Louisiana prosecutors are using fake subpoenas to pressure witnesses to talk

It's going to teach people that they might not have to comply with subpoenas because of all the fake ones. At the very least, people will be more inclined to wait until they have a lawyer before speaking with the police, which is the opposite of what they want.

But it's also likely to cause people to ignore real subpoenas, which will not only hurt them but also the court cases that they were supposed to testify at.

It's incredibly stupid.

Misrepresenting a court or court officer may have criminal penalties as well.

I hope the LA state bar is reviewing (or will review) the attorneys that have done this.

Who watches the watchers?

We know now that we need to look for something like a notary stamp and judge signature on a subpeona, but we will never be as sophisticated in this domain as the DA's office, so they can probably easily trick us in other ways. The lesson I am inclined to take from this is to avoid interacting with a DA without a lawyer, similar to an investigator or a "curious" or "friendly" police officer.

Sounds like her daughter might have had incorrect expectations for what it entails to call the police, though, unfortunately. The purpose and function of calling the police is generally to bring lawful force to bear against someone who has committed a crime. Any time you call the cops on somebody, it should be done with the expectation that they may be arrested and taken to jail, regardless of your intentions when making the call.

Police are not therapists and their job is not to resolve domestic disputes like a guidance counselor. While we might wish that this is what police would be, and while this is how excellent police might behave, in small-town settings, when you scale the system up to cities of millions, the function of police tends toward that of enforcing the law through use of force.

When you scale the police system up, it means the officers don't have a personal relationship with the people who call them, and they're going into a situation with no context. We can't fairly expect them to pass judgment on the spot about how a domestic dispute should be resolved when there's ambiguity and no law has obviously been broken - the courts are for handling nuanced, contextual situations like that where facts need to be determined, and fairness weighed. Anything less deprives one party of their rights.

Police also need to prioritize their time, because big cities are filled with constant real crime like theft, most of which is already never investigated due to lack of resources. In my mind, actual thefts (that deprive people of property and rights) are a substantially higher priority than resolving social disputes. Any time a police spends on social disputes is time taken away from fighting meaningful crimes that have obvious victims.

So from my perspective one should generally not expect the police to intervene for anything less than a law obviously being broken.

With this perspective in mind, police are a pretty "binary function". You call them because someone has broken the law and you need to bring society's force to bear against them, typically by giving them e.g. a lawful order to leave the premises of property you own, or by arresting them and taking them to jail. They are not "for" any other purpose. This is of course is not a defense of police taking people to jail for no reason in situations where they are called inappropriately, but I'm saying this to share my life experience in the hopes that it will set useful expectations for others: generally don't call police on someone unless you're willing to send them to jail.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...

It sounds like she was having some sort of mental health episode - I wonder if it would have helped had the daughter requested an ambulance rather than the police? Where I live, whenever you call 911 for an in-home emergency the police are tasked to arrive first to make sure the residence is safe and then the paramedics and fire crews come in after. You're right about the hammer and nail, but by framing it as a medical emergency you can hopefully ensure the hammer is holstered when they arrive as they approach the incident as secondary support who will only intervene if there is real danger.

Came across an interesting somewhat contrarian argument recently in a New Yorker article reviewing a new book about mass incarceration in America:

So what makes for the madness of American incarceration? If it isn’t crazy drug laws or outrageous sentences or profit-seeking prison keepers, what is it? Pfaff has a simple explanation: it’s prosecutors. They are political creatures, who get political rewards for locking people up and almost unlimited power to do it.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/10/how-we-misunder...

And yet, they manage to not be such bastards in other parts of the Western World (EU, Nordic countries, etc).

What they did here violates the judicial process as you mentioned in a very horrible way.

There are very few countries where that idea is as much a force as it is in the US–it's theoretically possible, but courts often shy away from applying it.

I think it's a testament to the integrity of the US court system that they routinely let people off the hook, even when it is proven that they committed a serious crime. They are serving a higher goal, but they do so in the face of stiff public opposition ("The rapist got away on a technicality").

Everything runs on written signed letters and the post.

Interesting fact, Barristers used to get paid by the inch of paper in their brief, so when you read old law and its verbose as fk. you just know someone was on the clock running up the hours.

You need a Duke Lacrosse[1] situation before anything would happen.

[1] Serious overreach coupled directed at camera-friendly victims with the resources to hire good, media-savvy attorneys.

New York City (#1) has 8.5 million people at a density of 27,012 people per square mile. In other words, NYC has over half of the population of all of The Netherlands and roughly 20 times the average density. I don't think you should assume that anything about policing strategy in The Netherlands can be applied to these fairly radically different environments.

Edit: I can't reply to the comment below this about education spending. Let's look at the data:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GB.ZS

"Expenditure on education as % of total government expenditure (%)"

> Netherlands 12.1%

> United States 13.3%

For those down voting, here are the stats from Australia, courtesy Wikipedia:

"Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that during the 2009/10 year police took action against 375,259 people, up by 4.8 percent from 2008/09 figures."

So, that's 375k "actions". Even if you assume that a lot of those won't end in arrest, that's still a lot of arresting.

> "Protect and Serve"

Everyone thinks that the police's job is their motto. It was some strategic messaging, but they came up with that. Police weren't created to protect and serve. Going back to the foundations of the country's policing strategy, police exist to maintain order. That's why they arrest protesters, shoot unarmed guys who are noncompliant, arrest people for selling cigarette singles. That subtle shift in how we perseve their job explains vertically all of their behavior as of late.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245012 and marked it off-topic.

HN may be most familiar with the administrative subpoena in the form of the National Security Letter, and such subpoenas have been fought in court.

It's not great, to be clear. We should have all subpoenas / warrants require individual advance approval by a judge. But there's a big difference between a type of subpoena authorized by the legislature, used by the executive, and subject to review from the judiciary (and subject to the entire law being ruled unconstitutional, in theory), and the executive inventing the idea of "administrative subpoena" on their own.