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Baron Porkface posted:Do Public Defenders have a real incentive to do their job properly? Incentive? They're lawyers, they took an oath to defend their clients rigorously. And they do it very well every day despite having thankless jobs (which I thank them for).
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Jun 22, 2015 04:08
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blarzgh posted:How many of you have actually dealt with Sovereign Citizens before? In this Texas municipal Court conference, when asked, like 75% of the prosecutors here raised their hands. I get about three per year, but I deal with nut jobs who live in the woods a hundred miles outside of civilization (and then come to town where they run over people while driving their rental car drunk) so my stats are high I'm sure. I honestly can't think of a prosecutor who hasn't at least run into one in court. Thankfully we have a prosecutor in the office who is a glutton for punishment and finds those guys hilarious so he volunteers to have all their cases assigned to him.
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Jun 22, 2015 16:58
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Vox Nihili posted:Genuine question: how often does this happen, and how do you make that determination? What happens with "borderline" cases? The process of declining to prosecute people depends on who charges the person and what level the charges are. It's a pretty complicated question. The big factors are whether the crime is a misdo or a felony, and whether the crime happens in front of the officer or it's the result of an investigation. It's hard to generalize a strategy for screening cases other than "look at the police report, listen to whatever recordings, determine whether the case sucks." Also keep in mind that the grand jury is the one with ultimate charging authority for felonies. Several times we have referred charges to them, or initiated investigations for them with no charges resulting. And sometimes we refer, say, an assault case that they bump up to Attempted Murder. We then have no choice but to go forward with the Att. Murder. Sometimes the cases are "borderline" but not in the sense of whether the defendant is guilty, but rather the question is what crime can we prove? We know the end result is going to be "guilty," but is this a Murder 1 or Manslaughter? If a grand jury supports a Murder 1 charge, we would let the trial jury decide that question, because that is their job and not ours. Sometimes a case gets initiated but a speedbump is later identified, like we initiate an assault case then learn the victim moved to Greenland without telling anyone and we can't go forward. Sometimes we take cases that are hard to prove but the defendant is such a shitbag that we can't cut him the same slack as the soccer mom who had one too many wine coolers and slapped her husband. In short, that's a complicated question with a lot of moving parts. As with most questions asked of lawyers, the answer is "it depends." But if I'm not confident the facts support an eventual guilty verdict, there is a near-zero percent chance that I'm going to prosecute it. And even if the facts do support a guilty verdict, I'm probably not going to ask a jury to decide a $10 WalMart shoplifting case or a 30 year old dude with a joint. BigHead fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 03:31
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Titan posted:Can someone please explain to me how bail is legal? If you can't pay it, you sit in jail till your arraignment or even your trial, which could be weeks or even months. If you're found not guilty how has the state not committed a violation of your civil rights, or due process? In Alaska, bail exists to do two things: ensure the person's appearance in court and ensure that the person is following the court's conditions. The first concern is more or less a gut call by the judge, and depends on whether someone is a life-long Alaskan or whether they are a seasonal fisherman who has been in town for two weeks. Appearance is almost always backed up by cash. Appearance bond is handled three ways: "unsecured" is if you can't pay anything you just sign a piece of paper promising to show up. Then if you don't show up the court enters a civil judgment against you for whatever the paper says, and that civil judgment goes straight to collections. So if you sign a $500 unsecured bond, you just sign a piece of paper and get out of jail ASAP, then if you don't show up the $500 gets taken out of your next PFD (that sweet sweet gubbmint money Alaskans get every year). The other is through a bail bondsman. If they have to post, say, a $2500 appearance bond on your behalf, you have to put %10 down and then have collateral for the whole amount. They also own your rear end and will track you down if you go on the lam because it means they lose their $2500 if they lose you. The third way is just pony up the cash yourself. Bail in the vast vast majority of cases is either the unsecured or the $250 to the bondsman, which most people can scrounge up. The type of bail that ensures you perform on your conditions is called performance bail. Performance usually comes in only two ways: cold hard cash or we have a system of "Court Approved Third Parties." The CATP serves as your babysitter and is there to call the cops on you if you don't follow your conditions. Conditions always include no alcohol, and usually include things like no contact with the victim, don't return to wherever you burglarized, medication only by valid prescription, no driving, that sort of thing. If you pay the cash bail, which is usually in the $100-$300 range, and get caught I get to seize your cash (after a little mini trial). If you can't afford the cash, you ask your parents or girlfriend or coworker or an ankle monitor company or any combination thereof to babysit you. The babysitter isn't there to stop you from drinking, he's there to call the cops if you do drink or abscond or call that bitch of an ex wife whose leg you shot, leading to your pending assault charges. In Alaska, there is also a presumption that no bail is necessary, even for murderers. So we prosecutors need to convince a judge that you are a flight risk (tourists vs locals make an easy gut call) and that you won't perform on bail (it's not hard to convince a judge that a career alcoholic is probably going to drink tomorrow). Basically, unless you murder someone, you get out by signing a piece of paper or finding like $300 that you get back once you plead out or get found guilty or get found not guilty.
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Jun 23, 2015 07:59
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PostNouveau posted:Defenders: Are the prosecutors on the up-and-up, or do you suspect something like that Orange County misconduct scandal is going on in most of their offices? nm posted:In California, the majority of prosecutors are ethical (though often have a pretty simplistic world view), however unethical behavior is not punished by thier superiors and the bench and is often rewarded, so you have a shockingly high number of unethical prosecutors here. I'm sure it varies, but up here in Alaska, the public defenders operate on their own totally separate rules of ethics and professional responsibility that are completely insane and change daily with the whims of whatever judge we happen to be in front of. It's nuts the stuff they can get away with, stuff that if I pulled I would be sanctioned and probably disbarred within like five minutes. Then we have a few true believer defense attorneys who are cookey outliers and think all cops are engaged in a broad conspiracy and blah blah blah tinfoil hats to protect us from gubbmint drone surveillance. The huge majority of defense lawyers are just normal people though, even if some operate under different rules than I operate under. Fun story: we have this public defender up here who has a fantastic reputation for pulling the craziest poo poo in court. Someone once charged this gal for driving drunk and running over this little kid on a bike. The little kid was fine, she just had road rash, but it's still a felonious assault to drive drunk and cause an accident resulting in any injury in Alaska. Anyway, two days before trial this defense attorney convinces the judge that a) his client is like 8 and a half months pregnant, b) it's a super high risk pregnancy, c) she is going to have to do the trial from a hospital bed next to the defense's table, and d) the court is going to have to pay for a nurse to sit with her during the trial to monitor her. The judge buys it because the defendant has always appeared over the phone from her remote village and nobody has seen her since arraignment. The prosecutor of course freaks out and offers to continue the trial for several months but no no no, this defense attorney says his client wants to get it over with sooner than later and wants trial to start on Tuesday, not several months from now (in Alaska, with rare exception the defense bar unilaterally picks when trial gets scheduled for anything but murder charges or cases with like 30 witnesses). So the judge buys it, and orders the court administrator to organize and pay for a nurse to show up, but he also says the defense has to provide their own gurney. This was a phenomenally huge mess that had to go up several chains of command with emergency orders be issued to tap special Supreme Court funding and poo poo like that, because nobody had anticipated this crisis in the history of the State. Trial is set to start, we have a jury panel ready to go, and we have all the crap set up on Monday to start trial on Tuesday. And Tuesday morning in saunters the defense attorney and his client, who it turns out is 2 months pregnant, fine, and totally unaware of all the hullabaloo regarding her loins. Turns out the defense attorney just made the whole cockamamie story up just to rustle some feathers and have some fun at the court's expense. It worked, too. That defense attorney has given more ulcers to lawyers in this state than Vodka, which is saying something. I think he's hilarious. During a basic weapons possession trial (possession of brass knuckles, which are illegal in Alaska), he brought his entire gun collection to court and lined it up in the back of the courtroom just to emphasize how stupid the brass knuckle law was when you can literally own as many bazookas as you want in this State. He also broke a podium with a prosthetic leg to show how his client was defending himself from a guy with one leg. DAs are also just normal people doing our job. Though I am very glad that our DAs aren't elected officials and aren't swept aside every few years for an incoming governor's political buddies. Having political aspirations means having to make cases in the media, which leads to all sorts of hosed up conflicts for prosecutors. Nobody in my office needs to justify a win-loss ratio, so I have a lot more normalcy in my job than someone whose win-rate ratio is attacked by angry tea partiers every few years. I'm sure there are some true believer prosecutors that exist that will fight tooth and nail every low level drug charge, or get all unethical to avoid pleading out a big case, but I've not seen them up here.
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Jul 2, 2015 08:35
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Shooting Blanks posted:There's been a few questions about prosecution integrity here and in the corresponding legal system D&D thread, but I haven't seen this one asked: If we found out a prosecutor withheld evidence he or she would not be a prosecutor any longer. If we found out a cop forgot to log in some random piece of evidence or upload some audio or write their supplement until a trial started, it would be a Tuesday. And I would drag the officer into court to explain to the judge what was going on. Then the judge would continue the trial for however long the defense wanted so they could look at whatever random crap the cop forgot to put into evidence. Up here, and I can imagine many other places, the defense gets everything relevant, whether exculpatory or incuplatory. It's not the prosecutor's job to win a case or hide evidence or game the system for a win. We are after the truth, not some nefarious motive. poo poo my office doesn't have the manpower or the resources to pull the wool over a toddler's eyes, we certainly can't play any weird conspiracy games. Defense wants something totally random that's barely even connected to a case? They can have it. What do I care? If the dude's guilty he's guilty, and if he's not he's not. Fighting over discovery are not fights that we are ever going to win or spend resources on, unless it's some totally wild request. And even if it is a totally wild request we give it to the judge to figure out what's relevant, then the judge picks what gets discovered, not us. Actually, now that I think about it, the only requests that we fight are officer personnel files. Since defense attorneys give defendants all their discovery (and since some defense attorneys are crazy rear end anarchist types in their own right) we don't give out cops' home addresses.
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Jul 21, 2015 08:10
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Yeah we have a whole Victims Rights Act that sets up not only a procedure to keep the victims informed and active in cases, but it set up a whole office of attorneys who represent victims in criminal cases. That leads to some hilarious things, when the Office of Victims Rights attorney pulls some poo poo that the prosecutor doesn't have the balls to do, like appeal sentences that pro-dv judges hand down.
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Jul 21, 2015 21:30
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