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I want to extend my comment. The big takeaway from all of this is that to beat the system, you need to be prepared to defend yourself at all costs, to the very end. The system depends on everyone taking plea deals. It's a well-oiled machine where by taking the plea deal, everyone wins but you. The defense lawyer made his money, the prosecutor gets their "win". The judge looks "tough on crime" for their next election. The cop gets a plaque for locking up lots of people.

My advice: Save some money. Just like a car accident, or some health or other emergency, it's best to be prepared with some kind of emergency fund.

Most people don't take plea deals because they are too broke to defend themselves, by going to court you risk a much higher penalty if you lose. Would you take a guaranteed 12 months in prison or gamble on a 50% chance of 10 years?

If you are guilty a plea deal is a good deal. If you are completely innocent, and have some money to defend yourself, you have a moral obligation to fight the charges. (Note: I'm no expert on moral authority, it's just how I feel. Sorry)

Why should that burden fall on a group of people who, are in general, least able to take it up?

Completely innocent people can still be convicted. Some even get put to death. One of the distressing things about the courts is that everybody can just "know" the guy is guilty, but in truth they know the evidence is crap. But luckily his defense is crap (good defense costs money) so they can get away with it. This happens time and time again and eventually the odds catch up to them and they've convicted a lot of innocent people.

Even worse is when the evidence is poor but they want to convict the guy anyway because he looks like a bad guy. "Even if he didn't do this, I know in my heart that he's guilty of other crimes."

The problem is, US lawyers are ridiculously expensive. I'm not aware of any other country where one court case against you can ruin you financially. So it doesn't matter if you are innocent or guilty, if you are charged, you've already lost.

EDIT: Why not make it a law that when you are found innocent then prosecutor's office should refund whatever it cost you to hire your lawyer?

Good question. It's rare to be reimbursed. You can sue for malicious prosecution after you have been aquitted, but many times these cases don't prevail.

Do other countries have this? It would discourage nuisance suits if this also applied to civil cases.

It is my understanding that in German civil suits it's customary for the loser to pay the cost of the law suit, including lawyer's fees (which are usually coupled to the monetary value of the lawsuit, so frivolously racking up the fees is difficult).

In the US, the winning party in a civil suit can sometimes get their legal costs paid by the losing party. It depends on the type of case, and sometimes on whether the losing party is determined to have brought the case frivolously or for the purpose of being a nuisance.

The question, though, was whether a person in a criminal case would be reimbursed the cost of their defense by the government after being found not guilty.

Unfortunately that "moral obligation" doesn't pay for itself, and if you can't afford to fight you're SOL.

Does anyone know if there are insurance policies for this? Something like life insurance where you pay monthly and if you need a defense attorney because you are accused of something you will receive a capped sum of money for that purpose.

prepaid legal exists

quite a bit better than public defenders, still a lot of incompetence from my experience on the paralegal side, but they'll do the research. I haven't had experience with criminal cases though

Funny you ask. I looked into this very thing when I became involved in this situation. There are pre-paid legal services like LegalShield, but most will only cover 20-25% of the cost. This represents a possible startup opportunity IMO.

I feel like you'd suffer heavily from adverse selection.

You mean folks who already decided they will commit crimes and take out insurance for "free" money?

That's a good point. This is where working with experienced actuaries to build risk models will be important. This idea would not be a tech startup per say. Just a good 'ol insurance policy with a shiny iOS app wrapper :)

Yeah, I could see this turning into a nightmare scenario where you waive privacy rights and carry a tracking device everywhere so they know you have an alibi. Sort of like how car insurance companies offer those plug in things to monitor your driving habits to lower your premium.

Has this already occurred? Has anyone been able to use their phone's location history for their alibi? The data exists. Isn't this what subpoenas are for?

It's not the best alibi since your phone isn't physically attached to your body. Someone intending to commit a crime can easily drop their phone somewhere else to conceal their true location.

That's quite a complex plan, especially if the phone in question is making http requests and taking calls.

I used my Google Location History as part of an alibi with the police (it never made it to the courts). My guess as to why that was successful despite the obvious flaws was:

1. The crime occurred in another city about 3 hours way, so poor granularity or precision really didn't come into play.

2. The crime itself was a hit and run on a road worker. Not something you'd generally believe to be premeditated where I'd have thought to have a friend haul my phone around town to provide an alibi.

I don't see how it would be different than any other insurance product. If you're an established criminal no adjuster would recommend you be insured. Or maybe the premium would be astronomical, like thousands per month.

> My advice: Save some money. Just like a car accident, or some health or other emergency

Isn't this what legal costs insurances are for? Why should everyone save huge amounts of money individually if you can spread the cost (as well as the risk) over a large group?

Plea bargains should be eliminated. It's insane that people are basically punished for insisting on their right to a trial, and everybody is OK with this. If somebody wants to avoid a trial by pleading guilty, that's fine, but it shouldn't affect their punishment.

The typical argument in the other direction is that requiring every case to go to trial would overwhelm the courts. I think that means that we either have too many crimes or not enough courts, or some mixture of the two. A society that pretends to have the rule of law must be able to afford to give every accused person a trial.

The court system is absurdly underfunded, but no one is willing to pay more for it. And, unfortunately, too many people have the attitude that if you're arrested you must have done something so you're criminal scum and deserve whatever you get.

It's strange, because the amount of government money spent on courts is pretty small relative to everything else. If we had to scale them up by an order of magnitude, it could be done without too much fuss.

I guess your second point causes people to be biased against spending any more money, no matter how little.

Yeah, you would think the tax dollars spent on prisons vastly outweigh the extra dough it would take to actually try everyone who goes through them.

Plus, the innocent who aren't jailed pay taxes and do productive things for society.

This is all ignoring the human cost of the equation.

For profit prisons and the politicians paid off by them have an incentive to keep plea bargains because money.

Yep. Another reason to disallow private prisons.

It isn't underfunded; it's just being asked to deal with too much inane nickle and dime 'crimes'.

I really look forward to when self driving cars eliminate ALL traffic cases.

Court system underfunded but enforcement (police) overfunded - sounds like trouble.

Reminds me of the ludicrous idea of medical savings accounts. Hardly anyone below the top 0.1% could ever hope to "save" enough money and put it away to cover a medical or legal disaster or a really bad accident involving personal injury or destruction of extremely valuable property.

It just isn't a realistic proposition. Insurance with all its flaws exists for good reason.

There is no "criminal defense insurance". Believe me I looked all over. There are just some surprise expenses out there you have to be prepared for.

Start a company?

I still can wrap my head around the fact that judges are elected!!!

Are there elections for judges in other countries too?

Basically no, and it definitely baffles people.

That's not to say there isn't corruption and cronyism when appointing judges in other places :( . No system is perfect.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/world/americas/25iht-judge...

there are only two nations that have judicial elections, and then only in limited fashion. Smaller Swiss cantons elect judges, and appointed justices on the Japanese Supreme Court must sometimes face retention elections

> 2. Criminal defense lawyers love the system as-is and will fight to protect it. More arrests mean more business. An absolute worst conflict of interest that you can imagine.

Criminal defense lawyers hate the system as-is. There isn't much money collecting $1,000 here and there convincing people to plead guilty. The criminal lawyers that make the real money are the ones that take big cases to trial. There would be a lot more of that work if the system weren't so stacked in favor of taking a plea deal.

> 3. Public defenders will do the minimum amount of work, and will always strong-arm you to take a plea deal.

Public defenders' offices are incredibly overworked; deal almost entirely with people who are, in fact, guilty; and work within a system where not taking a plea can have very negative consequences in terms of sentencing.

The root of both (2), (3), and (4) is the American public. In many European countries the maximum prison sentence effectively is 15 years, and many don't really have a plea bargaining system. It's not like those countries don't have lawyers who have the same incentives as American lawyers. That's not the difference. The difference is that the people over there are more moral and virtuous, and don't keep voting for politicians who push "tough on crime" and inhumanely-long sentences.

Regarding (2), I don't disagree totally, but from what I saw, the person in question was originally charged $5,000 (the fee was eventually reduced) just for the hearing/plea deal. If she wanted to go to trial, he told her $20,000+.

Breaking down the math, the lawyer did a total of 5 hours of work just for the plea. If he had to go to trial, the hours of work would have exploded to 50-100.

So:

Plea: $5,000 / 5 = $1,000/hour

Trial $20,000 / 50 = $400/hour

The criminal defense lawyers know that most cases will get plea-ed, so they frontload their costs. I can't speak for every CD lawyer out there, and I imagine many would like to see CJ reform, but not too many of them are complaining about the current system (that I know of).

> The difference is that the people over there are more moral and virtuous, and don't keep voting for politicians who push "tough on crime" and inhumanely-long sentences.

Agree 100%

> Plea: $5,000 / 5 = $1,000/hour Trial $20,000 / 50 = $400/hour

The challenge for most lawyers is keeping a full pipeline of work. Unless you’re a household name, you do a lot of unpaid work to get each engagement, and often have downtime between engagements. So it’s vastly preferable to have fewer engagements that are more work each. Just look at the numbers above. Say plea bargaining became illegal. Even if the number of prosecutions dropped by a factor of four (highly unrealistic), lawyers would still come out ahead by earning the same money in fewer engagements.

> but not too many of them are complaining about the current system

They have an advocacy organization that does that. The National Association of Criminal Defense lawyers advocates vigorously for changing the system. E.g. https://www.nacdl.org/reports/misdemeanor/

> Millions of people each year are now processed for misdemeanors. In a 2009 report titled “Minor Crimes, Massive Waste,” the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers described a system characterized by “the ardent enforcement of crimes that were once simply deemed undesirable behavior and punished by societal means or a civil infraction punishable by a fine.”

Don't forget the differences in prosecution versus defense budgets. The government has proven it's more than happy to spend millions to prosecute bubble gum theft.

Family court isn't much better:

https://www.divorcecorp.com/the-film/

Your comments are full of hyperbole. It’s counterproductive, unless your goal is only to express the frustration of it all.

Maybe that sentence prompts a knee jerk thought that I don’t want to consider how bad it really is, or that I don’t care about or have empathy for your friend. I assure you both are not true.

It’s just counterproductive to say things like public defenders want to do minimum work. Is that because they are lazy? Or is it because of a budget/management/legislation issue that would better deserve to be highlighted?

These are all not only complex topics but they vary wildly based on location and local vs federal government etc. The reasons may be different.

The point is it would be more helpful to try and identify root causes and motivations, because that shows where the thing is broken.

I personally sat in a courtroom and watched this unfold. In some cases the PD shows up at the last possible minute with some scant details about the case, asks the defendant how they want to plea, converses with the judge, then leaves.

I never made an insinuation as to the "why", just the "what". Are they overworked? Definitely. And yes this is a large city, where the cogs are moving fast. I'm sure in a smaller jurisdiction there is more attention to detail.

> Your comments are full of hyperbole.

If only that were true

What’s true is my response was a little callous and dickish, I shouldn’t post here after all nighters. But that doesn’t make the OP blanket statements productive.

There is cancer, let’s try to understand it and use a scalpel before chemo.

Maybe just naming the city state and jurisdiction? That at least potentially allows specific issues or causes to be discussed.

I think any urban public defender's office struggles to cope with the kind of workload they see. They don't have the resources to take every case they see to trial so they try to convince their clients to plea bargain. I'm sure they're good people and they're trying their best, but at scale, it's hard to provide a bespoke, high quality legal defence.

The public defenders in many jurisdictions are so overloaded that they could not do a good job if they were the most conscientious people in the world.

Many are good people. I talked to one through the whole ordeal who wanted to help, but he was forced to recuse himself from the case. And that's the issue: you are assigned a defender, and if it's an unsympathetic one there's little you can do.

I'm not saying they're bad people; I'm saying that they're assigned far too many cases to give defendants the time they deserve.

Why are they rushing things?

Wouldn't it be better to wait a week to meet a public defender for a day instead of having 20 minutes with one?

How's that going to help? Even assuming no deadlines beyond their control, they'd only fall further and further behind until you were waiting years to even meet your attorney. The system needs to be funded.

But their integrity wouldn't be questionable.

One reason so many people take plea bargains is they've waited so long in pretrial detention they just want time served, a problem you're proposing making much worse. I recommend this article, although it doesn't touch on places like Louisiana where the public defender system is woefully underfunded in the first place. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

I served on a jury recently, so I got firsthand experience in a different way.

I'd disagree with 4. We did arrive at a guilty verdict so you might take that to support your thesis here, but everyone involved seemed genuinely interested in giving the defendant a fair trial. The judge who presided over voir dire and the judge who presided over the trial were rigorous, affable, and sincere in their desires to be fair to everyone. The public defender fought well for her client. The clerks didn't insert themselves. I was really taken by the lengths that everyone went to in order to ensure that we weren't biased by certain facts. For example, it came out in cross-examination that the defendant was on probation. We wouldn't have known that otherwise.

We deliberated for hours, so the outcome was far from pre-determined.

Some other marginally relevant impressions:

1. The courts need more state funding. Your post actually makes me reconsider this, since it could increase corruption. But I think that if you had more judges and courtrooms, it could remove a bottleneck that might lead defendants and prosecutors alike to take the plea deal and move on rather than getting tied up in the courts for a long time. There are probably corrupt interests that make the current system the way it is, but I know that one reason people push plea deals is because the system would become paralyzed otherwise. More money could maybe go to public defenders as well or provide incentives to go to trial and fight hard. I have to think public defenders push towards plea deals because they have too much on their plates already.

2. Everyone should stop making "get out of jury duty" jokes, and jury duty should be more heavily incentivized. It's a lot harder to get a trial by your peers if you're lower on the socioeconomic ladder, because people are trying to get out of jury duty since they can't lose the money from work or perhaps even the job itself (that's illegal de jure, but de facto? Who knows). I'm not sure I'd want my jury to only be there for the money, but there's always gonna be a risk that your jury has bad motives.

3. People watch too many crime dramas. This isn't as relevant to what you're saying, except that it might actually be a counterpoint to your argument. Jurors can be unwilling to convict because the guy didn't confess to the police, get caught on video, AND leave DNA in five spots at the crime scene. It has to be harder to get a conviction now than 30 years ago, for better or for worse.

4. It's amazing how charges can get slapped onto someone. One crime could end up having three or four different charges attached to it. I could see how that'd be scary when it's time to plea bargain, but what can you do here? How can you have a variety of charges to choose from to adequately cover justice for different kinds of crimes without using them as a club to beat guilty pleas out of people?

Only under 5% of cases ends up in actual court. Over 95% of cases pleads. Basically, if you are sitting in the jury, the case is alreasy unusual.