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How common is it for people to look down on defence lawyers because they "defend bad people"? Do people not understand that the only way to defend the wrongly accused is to ensure that everyone receives as strong a defence as possible? On a similar issue, how would you recommend reducing or eliminating the large advantage that the wealthy enjoy when it comes to interactions with the criminal justice system?
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Jun 21, 2015 21:52
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BigHead posted: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. Sounds like a decent way of padding one's win record, as I can't imagine any of those nuts actually win their cases.
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Jun 22, 2015 17:49
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Phil Moscowitz posted:Yeah but you are playing a dangerous game. All it takes is a judge waking up on the wrong side of the bed and then you are the idiot who lost an argument to a sov citizen, up on the wall of shame you go. Never thought about it that way. You're probably right. Though I imagine you have a safety margin, since even if the judge is in a very bad mood, he's likely to get pissed off with the sovereign citizen before anyone else.
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Jun 22, 2015 18:16
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Monaghan posted:It canada, sovereign citizens were so plentiful that one Alberta judge wrote a 700+ paragraph decision that refuted pretty much every one of their arguments. No way they're more plentiful in Canada, even Alberta, than in the US. First of all, half of that moron's arguments (the one who the judge is talking about, not the judge himself, who is witty and hilarious) seem based on a bizarre conception of US jurisprudence anyway, and second of all, that's only the second sovereign citizen I've ever heard of (another one claimed his rental apartment was an embassy or his personal sovereign nation or some rubbish, in order to avoid eviction). Could a US judge refer to a Canadian case as a precedent where there are no substantive differences between the laws in question? I think Canadian judges are allowed to refer to cases in other commonwealth nations (and possibly the US?) but I'm not certain. EDIT: Regarding DUI, it seems like there are a lot of abuses on both sides that would be illegal in other circumstances. For example, here in Alberta, you can have your car towed and license suspended as an administrative penalty without being over the DUI limit, and you have no legal recourse. Likewise, failure to provide a breath sample (even if you literally cannot do so, as in the case of one woman who had COPD) can result in your license being suspended until your trial, as does any charge of DUI regardless of circumstance. At least up here, it seems like the deck is so stacked against people accused of DUI that I don't mind defence lawyers having a few tricks up their sleeve to balance it out. In our haste to stamp out the dangerous practice of driving drunk, it seems like we've gone a bit crazy, at least to me. What are your professional opinions of the current state of DUI laws? PT6A fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jun 22, 2015 |
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Jun 22, 2015 19:18
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Gleri posted:About the DUI stuff, I'd just note that having your license suspended is an administrative matter, not a criminal matter, and would be done by the relevant provincial authorities. That is to say, it's very likely, though I don't actually know how Alberta works, done by a completely separate group of people from the police and the Crown who would not at all be communicating with each other. The province can suspend a driver's license, in general, for any number of reasons. In regulated activities like driving the government has a lot broader powers to tell people what to do than in non-regulated contexts. You do not have a right to drive a car; that's why you need a license. If the government thinks you might be a danger on the roads I think it's sensible to suspend your license and to wait and see the outcome of the trial. I don't at all see how that stacks the deck against a criminal defendant in a separate preceding for impaired driving. Depending on the circumstances, those administrative powers seem reasonable, but I think they're being abused at the moment. You now must have your license suspended over 0.05 even though it's only against the law to drive over 0.08 (or otherwise impaired), and any circumstances which result in not giving a breath test result in an indefinite suspension regardless of whether charges are appropriate. Like the woman who had COPD and could literally not provide an adequate breath sample. I'm not defending drunk driving at all; it's a crime, I don't do it (even if I suspect I'm over 0 but under 0.05), I've reported suspected drunk drivers to 911, and I wish we could eliminate it. I just think the processes that go on around it, whether administrative or criminal in nature, are pretty deeply hosed up. It's too easy for an innocent person to get hosed over, and too easy for a guilty person to get off -- the worst of all worlds. And, ultimately, it seems like it's being used as a cash cow more than in the interest of public safety in some jurisdictions. I don't think the criminal justice system should work that way.
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Jun 22, 2015 21:27
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Monaghan posted:I'm from Saskatchewan I've worked on some of these cases and there's no real defence trick that I can think of. At best you can appeal the decision to the Alberta Transportation Board. However, the Alberta Traffic Safety Act states as soon as the court finds that you driving at above 0.05 you are done and they have to uphold the suspended license. What I'm saying is that it's too easy for someone to get railroaded over not being able to provide a breath sample or driving at 0.06, but also too easy for someone who was at 0.15 to get off through a plea deal, like my idiot acquaintance who's managed to collect 6 DUI arrests/charges over no less than 3 jurisdictions, but no actual convictions (trust me, he was guilty every time). He still has a license, and probably still drives drunk regularly. It seems like DUI prosecution is broken as gently caress on all sides.
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Jun 22, 2015 23:52
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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? From a layman's perspective, it's obvious that bail is a very imperfect system, but what alternative do you propose? A non-negligible percentage of arrestees really are guilty, and should be kept in jail, yet it's unconscionable to keep an innocent person in jail unnecessarily. Recently we had a case of someone out on bail killing someone in a hit-and-run here, after a gas-and-dash. That was clearly someone who was a danger to society and should've been kept in jail. To a certain extent, if we accept that people are innocent until proven guilty, one has to make sure it's possible to be released from jail pre-trail, but seriously painful to gently caress up while released. I don't know what the right answer is, unfortunately. If I, or anyone, did, then we wouldn't need the bail system.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:43
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Tokelau All Star posted:Guilty means "Judge, it was me, I did it.", no contest means "Judge, I don't want to fight the charges." It seems problematic to me that you can punish/imprison someone who has neither been found guilty nor admitted guilt. Do you think the justice system benefits from having this plea available? What do you think about the Alford plea? That's pretty hosed up too, but it makes more sense to me than having "no contest" as an available option. Is it maybe even the same thing by a different name?
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Jun 25, 2015 05:27
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nm posted:Kind of, I think. The fact of your arrest is basically always public. It is on a police blotter somewhere and if the media picks it up, with google, it will never die. Seems pretty bad, still. Obviously, this extends to more than criminal law alone, but what do you think of the EU's "right to be forgotten?" I'm of two minds. Obviously, I think arrests with no convictions should not be publicly available at all, and to a certain extent I don't think convictions should be easy to find except for necessary background checks for certain jobs/positions. On the other hand, the only time I've dealt with it personally, I (and my other co-workers, and boss) found out that one of my co-workers had a conviction for sending a picture of his schlong to 12- and 13-year old girls, and soliciting child pornography from them, which he'd neglected to mention (obviously). It wouldn't have been as big a deal, but he was still a creepy motherfucker towards pretty much every woman he came into contact with, and that information did a great deal to contextualize it. In general, I think once people have served their time, they shouldn't have a scarlet letter, but this guy clearly had not learned his lesson. How would you propose balancing the interest of allowing convicts to reintegrate into society, with the public's right to know when they could be dealing with a predator (sexual or otherwise) who may not have been as rehabilitated as we all hope? EDIT: There's also a particularly bizarre case here in Canada that showed the problems associated with those sorts of laws. There was a case of a girl who was bullied to the point of committing suicide after being sexually abused at a party, with photos being spread around after the fact. Because she was a victim of child pornography, it was illegal to publish her name in relation to the incident, even though her parents wanted her name publicized to bring attention to the crime, and to advocate for anti-bullying efforts. I believe it finally got changed, but there was a time the parents could not even use their own name in relation to the incident, due to our "victim protection" laws. I don't know where I'm going with this, really, but I may as well ask: how do you prevent the law from crawling up its own rear end in cases like this? It was clearly protecting the abusers more than the victim in this case, even though the law was implemented with the best of intentions and for a very important reason. PT6A fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jul 5, 2015 |
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Jul 5, 2015 04:39
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nm posted:The whole answer would be complex, but I would at minimum prohibit police from disclosing the names of arrestees before charge. If PC can't even be met, they don't need to be releasing that. Totally. Even people with charges that are later dropped, I think, should have the right to have any references to such eliminated. Or would you disagree? I know a guy who has been charged of DUI something like six times (and he's guilty as sin of all of them, and many more for the times he didn't get caught) but never convicted because he has good lawyers that can always plead it down to something like non-criminal dangerous driving. While a guy who is charged with something he didn't do doesn't deserve to have a stain on his record, I can see the other side of the argument that says the public has a right to know about people like my acquaintance, even if they've never actually been convicted of the crime they've been charged with repeatedly. It's a fascinating question to me, and I certainly appreciate the many ethical and practical issues everyone involved in the criminal justice system must face on an almost-daily basis. PT6A fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jul 5, 2015 |
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Jul 5, 2015 04:53
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Drewjitsu posted:I know this may be a strange thing to understand, but if he was never convicted, he actually wasn't guilty (which is entirely different form "innocent"). You might have even seen the certificate of analysis each time, which stated he has a BAC over the legal limit, but guess what? Thanks to the sterling work of the local RCMP or police, they managed to gently caress up his Charter Rights to the point where the certificate was kicked after a Grant analysis, or upon review by the Crown, the case was not going to stand up at trial. You could also have the issue where thanks to recent development in the case law (thanks St-Onge Lamoureaux!) a failure to maintain logs of maintenance procedures done to the breathalyser constitutes a breach of the Crown's obligation to disclose all relevant fruits of the investigation, including whether the breathalyser was in working order when it took the sample. You're correct, I don't know exactly how he got the charged reduced, but he did admit to me that he had been drunk on each occasion (and I know he continues to drive drunk, because he's a severe alcoholic). Also, a few of them happened in the States. I don't know the full story, but he presented it to me basically as I did in this thread "I throw my money at lawyers until it goes away." I think ultimately it's best to hold the Crown to a very high standard, and I'm not saying his lawyers acted unethically in defending their client, I'm just saying that this sort of thing is probably one of the reasons people are in favour of having records of charges made public.
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Jul 6, 2015 00:14
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Drewjitsu posted:It's an asinine proposition, frankly. The entire point of the criminal justice system is to determine if proof beyond a reasonable doubt exists of the alleged crime. If so, then criminal record. If not, then no criminal record. What is difficulty of this system? For every one of your crazy friends, you have someone on the other end of the spectrum who get dinged for non-conviction records on police background checks. No, I agree 100% that people acquitted of charges, or not charged, should not have arrests or charges noted in a public location. I'm just pointing out why some people feel differently. I can understand why people feel that way without feeling that way myself.
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Jul 6, 2015 01:12
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Drewjitsu posted:Mentioned before, but every time one of these comes up in Canada (more or less), thanks to Associate Chief Justice Rooke of the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench, they get dealt with quickly: That is one of the most amazing things I've ever read (and this isn't the first time I've seen it, I read it a long time ago), and it's one of the very few things that makes me proud of my province in any way. That judge did a wonderful thing.
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Jul 9, 2015 07:40
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junidog posted:What I don't get is who the "gurus" are. They seem like fraudulent hucksters, but without fail it seems like whenever they get in trouble (generally for not paying taxes on the sales of their hucksterism) they use their own nonsense techniques. Shouldn't a true fraud be hiring a real lawyer for themselves? I wouldn't expect a snakeoil salesman to actually take snake oil to cure his own headache. I guess getting a real lawyer would put an end to your fraudulent ways, but so would being in jail. An uninformed opinion on my part, but here's my guess: the bullshit artists actually have some understanding of the law, enough to make their bullshit seem believable, and also enough to themselves avoid the court system entirely. Do you think the "gurus" rant about being a sov cit when they get pulled over for speeding? I don't think so; I think they pay their fines like the rest of us, like reasonable people. These "gurus" don't need to claim their rental apartment is a sovereign embassy to try to get out of eviction, because they have money and probably own property, so these situations don't ever happen to them.
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Jul 10, 2015 05:46
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