81–90 of 175 posts
Those who do not view her actions favourably use the wrong name and pronouns.
That suggests that there's overlap between those who do not view her favourably and people who do not view transgender people favourably.
I find it very disturbing that you need tens of thousands of dollars at your disposal to get a "fair" trial. I say "fair", because the output obviously changes with the amount of money you feed the system. Too little money and the outcome will be biased against you, too much money and the outcome will be biased in the other direction. Which amount will give an unbiased output? $50k? $100k? How can this be considered…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friend is a criminal defense attorney for those who are usually unable to pay market rates. He's making a lot less than I was as a senior developer and not much more when I was a junior developer. Factor in law school loans and time spent in the books and he's not exactly rolling in cash.
> criminal defense attorney for those who are usually unable to pay market rates So obviously he is not the typical lawyer.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_%2F_Lawyer/...
Average salaries are skewed because the top-end is so high. If you have all the bona fides (top-tier law school/clerking opportunities, high-paying specialty, good track record of winning cases) you can command an astronomical hourly rate.
However, the vast majority of lawyers don't get those opportunities, and are working schlubs just like the rest of us.
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That's not an issue at all, if the government just acts as a lender to whoever is going to lose. That also has the added bonus of making people think twice about engaging people in civil suits and prevents people and bad prosecutors from using the legal system for blackmail.
Well, if you go with a "loser pays" system you run into the issue of false convictions and economic-disparity again. If I were to barely break even at the end of each month, and was tried for a crime I didn't commit I might still consider pleading guilty because the actual punishment would be less than the results of the financial penalty incurred by defending yourself and losing. If I were rich enough to easily pay…
I find it very disturbing that you need tens of thousands of dollars at your disposal to get a "fair" trial. I say "fair", because the output obviously changes with the amount of money you feed the system. Too little money and the outcome will be biased against you, too much money and the outcome will be biased in the other direction. Which amount will give an unbiased output? $50k? $100k? How can this be considered…
("According to your mighty or miserable position, The judgment of court will render you white or black.")
- Jean de la Fontaine, 1678
It's remarkable that this has so many points. Why would so many be keen to contribute to the defense of someone who violated his oath and betrayed his country? He wasn't a whistleblower: there are processes in place for whistleblowing, and there are inspectors general who would love to get a good case of misconduct to work on, and he never availed himself of them. He pled guilty at trial, and received a fair sentence…
Perhaps because exposing unethical and illegal activities carried out by your country is a service to your country, not betrayal.
Perhaps because she, like Edward Snowden, should be celebrated as a hero instead of rotting in jail.
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So basically the point is that it doesn't apply for cases where you need a complicated defense? To me this sounds close to saying that there is the law of the common person - where you are sent to rot in jail if you break the rules, and the law of the people who are wealthy enough to pay for complicated defense strategies. I'm not trying to build a straw man here, just trying to figure out where the difference in our…
> "it doesn't apply for cases where you need a complicated defense?" More like, it doesn't apply for cases where your defense is "I totally did it, but I'm not guilty because..." in such a circumstance, you're essentially hoping to convince a judge or jury that your law-breaking was OK, which is significantly more difficult and requires significantly more research than if you merely needed to convince the jury that y…
The law is complex, and the interpretation of it is a skill we pay people a lot for.
For example. Let's say I confess to killing someone, but I claim it was self defense. I "totally did it", but the self-defense is a complication. Maybe my lawyer sucks, and maybe I killed this person in the wrong state and I'll get a lethal injection. Maybe I can afford a great lawyer and I'll get out of jail (although not for free...).
If the court decides that I acted in self defense, I didn't break the law, right? Or would you say that I broke the law and got away with it? The way I see it, my actions may be clear, but the legality of them are in a kind of dual state which doesn't collapse into a "guilty" or "not guilty" until there is an actual verdict. And even this is an oversimplification, of course.
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A person with $200 000 yearly income (a very conservative assumption for top lawyers) is in top %0.04 richest people by income.[0] Yeah, right, they have to "put food" on the table. [0] http://www.globalrichlist.com
Rich people don't just swim in money you know. It's fairly likely they'll have far more expenses than poor people. So they might have a better pension plan, pay a gardener. Might send their kids to private school. etc etc So someone earning $200k could well be less well off after expenses than someone earning $50k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically the point is that it doesn't apply for cases where you need a complicated defense? To me this sounds close to saying that there is the law of the common person - where you are sent to rot in jail if you break the rules, and the law of the people who are wealthy enough to pay for complicated defense strategies. I'm not trying to build a straw man here, just trying to figure out where the difference in our…
The question is, how do you make the system more fair? One way to make it more fair is to make it cheaper, and the way to do that is to reduce its complexity. But what does a less complex system look like? Consider that most of our criminal laws have a "mens rea" (i.e. mental state) requirement in addition to the "actus reus" (i.e. culpable conduct). Cases would be a lot cheaper to prosecute and defend without those…
At the very least, having a fund or pool of some sort might not be a bad idea, and it would not cost us much.
Ordinary people sometimes require extraordinary legal defenses. Sometimes they deserve them too. We hear about the ones who didn't get what they deserve in the news.
We do prosecute on intent, and we often make judgements on intent too. Spending that time and money to determine intent is warranted.
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> How can this be considered normal? It's not acceptable, but nobody has any better ideas.
What's causing the prices to be so high? Is it the complexity of U.S. law? Would it help if you had 5 pages laws instead of 500 pages laws, or would that make things worse? (more room for loopholes) I'm inclined to believe simpler laws would help, though, because a lawyer wouldn't have to know tens of thousands of pages of laws by heart (or close to it), or at least wouldn't have to research tens of thousands of page…
At this point one might object that lawyers make too much money, but then I'd like to say that most everybody on this site working for a big company, or working for their own, costs this much or charges this much (or should charge as much, if they're 'professionals' and not 'I can set up Wordpress'-style workers).
Also, let's say that there are no expenses, i.e. only lawyers who live close to wherever the cases are heard (no plane tickets, no hotels), that all proceeding are in the same location, that the defendant is held somewhere close as well, that everybody working the case drives cars that run on air etc.
So then we have ~ 6 months, for a single person with some part-time help to do the menial stuff, to research the case, prepare all briefs, do all trial prep work (I don't know anything about this case but let's say you want to call 3 character witnesses. That's a week right there just selecting them, convincing them to come, prepping them, filing the paperwork etc.); to do the PR; to work with other stakeholders; the actual proceedings (which might span several court sessions - motion for this and that, pre-trial hearing(s), the actual trial, etc. I think it's clear that a single person can't do all of this in 6 months.
It's just what things cost in the real world. But hey, it could have been worse, you could've gone to court in Europe - in which case you'd get to pay between 15 and 25% VAT on top of it (probably not in all European countries, before someone jumps on that).