How Paid Experts Help Exonerate Police After Deaths in Custody

One of the really surprising articles I came across was that there exists a group of elite law/business school professors who charge over $1k per hour to basically defend mega-mergers to lawmakers [1]. Some of these professors make tens of millions of dollars individually.

This appears to be something similar. It must really pay to be an “expert”.

1 - https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-mor...

Prosections against cops are weird because in criminals prosecution's generally (1) the cops side with the prosecution, regardless of how weak the evidence is and (2) the experts are more or less on the prosecution's payroll (not relevant here but generally the non expert witnesses are also on the prosecution's payroll in that prosecutors are allowed to intimidate them with threats of prosecution which can be hell even without evidence or offer immunity). Obviously (1) and (2) are not true with cop dependents.

Thing is these cases are probably more fair than cases with non cop dependents. In particular if the taser manufacturer says they're safe that's something the jury should know.

The authors of this article might not know this or understand what it means, but US criminal courts are an adversarial system. All the opinions the authors here have the prosecution could present to the jury, or allude to on cross.

The issue with flame bait articles like this is that they don't help incarcerate dirty cops, but harm everyday innocent defendents. You're on trial for murder, and like most cases the cops and witnesses are bought and paid for, and you can't even hire an expert witness because some government official read a mislead NYT article and thought it was unfortunate the Chauvin prosecution had to put in effort cross examining witnesses! Despite him being convicted on all counts!