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In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

nytimes.com

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Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#321

Post by rafram »

shkkmo wrote: post #286
rafram wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're facing sexual assault charges (and a lifetime on the sex offender registry) for allegedly peeing in a park People repeat this anecdote all the time, but I'd challenge you to find a single person who has ever been put on the sex offender registry for nothing more than public urination. (Let alone being charged with sexual assault, which is nonsensical -- look up how that crime is defined in US law.)

Being put on the sex offender registry happens after conviction. The comment you are responding to is talking about how unconvictable trumped up charges are used to scare people into taking pleas so your challenge doesn't make sense in context.

OK, I would challenge you to find a single case, reported in the media, in which a defendant took a plea deal rather than face charges that included mandatory sex offender registration for nothing more than public urination. If that has ever happened, surely it would've been reported on at least once, right?

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#322

Post by monkey_monkey »

hollerith wrote: post #278
monkey_monkey wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That article was written 14 months ago. Since then, the amount the Kremlin is willing to offer volunteers to sign a contract has gone up substantially. However, my research is telling me that I was wrong when I wrote, "Most Russian soldiers are paid over $100,000 a year to volunteer to fight in Ukraine". Even the ones who signed contracts recently probably get less than half of that.

[flagged]

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#323

Post by potato3732842 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #138
AngryData wrote: post #38

Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just some regular bloke knows it is broken. 90% of it is about extorting the population for funding for the courts and cops. If you can't afford a lawyer, they will provide you with a joke. And if you can afford a lawyer, now its just a question if you are willing to spend more on your lawyer than the state is hoping to extort from you. If you are, you will get…

I agree 100%. I've written about this here before, but I've been involved in two civil lawsuits in my life. One was in the USA, the other was in mainland China. I should stress that I am an American, and I wasn't even in China when the lawsuit over there was moving along. The Chinese process was very fast -- it went before a judge who reached a verdict in something like ten months -- and it was extremely inexpensive.…

I was sued in the US once. Between all the stuff it took about 3mo.

You can't just spew blanket judgements when the actual course of events depends so heavily on the specific facts. I question the intelligence of anyone who managed to have a lawsuit going on for 2yr and not come away with an understanding that specific facts matter greatly.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#324

Post by SauciestGNU »

lurk2 wrote: post #257
neffy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else. And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.

> We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else. They don’t. Americans earn something like 1/3rd more than the average European. They have substantially larger houses and own more cars. > And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place The vast majority of people will…

I think there's maybe a value discrepancy as well. Admittedly I fall more on what I perceive to be the European side of this, so that's my bias here.

As someone of moderate wealth (high earner, investments), I still live in the same small house in the same inexpensive city I did when I was earning a quarter of what I do now. Americans talk about "starter houses" and moving up, but that's a consumptive pattern I don't value. Instead, I value the financial freedom of not having a mortgage and having stable, well-constructed housing that I continuously improve. I could afford the bigger house but I don't want it.

As for cars, I have 2 but they rarely get used. One is a business van for transporting large equipment and the other is a cheap hatchback. I bike most places though, and drive only a couple times a week. I understand their utility as a tool, but if I could get away without owning one I would.

Money is nice, but financial security with social safety nets and public healthcare is a trade-off I'd gladly make.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#325

Post by ziddoap »

db48x wrote: post #317
ziddoap wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A degree is ultimately just a piece of paper Would you be comfortable visiting a doctor who didn't have their "piece of paper"? Obviously a degree is not a guarantee of skill or knowledge. No one is saying it is. However, a degree is a very strong indicator that the person is above some minimum level of knowledge. The counterpoint of "there are shitty lawyers with degrees" is ridiculous. Remove the requirements and…

Yes. The primary purpose of occupational licensing is to reduce the number of people who can participate in the occupation. Test doctors and judges and hair stylists alike based on whether they can do the job, not whether they have a piece of paper. Thousands of judges in 28 states are doing the job just fine even though they haven’t got that piece of paper. Requiring them to get one isn’t going to fix any problems.

>Test doctors and judges and hair stylists alike based on whether they can do the job

This is exactly what the piece of paper shows when you get it from an accredited and reputable institution.

What is your proposal? Do surgery until you stop killing people to prove that you can do them now?

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#326

Post by ddtaylor »

db48x wrote: post #211
ddtaylor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bar exam is supposed to be a legal litmus test of some kind

A lot of court functions don’t involve lawyers at all. Small Claims courts, traffic courts, etc, etc. States that allow judges without a law degree are using them in these courts.

Small claims courts, traffic courts and every other area of the legal apparatus should not be wield by potentially incompetent people. We already have enough problems with these swords when being held by competent people.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#327

Post by potato3732842 »

netcan wrote: post #235
AngryData wrote: post #38

Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just some regular bloke knows it is broken. 90% of it is about extorting the population for funding for the courts and cops. If you can't afford a lawyer, they will provide you with a joke. And if you can afford a lawyer, now its just a question if you are willing to spend more on your lawyer than the state is hoping to extort from you. If you are, you will get…

> Just like healthcare, US justice is only for people with money. In most times and places, this is true. Ancient times, recent history, autocracies, democracies... Justice is expensive. Justice, and the legal college as an ideal often specifically negates this. Equality before the law. Blind justice, etc. That said... justice is inevitably ridden with contradiction, hypocrisy and whatnot. That's what justice is. Deg…

>Justice is expensive.

Nitpick: Process is expensive. Process does not yield justice by itself. It (assuming it's crafted right) just makes the outcomes more consistent.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#328

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #314
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but what if you're the plaintiff/defendant and the other party has evidence in your favor? How do you get it before the court? That is what discovery is for. What do you know of this evidence and how do you know about it? > Honestly it just sounds like you had an easy case tried in China and a hard one tried in the US and are making some really broad assertions about the two legal systems based on a small samp…

The Tesla ran into me while I was crossing the crosswalk and then took off. I was able to capture their license plate. We tracked them down and were able to ask them, but they denied that they had done this. I sued them in civil court to cover my medical expenses. I happen to know what Teslas keep a video log of these. The defendant wouldn’t provide it willingly until we went into discovery and they were compelled to…

> I happen to know what Teslas keep a video log of these.

You provide the court with that information, and the judge presiding over the case can (and almost surely will, if you're correct,) ask for the logs. If they don't provide them upon request, they're hit with a adverse inference, just as they would be if they withheld documents in discovery.

It's plain common sense.

Now, it's true that "you don't know what you don't know" and that discovery can be an investigative process, but for the vast majority of cases it's totally unnecessary. And, in very many cases, discovery will actually impede access to justice. In court systems without discovery, judges tend to take on a slightly more investigative role, besides.

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#329

Post by xkcd-sucks »

BrenBarn wrote: post #105
FilosofumRex wrote: post #104

Of course big corp media like NYT would report on injustices in red states, especially Texas. Next door to NYT in the deep blue state of Massachusetts, two men have been arrested for simple trespass even though they had valid active IDs. Cops simply took the ID and left it out of police report, and never turned it over to the DA or the defense as exculpatory evidence. All with complete impunity and re-arrested them h…

Can you provide a link to a non-big-corp-media source where we can read about it?

I realize this is somewhat off topic but Massachusetts State Police is notoriously corrupt. Some recent items off the top of my head which have been covered extensively in mainstream media:

  * The overtime scandal; TLDR for years there has been a culture of falsifying overtime often in multiple excess of base salary
  * A recruit was beaten to death in an alleged hazing incident
  * Accepting bribes to pass CDL inspections
  * Drug labs faking results, 21k convictions overturned... years later
  * The Karen Read drama, which is just embarrassing regardless of who's the murderer
It's honestly kind of hard to find refs for some of the specific incidents I'm thinking of, because the search results are masked by other similar incidents! Just for starters,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...

https://www.wcvb.com/article/recent-massachusetts-state-poli...

https://www.wcvb.com/article/massachusetts-state-police-trai...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_State_Police#Con...

Re: In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

#330

Post by lurk2 »

askonomm wrote: post #185
lurk2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European society proves that Americans could have true freedom and quality of life if it weren't for corporations and oligarchs effectively owning our government. Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans. They are also substantially poorer than Americans, and those numbers get worse when you account for America’s average being skewed…

And yet, by all accounts we have a higher life quality than Americans. Only Americans care about money, because in USA you don't get anything without paying for it all yourself. Here we have minimum mandatory vacations for 4 weeks per year, and many countries have a lot more than that, most countries have a year or more of maternity leave, paid of course, we have plenty of public holidays, paid of course, and we don'…

Rent free.
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