the exact same amount of money to spend as they like? No, why would we? The fact that the DNA test cost $X is irrelevant to how much the defendant should be given to argue against the DNA test.
In other words, a DNA test that shows whether the defendant’s DNA matches blood at the crime scene is an independent source of information. It is not something that the prosecution can just make up. The prosecution doesn’t call up labs and offer higher and higher amounts of money until they find a lab that will just say the DNA matches. So that DNA test, before it occurs, will not automatically generate evidence against the defendant. Suppose the test doesn’t match? Then it becomes evidence for the defendant. If the prosecution tried to hide that evidence from the defendant it would be a miscarriage of justice.
The amount of money each team spends is a horrible metric for how effective each team will be. Yeah, OJ was acquitted after spending a fortune on expensive law talking guys. That’s one. Plenty of other rich people who spent a fortune on expensive lawyers were convicted. The actual facts of the case (you know, like if there’s a lot of evidence for or against the defendant) are a much better predictor of the outcome of the case than the amount of money the defense or prosecution spends.
