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Comment by joe5150 | Hacker News Reader

how many people can realistically pull $120,000 from friend and family _and_ expect to pay it all back?

Well, if I were your friend you'd be roughly halfway there, and if you couldn't pay back then I probably would not lose sleep over it. It depends on your friends, on your standing with them and possibly on who their friends are.

That said, the American legal system is totally fucked up and of course it should not take that kind of money to stay out of jail if you're innocent. The burden on society in the longer term is terrible, the burden on these individuals unforgivable. The fact that there are no penalties for prosecutors that wrongly convict, no proper compensation for time served and that prosecutors tend to do dick measuring contests based on their conviction rates doesn't help either.

Even if you can only pull $12,000 or even $1,200 ALMOST ANYTHING is better than relying on the public defender.

The public defender is overworked and understaffed. Having someone dedicated to you in the criminal justice system is a huge advantage--especially if you are guilty.

(As for being guilty, there are a lot of things that can land you with a felony that are far short of murder or armed robbery. Having a lawyer of your own can sometimes mean the difference between a felony that will haunt you forever versus a misdemeanor that can be expunged/erased/etc.)

> The public defender is overworked and understaffed. Having someone dedicated to you in the criminal justice system is a huge advantage--especially if you are guilty.

It's a real shame that the fate of an innocent person's life is determined by a system that's pay to win.

To think that you can lose a massive chunk or maybe even your entire adult life for being falsely accused because your public defender is in a bad mood or doesn't have enough time to look into your case is total insanity.

It's how the system is intentionally designed. It's how people want it. They want high conviction rates and a 'tough on crime' attitude and don't really care much about truth or justice at all, especially if the accused is poor and doubly especially if they're also black.

That attitude really backfires when they are the ones wrongly accused, heh

They are white and rich. That system doesn't apply to them, by design.

The only time I really remember someone rich and famous going to jail was when Wesley Snipes tried to avoid paying income tax.

And I feel like that was more to send a message out to the general public that it doesn't matter how much money you have, if you try to evade taxes you will get thrown in jail. It wasn't so much a personal case where a good lawyer could get you out of having your only life ruined.

Then again, I don't watch the news or follow politics at all. In any case, it's messed up that money drives something as important as your freedom to live your life.

Wesley Snipes also made the bad decision to not be white.

It really is so much worse than most people realize. I was in a courtroom where around 20 county jail inmates (innocent until proven guilty) were shackled together with leg chains and handcuffs while two public defenders (whom none of those accused had ever met before) stood before them and explained that they were their lawyers and then spent a whole five minutes explaining that they had better just plead guilty because if they don't and lose in trial they will get at least twice as much time as the plea deal. I saw this more than once.

Taking the public defender option is basically an admission of guilt. You aren't even trying to defend yourself really.

Yes, being poor makes you automatically guilty.

You can actually do much worse than a public defender. Calling e.g. a lawyer who works for a "mill" (like those guys who advertise on TV, in my hometown it's Kerry Steigerwalt -- who makes a living pleading out DUI's with the least amount of effort possible, but would take your murder case without asking) will get you a guy who is just as overworked and understaffed as the PD, but unlike the PD, does not care about justice at all, only making money. They will do anything that results in a reduction in their workload, even if it means years in prison for you.

At least with the public defender's office you get someone who gives a shit, even if they are overworked.

More importantly - if you get falsely accused, shell out 120k, then what? Courts can still decide that everyone pays their own legal expenses... sounds like falsely accusing someone is enough to ruin them financially.

> how many people can realistically pull $120,000 from friend and family _and_ expect to pay it all back?

Taking everything said at face value, you pay 120k for 6 years in the job market. That's 20k a year, without interest.

edit: please don't read this as an "oh, only 20k a year" comment. My intention was just to make the number approachable by connecting it to the given return.

In the same way one would explain unreasonably high college expenses.

That's more than half of some (most?) peoples' salary.

On top of all other typical expenses and obligations, that's effectively a respectable mortgage that most households in the US[1] likely wouldn't be able to afford. It's a pretty ridiculous financial burden to shoulder for anyone who isn't in roughly the top 10th-percentile income bracket.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26...

Keep in mind that in the us the median income per capita is less than 32k. It's hard to save 20k a years on that kind of revenues.

Try getting a high paying job with a criminal record. Even if you were acquitted.

And going to trial with an expensive lawyer is not guarantee of success. You may have an actual criminal record and years in jail before you can begin to pay that back.

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