> If you knew you were in trouble at work, would you show up to your disciplinary hearing/meeting/whathaveyou with "Buttfucker 3000" written over your name on your badge in plain sight?
> The same thing generally applies to the courtroom - it's showing a lack of respect for, and understanding of, the situation one is in.
Others have said this, but I want to underscore it with different phrasing: you seem to not understand the difference between "fear" and "respect".
> Were a judge to think they may want to give an individual a lenient sentence, they may change their mind were they to find out that that individual is basically saying, "Fuck you and fuck all of this, I don't care."
Justice should not depend on how good you make a judge feel about themselves or how fearful you show yourself to be of the system; justice should look only at the facts of the case and be blind to these unrelated details, no matter how much they make the judge personally feel bad.
I appreciate it isn't like that: justice is not blind, and is in fact horribly unfair. And this means we tend to leave laws on the books that disproportionately affect certain groups of people because we let law enforcement and judgement proceedings favor use "discretion" to "discriminate" (note the relationship between these words).
But that someone knows this to be true and thereby chooses a strategy to play that maximizes their benefit, has nothing to do with "respect": it is out of "fear" of what the system will do to you if you don't put on the outward appearance of "respect", even if--entirely internally--you are feeling nothing but "contempt" (a feeling that I personally couldn't blame anyone for having).