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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

>the police and courts don’t actually care about justice, if they did, the system would look massively different.

Seems overly cynical. How about public defenders, Miranda rights, etc.?

The US court system is set up to be adversarial. The belief is that you get the best overall outcome by having one set of people who try to convict, and another set of people who try to acquit.

One can also make the system look bad from the other direction by arguing that public defenders are terrible, because their job is to help criminals walk free. https://xcancel.com/katanaspeaks/status/1954636840272884111

You're welcome to argue against the overall concept of an adversarial court system. But the system has to be taken in total, rather than selectively focusing on one side.

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The same public defenders that are unpaid and overworked to the point where they have less than 15 minutes total to work on your case while the prosecution has unlimited funds and resources?

Miranda rights don't work the way most people think they do (https://www.cgmbesq.com/blog/2022/july/the-many-misconceptio...) and courts have gone out of their way to deny people their rights.

The system is corrupt and broken from top to bottom.

>the prosecution has unlimited funds and resources?

Nope. One needs to take the system in total.

"Since New York State’s 2019 discovery reforms were passed, dismissals in cases involving domestic violence rose 26 percent in New York City. In 2023, about 94 percent of cases were dismissed in New York City and nearly 50 percent were dismissed outside of New York City. In many cases, automatic dismissal of cases has put survivors of domestic violence and other crimes at greater risk."

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-and-state-o...

This increase is a direct result of passing 2019 "discovery reforms" designed to safeguard the rights of the accused. Read the list of examples on the page I linked and tell me that prosecutors in NYC have "unlimited resources".

It's a constant balancing act.

And BTW:

"Public defender jobs in many places are intensely competitive. Many of us went to law school specifically to become public defenders and have zero interest in working for a big firm. I had a merit scholarship to a top 20 law school and only applied to public defender jobs."

https://xcancel.com/kit_sionn_witch/status/17749841523596168...

> This increase is a direct result of passing 2019 "discovery reforms" designed to safeguard the rights of the accused. Read the list of examples on the page I linked and tell me that prosecutors in NYC have "unlimited resources".

You'll notice that in all of those cases the prosecution had evidence and they just failed to hand it over or screwed up procedure. They can screw up badly enough that cases get dismissed, but that's not a lack of resources or time.

It's also a very different situation from public defenders who can do everything right but don't have the time or resources to get the job done. To be clear, I don't think that public defenders aren't skilled or qualified or willing to help. They're just very often insanely overworked to the point where they can't possibly put in the time their clients deserve. Even the NACDL admits that this is a problem.

Public defenders can also make a good living, but I think it's clear that private defense attorneys get paid more on average.

A lot of the problems come down to a lack of accountability. Police who commit even the most egregious offenses often don't face meaningful consequences, and the judges, prosecutors, attorneys general have even less accountability.

Even access to our justice system is highly limited for people without a lot of money and outcomes are often determined by who has the most cash to spend.

The results of the whole system speak for themselves. You simply don't get the incarceration rate the US has with a fair and just system.

Maybe if they hired more public defenders, applying for the job would be less competitive?

In the US, public defenders may try 1000 cases a year, may not meet you until five minutes before the initial plea, may have essentially zero investigative capability. Court cases may take years to arise, bail may be effectively denied by virtue of economics, and the plea bargain offered is often <5% of the sentence sought, while being the ultimate way of settling nearly every case.

Arguing for the merits of an adversarial system is one thing. But many parts of due process are effectively completely dead for the vast majority of defendants, and prosecutorial discretion rules the justice system almost completely for those of us who aren't millionaires. "Adversarial" might work for OJ Simpson, but it hasn't worked for most of us for a long time, and the US prison system holds the most prisoners per capita in the world - it isn't close†.

Defenders of the shortcuts we have created proudly justify it as saving the taxpayer money; of making workable a situation where they feel they are underfunded by an order of magnitude, but the reality is that it is justice amputated of essential components. If you want to save money, maybe consider making fewer things illegal, and imprisoning people for a shorter amount of time, but go back to actually holding real, speedy trials that are effectively adversarial in nature. In the meantime, we have a judge/jury/executioner in the DA's office, and they get re-elected electorally largely based on their conviction rate; Like shooting fish in a barrel.

†Depending on how you view internment camps for specific minorities

It’s not about cynical: it’s a purely risk/reward calculation. If you talk to the police and nothing happened, you don’t gain anything. If you’re found guilty though, it turns into a massive inconvenience. There’s no positive ROI.

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