> ‘I was simply not aware of the duties on a prosecutor to make sure an expert witness was fully aware of their duties.’
We cannot have a system where people can be wrongly convicted while being denied a proper defence due to incompetence. Either incompetence cannot be a defence, or convictions must not be permitted to be made where incompetence might lead to an injustice.
Or another way of looking at this: "the prosecution's case would fail if anybody involved on the prosecution's side turns out to be incompetent" should be an absolute defence in any trial and if that situation arises then it must always fail to result in a conviction.
I was at traffic court yesterday and before they got to my ticket they were processing actual criminal cases with defendants walking in the courtroom in hands and feet cuffs.
I was watching the public defender interact and process each case that walked in.
I was extremely unimpressed with the public defender who didn’t appear to know basic details on any of the cases she was representing.
It was a sad reminder that the justice system is still very much imperfect, and the outcome of many cases depends heavily on whether you have money to pay attorneys.
The simplest “proof” of the preferential treatment you get with a paid attorney is you’re almost always the first case on the docket if you have paid representation. Then after the cases with paid representation they move on to the public defender cases.
I would be terrified to face the US justice system without heavy weight defense attorneys - even if I’m completely innocent - because the system isn’t fair by default.
Washington State defined its limits for public defenders as:
Felonies: 150 cases per year
Misdemeanors: 300 cases per year
Juvenile cases: 250 cases per year
So a total of 700 cases per public defender, per year. Assuming no vacations or sick leave, total working hours is about 2000 per year, so they could average not even 3 hours per case, and of course felonies are likely to eat up the lions share of whatever hours they could spend on them.
You're not going to get effective representation from any public defender, even with the most competent lawyers in the world. They simply don't have enough possible hours to spend on any given case to provide competent defense.
Check out the podcast The Kids of Rutherford County to hear public defenders talk about how impossible the work is; especially when you have an absolutely corrupt judge. It's goddamn maddening.
I know a public defender (in family law, so adoption, foster care, child endagerment, etc).
The state pays her $75/h. Most people locally look at that dollar number and feel she is out of touch to complain, but she also has to:
1. have an office that is not her home that can recieve certified mail (and be signed for, no po boxes)
2. pay any staff out of that.
3. Maintain her own computers, and software and access to services needed
4. Hire her own PI's (if needed) out of her own pocket
5. Any other expert consultants out of her own pocket
She also doesn't get any health insurance, or other benefits. And the best part, is the state has a formula they don't disclose, that determines how many hours work they think each case is appropriate for, and don't care how many she actually works. Every time she is paid, it includes a paper only invoice that she then gets to reconcile manually to see which cases are paid off, which are only partially, and which they forgot to pay that month.
The simple, straightforward, and therefore politically impossible solution is to require parity in funding for the district attorneys' offices and the public defenders' offices.
I think it should go beyond that, in that public defense and prosecution should come from the same pool of lawyers and they are graded by success on both sides by type/class of case.
The fact that this isn't the case after 200 some odd years exposes us. We don't care about the right to a fair trial for people who don't have money, it's a lie we tell ourselves.
As someone who absolutely agrees with this in principle, I disagree with "simple and straightforward" - you need to look at case categories (felonies and classes thereof, gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors) for a view on expected effort, and then you need to look at "what proportion of those cases have private representation".
And then this will always be a trailing metric.
I mean, personally I think the simple answer is just blanket equal resources, but there's no motivation to make that happen, but certainly won't be without things like the above.
Elected prosecuting officials is a bad thing, IMHO. The incentives are all wrong. They get elected and re-elected on "being tough on crime", which means convictions, which leads to the simple fact that the US abuses the concept of the plea deal enormously.
Thousands of people who would otherwise be found not guilty (if not are factually innocent) accept plea deals just to be done with a process that can take years to resolve (not to mention money, or freedom, or both, in the interim).
In other countries the use of the plea deal is generally fairly rare, and comes with stringent judicial oversight. Here it is often the first option. "Well, what would your client plead to?"
The situation that you just described would be a pleasant improvement for many of the private sector sole proprietors and small business owners that I know.
Her situation sounds actually far more stable and easier than theirs in a variety of ways. Her client is likely quite well-established, and the risk of it "going out of business" or running into insurmountable funding issues is small. Her client will likely be feeding her a steady supply of work, without interruption, effectively forever. It doesn't sound like she has any marketing, advertising, or customer-acquisition overhead. She doesn't have the overhead of negotiating a contract and fees with each client. Her working conditions are likely quite safe and comfortable (as compared to those in the trades, for example).
I don't think she has much to complain about when compared to what those in the private sector have to deal with.
Don’t small businesses typically get to set their prices though? I realise there’s competition and suchlike but that seems like a pretty important lever that most businesses have but which the public defender described above does not.
Are any of these unfortunate private sector proprietors the sole bulwark against their clients ending up in jail or prison, and always up against better-funded opponents?
You're comparing apples and something far, far different than oranges.
Wow. I had heard that public defenders certainly weren’t in it for the money but that’s worse than I expected.
It seems like the biggest sink would be paying someone to staff the office. I think some coworking spaces are set up to be able to accept certified mail. Has she looked into that?
If an alien landed on planet Earth to watch these cases as they unfold without knowing anything about the roles of the judge, prosecution, and defense, they would inevitably come to the conclusion that public defenders job is to assist in the processing of arrestees so that they can be sent to prison quickly and conveniently.
> It was a sad reminder that the justice system is still very much imperfect,
We don't have a justice system. We have a conviction system. When prosecutors run for office (haha!), they don't brag about all the times they thoroughly investigated an alleged crime and determined that the defendants were innocent and should have charges dropped, they brag about how many they've put behind bars. And, in some cases, it's turned out that those they bragged about were in fact innocent. Additionally, when appeals seem destined to exonerate someone already convicted, something like half of prosecutors will go to heroic lengths to protect those convictions even when forensic science makes innocence clear.
> I would be terrified to face the US justice system without heavy weight defense attorneys
Often, it's enough to have one at all. Public defenders will browbeat you to plead out, and if you insist otherwise, they'll just wink at you and you know they'll sleep through your trial. They exist to give the appearance of defense.
The biggest and most important reform we might enact would be to disallow DAs from using plea bargaining for more than 3% of cases that come through in any given calendar year. The second biggest would be to outlaw bail bonding.
This is a common class of problem with this kind of system. The state level public defender offices are mandated to exist since Gideon v. Wainwright, but the courts aren't really in a position to dictate budgeting. Legislatures could e.g. require budget parity with the prosecutor's office, but largely don't want that because helping accused criminals is politically unpopular.
which leads to another problem, if we can't supply them, we need to reinvent our court system to become more realistic for people to defend their own case without having to worry about the nitpicks of "oh you didn't just say that did you now you're in more trouble you should have had a lawyer"
laws aren't difficult to read nor understand, its however very tedious to make sure you're not missing something important from some chapter of a book you were unaware of. understanding the history of how cases TEND to be prosecuted and dealt with is another whole cultural side of things that are just not obvious to the layman. and this kind of information can and should be more accessible to people currently being processed through the system
i think in the age we currently live in this is a realistic goal for improvement that would also humanize the process quite a lot
> laws aren't difficult to read nor understand, its however very tedious to make sure you're not missing something important from some chapter of a book you were unaware of.
Yea, as a non-lawyer, this is what would terrify me away from representing myself in court. Not whether I was guilty or not, but the fact that it's such a procedural gotcha-game: "Haha! You did not say Magical Incantation 1924 in front of a judge in response to the opposing counsel's Magical Incantation 266! You automatically lose!" Or "Haha! You didn't file a form 27B/6 in the right clerk's office before the right deadline! You automatically lose!"
> oh you didn't just say that did you now you're in more trouble you should have had a lawyer
Yeah, there is so much absolutely farcical stuff that happens in our court systems that would make for champagne-tier black comedy, if it didn't affect people's lives so much.
Accused: "I want a lawyer, dawg!"
Police: No lawyer.
In court...
"I asked for a lawyer and they refused to let me get one."
Prosecutor: "Your honor, the defendant asked the police for a lawyer dog, and knowing no canines that had passed the bar, they were unable to find one. This isn't their fault."
Judge: "Sounds entirely reasonable to me. No issue here."
As a lawyer, I feel like your comment is reflective of the general misunderstandings around this issue.
Sit through a docket or two and you come to a few conclusions. 1. They're all guilty. This is a corollary of: prosecutors like shooting fish in a barrel, not prosecuting cases where they might have to actually work. 2. The role of the defense lawyer in 99% of these cases is to keep them from disrupting the proceedings. 3. Probation / alternative sentences don't work. A good horsewhipping in the town square and 90 hard labor on the farm would be a much more effective way to get through to these people (and thus ultimately more humane).
Even if what you're saying is true (and I grew up with dudes like you're describing) it's extremely important that those folks get due process. If we (the non-criminals) don't hold up the ideals of civilization then we lose the right to perform "justice" on these offenders, eh? I've heard dudes say, "the cops are just another gang", due process is how we make that not true.
Further, a lot of the people who can't control themselves are /also/ victims: lead in the water and air, moms who took drugs during pregnancy (the most out-of-control kid I knew back in the day was a "crack baby", he was neurologically damaged before he was born.)
Whippings and forced farm labor (you realize you're describing slavery?) are not a solution to criminality.
Everyone is entitled to due process and a certain burden of proof regardless of whether or not the vast majority are generally guilty.
The courts should not be dictated by efficiency, but by everyone's rights being fully respected. I understand what reality is but we should strive for better and accept nothing less.
There's another attorney in this thread who seems genuinely unsure why we should be devoting time, effort or energy into people who are "obviously probably guilty". Genuinely unsure might be stretching it too. "Complex criminal defense cases where there's a decent chance the person may not be guilty should get resources, everything else? Eh."
Like... Law School 101. That attitude in an attorney is genuinely disappointing at best, frightening at worst.
I work in a field where "compassion fatigue" and burnout are very very real things (after you administer Narcan to someone for the third time that week, or you go to the home of the person who calls 911 at 3am because they stubbed their toe several days ago and now it has a hangnail that's catching on their bedsheets and making it "difficult" to fall asleep)...
but being blunt - the day those feelings overtake you is the day you should consider what you are doing and why you are doing it.
It has nothing to do with fatigue. It has to do with being able to see rather obvious patterns when they're repeated 100 times a day, day after day, in courtrooms across the country.
As an attorney, I will always fight zealously for my clients, that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about the system as a whole.
> As an attorney, I will always fight zealously for my clients, that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about the system as a whole.
The point of compassion fatigue is that when you start forming these opinions about the people you see, consciously or subconsciously, can you be as sure you are as zealously advocating for your clients as they deserve?
I don't mean to impugn you, to be clear. But that's the thing in EMS too, how am I sure I don't dismiss a patient's complaint as whining, when it's the third time I've seen them that week, even if I take care of everything else they have going on? And how long is it before that compassion fatigue leads me to miss or overlook a pertinent finding that has consequences for them?
a part of the "justice" system is not just to get justice for victims who have been wronged but its also to get justice for the guilty, to make them understand their wrongs and feel that they should be punished
to infuriate people with petty bureaucracy and form-filling as an extremely dangerous gotcha-game does not make them feel like the system actually does them "justice". punishments are meant to bring someone back into society, but if they go into that punishment thinking they were wronged by the process itself, its only making it worse for everyone
I was nearly killed and sustained significant injuries by a driver who didn't obey the law. The crooked cop disabled his bodycam when interviewing a witness who saw everything close up. He only ticketed the driver for driving with a suspension and apologetically told him it wasn't his fault. The prosecutor was uninterested in what happened and, when the driver and cop didn't show up, ensured the punishment was the bare minimum wrist slap of an extra suspension. I didn't get the partial video until a month after the sham trial.
It sounds like what you were watching was a first appearance, though I could be wrong. Depending on the circumstances, the public defender may not have even been appointed to the case until the hearing. The public defender may not even have had an opportunity to talk to the defendant prior to that, and is going mostly on whatever the prosecutor filed.
But that doesn't really matter that much for first appearances. The only real point of first appearances is to advise the defendant of their rights, the charges, take an initial plea (this is almost always a not guilty plea - negotiations for plea agreements generally don't start until after the first appearance), and officially assign a public defender to the case (assuming they are not hiring their own attorney). Depending on the jurisdiction and context a bond may also be set, or that may be in a separate hearing. In some jurisdictions a public defender isn't even present for first appearances, because there's so little for them to actually do.
The stereotype is that the public defenders are all incompetent. But if you actually talk to judges or criminal attorneys you will get a different picture. Judges in particular tend to have a lot of respect for the public defender's office. Honestly, in all the hearings I've seen involving an incompetent defense attorney, they are more likely to be private counsel than from the public defender's office.
Where I live the public defenders just try to convince all their clients to plead guilty and take the lower charge. Was sitting near a public defender with his client in the courtroom once and his lawyer just told him plead guilty and he'll get a light sentence. The client protested that he was innocent, lawyer told him to plead anyway because the bargain charge wasn't serious.
This is why I truly believe that both Prosecutors and Public Defenders should be from the same pool of lawyers and that they are "graded" on both types of cases for promotion, pay, bonus, etc.
> It was a sad reminder that the justice system is still very much imperfect, and the outcome of many cases depends heavily on whether you have money to pay attorneys
I’m not sure that’s true. Prosecutors also throw far more resources into cases with expensive private attorneys.
I saw the end results of the process from the appellate side (where the facts are fully developed), and I know lots of public defenders. I think what you’re overlooking is that 99% of those people are facially guilty. The police and prosecutors are lazy, they don’t want to prosecute marginal cases that don’t have rock solid evidence. My wife defended a murder case where they had almost continuous CCTV video of the defendant shooting the victim and driving home to his house. Just one camera angle after the other. And that was a sufficiently exciting case to warrant her big firm getting involved pro bono.
I also see all these ACLU and Innocence Project mailings. Rarely do you see someone who isn’t guilty. Usually the case is about some legal technicality, or some principle such as whether teenagers should be prosecuted as adults or whether gang members involved in a fatal robbery should all be tried for murder when only one pulled the trigger.
So what you’re seeing is the system doing the best it can with this huge volume of obviously guilty people. The public defenders I know are all on the lookout for the rare defendant who might be innocent.
Even "obviously" guilty people are entitled to competent, robust, and vigorous defenses (and whether or not this 99% are truly "obviously" guilty is an entirely separate HN thread). This is where the imperfection lies: These public defenders have such a huge case load that they cannot properly and competently defend their clients.
If I could wave a magic wand, and we'd magically have 100X the number of public defense attorneys, each now having the ability to properly prepare for and litigate for their clients, even if those clients were "obviously guilty," why wouldn't I?
Sure, but what does a competent defense look like when someone is caught on CCTV breaking into a cell phone store and stealing phones, and then the police find text messages of him fencing the stolen phones? The thing about "poor people crimes" is that they're either easy to prove because what's illegal is doing something you're not allowed to do. (Or they go unsolved, because they can't find who did the thing.)
The reason "rich people" crimes are so expensive to defend is because those crimes often involve conduct that could be a crime or not depending on what various people were thinking at the time they did it, or whether it amounts to a pattern, etc.
I agree with the principle that anyone accused of a crime that warrants a complex defense should get one, whether or not they can afford it. But that's a small fraction of all prosecutions. Society needs to be able to handle the guy who breaks into the cell phone store and was caught on camera in a cost-effective and efficient way.
> Society needs to be able to handle the guy who breaks into the cell phone store and was caught on camera in a cost-effective and efficient way.
I think if you were the defendant, you might feel differently about the importance of making your trial cost-effective and efficient vs. competent and robust. Even that guy who is on TV breaking into cell phone stores should have the opportunity to cast doubt in the jury's mind, unless we think it's a good idea to have a separate "efficient" court system for people who are "obviously" guilty.
> I think if you were the defendant, you might feel differently about the importance of making your trial cost-effective and efficient
Of course! But that’s just an invitation to put aside reason and think with emotions. That doesn’t mean it would be fair to society to do that. And why should we allow a small class of anti-social people to revictimize society in that way?
I was a card-carrying ACLU member for a long time. But working in the court system really opened my eyes to the reality is that there’s a fraction of the population that’s anti-social and repeatedly victimizes society and the communities in which they live. They have rap sheets a mile long, and are prosecuted based on piles of evidence. Society needs some way to deal with these people that’s just to them but also just and fair to society.
The principle of innocence until proven guilty, the standard of reasonable doubt, and the inefficient trial by jury of one's peers is the best we have figured out so far. If there is a better way, I think everyone would love to hear it. But before you propose it, please consider whether it would really provide justice if you were the defendant with the mile-long rap sheet, but who didn't do it this time.
Clearly it's not the best we have figured out, or even a very good method. Look at how much more peaceful and orderly places like Japan and Singapore are, where you have effective, efficient justice.
Again, asking me to think about what if I was the defendant is an invitation to be antisocial. Of course, in that moment, I would say "fuck society!" But that's not a good way for society to make decisions for the good of the whole.
> Sure, but what does a competent defense look like when someone is caught on CCTV breaking into a cell phone store and stealing phones
Protecting their rights? Ensuring an overly zealous prosecutor doesn't overcharge the case?
I was the defendant in a case (charges dropped completely very quickly) where the prosecutor had flagged me as a "flight risk" and wanted me held with a stupid amount of bail and a surrendered passport because I was "here on a temporary work visa only" (actually, lived here 17 years as a permanent resident) and had "no ties to the community" (other than owning a house in the area for several years, working in the area, including as a volunteer firefighter/paramedic, oh, and having a partner and child).
I would easily have spent a good amount of time sitting in jail before the charges were dropped if I hadn't had competent representation, and that's even before we consider the facts of my case.
Why? If you knew 100% someone was guilty, why would you defend them? Isn't the point of the "strong defense" that we haven't established guilt? If someone is guilty, then give them the consequence of the crime, unless you think having some guilty people get away with it (at substantial cost) is in the best public interest?
I understand providing a way to determine guilt and innocence without bias, but if everyone knows someone is guilty, isn't trying them and/or defending them just a waste of resources, with the best outcome being "same as plea bargain" and worst possible outcome being "goes free without punishment, despite having committed crime"?
It’s a token effort to catch the false positives. If you put in no effort you’d start to become overconfident in the guilty assessment and an increasingly larger percent of defendants will be considered guilty even though more of them will in fact be innocent.
Plus there is more to it than guilty/not guilty and the state should not be permitted to take shortcuts.
Our whole concept of justice enshrined in the US Constitution is that the truth must be ascertained by a jury of your peers from a fair presentation of the evidence and arguments in a court of law. And it is entirely to prevent people from being "rubber stamped" guilty and discarded. At its heart the trial is about ascertaining the truth, with the understanding that the verdict has some powerful gravity for everyone involved.
> If you knew 100% someone was guilty, why would you defend them?
Ask defense attorneys, I think you'll be surprised at the number of "yes" responses. How do you establish that "everyone knows" someone is guilty? You're assuming the conclusion as true and then reasoning from there. Put yourself in the shoes of a defendant who "everyone knows" is guilty. Would you not still want a robust and aggressive defense?
Ok I get what people are saying, but you are describing the common case, where guilt is in question. I'm talking about the parent comment which is saying "even if someone is known to be guilty they still deserve defense." You're talking about the common case -- where there is doubt to guilt and/or someone maintains innocence. Do you also believe someone who admits guilt should still be defended (e.g. hide this fact from the jury and proceed as though they didn't admit to the crime)? The only reason for defending someone is because they may be innocent, there is no advantage to excusing a guilty person. Or do you believe there is an advantage to excusing the guilty?
I also understand why we have our current system, and that there may be false positives, I'm merely commenting on the fact that we should not defend those that are 100% known to be guilty (and I'm not claiming that its easy to ascertain, but that in cases where people plead/confess, maybe its for the best).
Let's enter fantasy land for a moment and assume that we even can ascertain whether someone is "100% known to be guilty" without a trial. Say we have a crystal ball that we can just ask. That person still is entitled to representation to ensure that all the proper procedure was followed (was the law somehow broken when the crystal ball was consulted? was the crystal ball accurately calibrated and configured? is it a real crystal ball and not a knock-off that always says "guilty"?).
Even if there was no crystal ball! The defendant admitted and signed a confession. He still needs a defense. Was the confession forced or obtained under duress? Did the defendant know what he was confessing to?
And even if there was no crystal ball, the defendant confessed voluntarily and understood fully what he confessed to, cooperatively admitted everything to the point where there is zero chance of reasonable doubt. He still needs a defense. Who is going to ensure that a fair punishment is imposed? Without a defense attorney and proper procedure, what stops the judge from simply imposing the maximum sentence for everyone?
In the US my dad had something like this happen to him. His lawyer told him the charges were misdemeanors and it'd be better to plead out, so he did. After his prison term, almost a decade later, he successfully argued this in front of his state Supreme Court and was granted post conviction relief. At that point he'd lost almost a decade of his life, but he was now able to get a real job. Long way of saying I don't trust our legal system to be fair and I pity anyone caught in its gears.
Edit: the details were fuzzy. Rereading the case, he plead nolo contendere and it was a PCR trial decision appeal. I updated those parts.
He always insisted he hadn't threatened her- just used choice words, but it was reported as a threat. I remember that after this, every phone call he had was recorded. Every one.
Man that's insane. 10 years is a bonkers sentence. Like even if this went to trial what evidence was there besides a phone record? You bet I'd push for a trial or at very least some discovery.
Wait, the lawyer said they were misdemeanors when they were really felonies? I would think even in that case the judge would be very clear someone was pleading guilty to a felony.
EDIT
Read your other post...wow. Even the worst attorney should be able to make sure their client understands the charges. In this case, the judge and prosecutor should have done the same. What a travesty.
I think you’re misreading what he’s saying. Let me translate from lawyer speak to regular speak
“Yes I knowingly broke the rules and got caught, but I don’t feel it was that serious, though I’ll admit the mistake if we can settle it with minor disciplinary action under the pretext that I just didn’t know any better”
Yes and its a big story in the news and everyone knows about it. The Judge is clearly corrupt and the state supreme court have already weighed in. It's pretty clearly an extraordinary situation.
Can you say more about this? The last I read, the state supreme court has accepted the case about the attorney's 'contempt of court' charge, but has not:
- issued any opinion related to any of these issues, or
- accepted any case about the judge being corrupt, recusing himself etc.
So far, to my knowledge, none of the people that botched this spent a day in jail. So what good are these inquiries that span years until they fade out of public interest, maybe some people get a slap on the wrist and they move on with their lives like nothing happened while others had their lives ruined beyond repair?
> what good are these inquiries that span years until they fade out of public interest
That appears to be the purpose of these inquiries. They very slowly and methodically move forward until the public are either forgetting about the issue or "let bygones be bygones". Until then anyone who should be held accountable (criminally or politically) can answer that they cannot comment on the matter while the inquiries are ongoing. (which is in itself a way to ice the discussion while making it appear as if the person asking the question is out of order, and not the person not answering them) It is a delaying tactic by powerful people against less powerful in the society. Change my mind if you can.
> That appears to be the purpose of these inquiries
Strong disagree. I’d say these drip drip disclosures are swaying public opinion and we’ll end up in a position where the public are clamouring for blood.
> we’ll end up in a position where the public are clamouring for blood
I would like to be as optimistic as you are. Simply the history of these things is not making me so.
Grenfell Tower, a terrible fiasco 7 years ago. The inquiry is still plodding on. Who went to prison for that one? Some folks who tried to scam compensation money for themselves. But nobody from the companies who sold the flammable insulation.
Contaminated blood scandal happened in the 70s and 80s. By the time the inquiry finishes (if ever) everyone who will be implicated has long retired.
Undercover Policing Inquiry? Still ongoing 9 years on. No end in sight. Again if it ever finds anyone responsible will there be any repercussions for them?
In the case of the Hillsborough disaster the police leaders were not prosecuted until 2017. 28 years after the incident.
Justice delayed is often justice denied in practice.
It’s interesting. The BP oil spill in the US: it was basically determined, in a 15 minute meeting between maybe 2 politicians and a businessman, that BP would be fined massively, by a certain amount they would decide, but not destroyed. Then there was 2-4 years of process to perform that for the public.
Like at the end of the day, in reality, a judge with a law degree and very limited life experience doesn’t really know what should happen. The decision for big public fiascos - the oil rig said BP on it, the oil came out when it wasn’t supposed to, what is there to investigate? - is political.
The delayed justice here was not denied. You have to wonder, what is the downside of coming hard on a flammable cladding manufacturer?
The Supreme Court reversed another triumph of political judgements - the indemnity of the Sacklers - so unfortunately, things seem to be trending away from pragmatic, politically driven solutions to problems and more towards the RNG of the Supreme Court.
The US is basically governed by playing Yogg-Saron now, and Clarence Thomas is the premium illustration.
The Bloody Sunday inquiry reported 38 years after the event.
I'm sure there are others we are forgetting.
And then there's the inquiries that haven't even started yet. Our security services colluded with America's post-911 international kidnap, torture and murder program. David Cameron promised an inquiry when he became prime minister. I guess he found out that ministers were complicit and changed his mind.
You need public and political will to have any inquiry, though. I don't think pointing out that there wasn't the political will to have a real Bloody Sunday inquiry more recently than the 38 years it took is the same as the original point which is that inquiries are a stalling tactic to delay (or avoid) trials.
In the event that happens, it does not rule out krisoft's hypothesis about the purpose of these inquiries.
I would point out that if criminal proceedings are a possibility, the presumption of innocence will have the consequences listed in krisoft's post, and while these consequences are convenient for the people and institutions directly and tangentially responsible, it does not follow that this convenience is the inquiry's only purpose.
Is there a serious possibility of criminal prosecutions arising from this inquiry? if not, then conducting them as if that possibility existed might itself be seen as a delaying tactic.
Sure, and we can’t know the minds of others, so the hypothesis is unprovable either way. I would say that public enquiry followed by a trial (if warranted) seems a generally worse outcome for potential defendants, than the other way around, given that it gives the prosecution a lot more time to get their case solid, and given that there’s no risk of hitting double jeopardy restrictions.
If I was at the center of this, I’d prefer to have a trial before an inquiry, rather than inquiry followed potentially by a trial.
> I would say that public enquiry followed by a trial (if warranted) seems a generally worse outcome for potential defendants
I agree with your reasoning but I can't recall any single examples where it worked out that way. That being said I don't store the full history of British legal system in my mind. Maybe you have some examples where someone got punished due to a public enquiry?
I imagine some of the people involved would indeed prefer a trial before all the evidence has been unearthed, even though that worked out so badly for their victims.
Botched is being kind. Lied, cheated, and covered up to destroy people's lives when they knew at the least these people were working with a faulty system, at the most they knew these post masters were completely innocent.
And that's why I hate the "they're paid more because they have more responsibility" when responsibility is just a farce.
Get everyone from the bottom to the top (who were responsible for their people) and dish out prison sentence. Just add from bottom to top: someone hid some data? 2 years. Their manager? How many people under them got sentenced? 4 then that's 8 years for mister "I got responsibilities". Go up the chain to the top decider.
The other thing that has not happened are the necessary changes to legislation and procedures with regard to expert witnesses to prevent this happening again and again.
I wonder how many other people have been wrongfully convicted or otherwise damaged (e.g. financially) because "the computer says so"?
Private meetings are fine. No issue there. The judge however, erred. He should've never allowed the disclosure to not be disclosed. You can redact information that is harmful to the state, or is not relevant to the case, but in this case, the fact that the system that was being used as the basis of detection of fraud, was in itself being audited, should've meant that it was to be included and disclosed to defense.
In my non-lawyer opinion, the judge is the one that erred, and it is compounded that this matter came up in a private meeting without defense, thereby supporting the idea that private meetings should never be had, when there are always exceptions for them.
Perhaps in the UK, but in the US a private meeting is not fine. The term is ex parte and in most states if it isn't outright banned it's highly discouraged.
Pretty much the only time it's allowed is when there's classified information in the mix, and for that there's a huge process beforehand to make sure the defense has access to enough information to make their defense.
This article presents a very odd version of what happened. Simon Clarke was the lawyer that actually stopped the Post Office prosecutions as soon as he got involved.
In this case he went to the judge and said he was aware of the existence of a report that needed to be disclosed, but it could not be given to anyone (including Simon Clarke) until the report had been presented to parliament. The judge granted the exemption for 8 weeks, after which the report was provided to the defense.
Tip of the iceberg imho, I would say this is fairly standard practice in UK law now for everything from police notebooks to dna evidence.
UK legal system stopped being about law and became all about trying to stem the collapse of trust in it a very long time ago.
Now imho there is nothing to trust, every decision some corrupt kafka like show of idiocy.
To see how corrupt they are you only need to look at Rishi soon sacked taking pride in a promise to leave the EHCR if they dont let him deprive a few people of basic human rights in order to demonstrate he is tough on immigration - all while his government gives every illegal immigrant free hotel accomodation and a huge weekly allowance higher to make them come in the first place.
The only thing we are seeing here is yet another public glimpse into why no one I know still in the UK, rich or poor, has any faith in its institutions any more.
> tough on immigration - all while his government gives every illegal immigrant free hotel accomodation and a huge weekly allowance higher to make them come in the first place.
Ah, a tabloid caricature.
The UK government would love to stop paying for asylum seekers (NB during this status they are not illegal immigrants), but cannot work out a way to do so that is actually legal under ECHR (and the various UN conventions on refugees). While their asylum case is pending, the government does not allow them to work, and they're not even allowed to seek private rented accomodation, so the government is obliged to look after them, which they do in the minimal possible way. Meanwhile their asylum cases drag on, which is good for nobody, but the Home Office is unable to process them at a reasonable speed.
The inability to even secure a working deportation process results in hundreds of thousands of people - humans - being stuck in the system.
No, bringing them in is policy, because they have a shrinking population from the low birth rate and anyone with an inch of ethics left 10 or 15 years ago (I was the last in my school year to do so)
The refugees are not a "policy", they're a crisis which the government has completely failed to deal with.
The Home Office is more and more aggressive every year against legal immigrants. People complain about illegal immigration but fail to actually do anything about it, more from incompetence than anything else.
I'm willing to bet that this is still the situation in a decade, because there really aren't any other approaches that aren't horrific. There's no sign that Labour understand this or have any plan for improving it.
So then why are they so keen to get to the UK from France?
I suspect because it is easier to work illegally here as the authorities have no interest in preventing it - having lots of people working at below minimum wage keeps inflation down.
Well some are trying to reach the UK, not all. As to why that is, I don't think any of us on HN can confidently state the reason - none of us have surveyed them all and processed the answers. They may be living in poor conditions and (incorrectly) assume the UK is somehow a more welcoming, tolerant place. They may have family, friends or connections in the UK, or they may simply speak English and have some kind of cultural closeness with the country that they don't have with France. However you're showing a bit more about yourself than you might realise, by assuming that they're purely doing it to work illegally.
It should go without saying that moving anywhere is stressful and not something you take lightly. Even if you're comfortable and well off it's not a walk in the park. Those who are crossing the English Channel in boats aren't doing so because they're after an easy life, and god knows they won't get one when they arrive. They've often endured hardships most of us can barely conceive of, and to do all that simply to live outside the system and work illegally? I find it hard to believe.
There is one problem in that data. It classifies people by country of birth. Because something like (IIRC) 10% of British citizens live abroad a lot of people who are "British citizens by descent", like my younger daughter, were born abroad. She actually spent more of her childhood in the UK than my older daughter who is "British born".
The Migration Observatory is a great source of data. There is a fascinating one on racial discrimination - lots of unexpected results.
See what you need to do if you want to refute something I said is actually go through each point and refute it. Not dump a link and declare checkmate. Either do that or go away.
Thats exactly what i did.
Posted a well researched article by a reasonably well respected educational establishment that disproved every point you tried to make.
Might I suggest you actually read articles like that instead of wandering around claiming no one can be sure of anything then shouting at me to leave my thread when I call you out on obviously never having researched anything you were talking about.
This isnt kindergaten any more, mommy isnt going to read the books to you.
And France does a basic sanity check of any application and rejects it after a day or two.
e.g. pretty sure they are supposed to apply in the first "safe country" they arrive in, everyone who doesn't can just be rejected.
whereas the UK gives them everything indefinately for years.
That's intentional policy, everything else is just a distraction to keep the yokels mostly satiated. No one with more than a double digit IQ could believe sending a few hundred of them at random to Rwanda would be a more effective policy to stop it over just rejecting 99.9999% of applications quickly and efficiently.
> all while his government gives every illegal immigrant free hotel accomodation and a huge weekly allowance higher to make them come in the first place.
People seeking asylum in the UK receive £49.18 per week[1], and get thrown into monstrously low quality accommodation - the current government essentially throws them into prison barges[2].
You really should read something other than tabloids. The reality of the situation is nothing like what you’ve described.
You seem to miss they are coming from countries where the average salary for a 70 hour working week is £50 a month while they lived in a corrugated steal house with no electricity, (mostly because the American proxies blew up their actual houses)
meanwhile, after 6 months of failing to find a job english families are being thrown onto the streets by the 10s of thousands to live in sleeping bags and eat from food banks.
1 in 52 people in London is homeless - the belief is none of them are immigrants.
In that world routinely keeping key evidence from the defence, and far worse, is 100% to be expected.
do some cost of living adjustment with that 50 pounds. and don't forget that they are not allowed to work.
thousands of English families are out of jobs because the UK left the EU, also because the underfunded NHS folks are not getting the care they need and thus many people end up with severe disabilities that would have been manageable. (or they are taking care of someone because there's no help from the system.)
20% of the UK workforce, nearly 9 million employees, were not born in the UK.
leaving the EU has nothing to do with any of the UKs major problems, which are massive national debt, government corruption, complete lack of ethics or values left in any of its institutions, the systematic dismantling of the NHS and a legal system more interested in saving face and protecting wealthy criminal interests than actually practicing justice.
Then wonder why everyone dislikes immigrants getting the lions share of social benefits and having 0% trust in any of the institutions.
Many, like myself, move from a developing country to a developed country not to get a better job / more money, but instead we spend a great deal of money to get away from lawlessness. It is precisely to get away from shenanigans like this.
Now i am starting to think all the great efforts were in vain
>Now i am starting to think all the great efforts were in vain
This doesn't make any sense. The difference here vs a lawless dictatorial country isn't that humans are magically all perfect angels in developed countries, but what you're seeing here: investigation by society and people caring, able to talk about it, able to research, able to muster political will around it, able to change all of government in response. This sort of case of massive abuse and criminality by very powerful figures should be rare, but when it does happen there are still fallbacks. There is still a free press that can dig into it and report on it and apply pressure doggedly for years. There are separations of powers that make it more challenging for any one entity to suppress everything. In the UK they did a full TV miniseries around this, lots of articles in major papers, there is an ongoing podcast, vs sending the first journalist to ask questions to prison. There are still regular changes of government at the vote of the population, and in turn incentive for different groups of politicians and new generations of them to gain power by digging into malfeasance of existing ones. There can still be public inquiries long after the fact.
The entire point of all the various checks and balances and defense is precisely to try to, eventually, steer things back onto the right track when, not if, they start to veer off. Humans are humans the world over. The slower, louder, argumentative processes of democracy and law are our so far best effort to try to corral that reality. Of course it would be better if such things just never happened at all, but getting from A to B has always been the challenge. Noisy popping of pus is gross but much better then letting it fester under the surface forever.
I think it's going downhill fast. I remember being 12 and watching bbc world news, every few months, after a scandal, you'd have a minister/high ranking official apologise and resign. it was completely different from the unapologetic cnuts at the head of my birth country at the time. now we have people like Dominic Cummings who basically broke his own rules and insisted it was fine for him to keep going until he was really forced out, and of course many more of these similar cases - some even lost to a salad.
> Now i am starting to think all the great efforts were in vain
This is such a big story, precisely because it's rare that the judicial process goes this wrong, and so when it does everyone wants to know why and what can be changed to prevent a reoccurrence.
Which country are you talking about? Or are you just making things up and applying them to every single non-Western, non-Northern country?
The Chinese execute people for corruption. In Korea and Japan, executives kill themselves out of shame when they screw up. In Britain, every posh shithead handed a job is too important to fail.
Which are the developing countries you’ve lived in or are familiar with which are counter examples?
I’m not sure people generally consider Korea and Japan to be developing countries. I get the strong impression that Chinese executives get in trouble when they lose political favour.
People's lives were ruined over this. People committed suicide over this.
Those complicit in ruining their lives to cover the blunder of the post office, execs, and third party companies should see jail time. The careers and paychecks of the wealthy and powerful do not trump justice and lives lost.
> Smith suggested that an investigation report from the time should not be disclosed to [Noel Thomas] when it was reviewed in 2014. If it was to be disclosed, the inquiry heard, it should be heavily redacted – and Smith himself had written that Thomas should not be shown a Post Office note from 2005 which noted that operator Fujitsu was testing the reliability of Horizon.
> ‘Such a [note] may well invite a request for disclosure of the test results,’ Smith had emailed a colleague. ‘There may also be a risk that [Thomas] will suggest the investigation was inadequate or incomplete.’
Yeah, no shit.
You know, in my company we have yearly "compliance training" courses where we have to hear imaginary stories about employees who gave gifts to potential clients, illegally agreed to divide up the market with competitors, and so on. I feel like everyone in the prosecutor's office should be forced to read a certain number of cases of innocent people who were wrongly convicted every year, including all the quotes like this.
The Post Office’s culpability is manifest, but this is first and foremost a massive miscarriage of justice that discredits the British judiciary and its chumminess with fellow Establishment members.
If you have a chance, the sedately paced but brutal TV adaptation of the scandal is well worth the watch. What they did to a demographic of genial middle-aged village shop proprietors to cover up their own administrative and regulatory failings was nothing short of stochastic terrorism.
It's not about peers and poor, it's about immigrants, and racism within the post office - the abhorrent assumption that immigrant families who get contracts as sub postmasters were 'on the make'.
It was reported in the lords that >40% of those prosecuted were immigrants, with a high proportion of asian women, which, given the very low level of asian women in the prison population is hard to believe.
For reference, hansard has what was discussed in the lords:
The whole point of this coverup was to benefit the elites or cover up their failings. We have a dodgy contract, acceptance of a faulty system, and desire to cover up its failings because that would lead to ruined careers at the C level. Misallocation of funds would be investigated, we would have to figure out where did millions of dollars actually disappear to, etc.
The middle classes involved, solicitors, etc. are culpable in the sense that they serviced the machine and enabled it, but they not the beneficiaries, they are just cog in the machine. If a specific person would refuse, another would soon take his place.
So the real blame lies with those who were comfortable giving outright criminal orders.
If/when the accountability starts to become inevitable, that gives them lots of bus-fodder, then.
One thing that I have learned (and, no one else seems to have learned), is that Accountability begins and ends at the top.
It doesn't matter if it was a "rogue employee." The top head is Responsible. That's (ostensibly) why they get paid the big bucks (or so I'm told, but never shown).
So are you suggesting that every time an employee commits a crime, CEOs should go to jail alongside them?
Every time a politician commits an offence the president/prime minister should go to prison?
Every time a pupil breaks the law, the principal of the school should go to prison?
I'd suggest the reason 'no on else seems to have learned' it is because it's a ridiculous and impractical idea.
Should CEOs (etc) be punished if they knowingly aid and abet crime and/or cover it up? Sure, I think most people are on board with that.
You're exaggerating this, but there certainly used to be concepts of ministerial and executive responsibility, even for things which were not entirely within that person's knowledge or control.
Ministers used to resign voluntarily. "Cabinet collective responsibility" used to be a thing. As recently as the Major government and the first term of Blair.
These days senior Tories greet the idea of responsibility with a shrug. That's how we got the Truss disaster, and why they're on course for electoral wipeout.
Used to resign voluntarily? They still do, part of why the Conservative government has been so ineffective is that their ministers are constantly resigning or being fired, either due to disagreements with government policy or for some over-the-top honour related reason (e.g. they were accused of being mean to a civil servant).
There are ministerial positions where they've had as many ministers in as many years!
That's exactly how this works in regulated industries. At UK banks there is criminal liability for senior management for institutional failures.
Concretely in this case, if you are bringing a prosecution and you fail to uphold the rights of the defendant, yes I absolutely think you should face criminal liability for that.
> So are you suggesting that every time an employee commits a crime, CEOs should go to jail alongside them?
Pretty much, yeah.
Happens in the military (not always, of course, but more common).
The argument I always hear, justifying the enormous pay differential, between the CEO and their staff, is that the CEO is ultimately responsible for everything.
Are they filled with other CEOs? I thought boards were filled with different people concerned with different topics. Where do you see that they're filled with other CEOs?
Just as a quick first check, of the three most influential/connected directors listed on the front page: 2 are ex-CEOs, and the third is a mixture, including having been Obama's ambassador to the EU. How did you see how many are CEOs out of the total?
The website doesn't have an overall table of stats. You yourself noted that 2/3 of the top 3 are ex-CEOs. They might have taken on those directorships when they were still CEOs. They might take on new CEO roles in the future. I think the overall point stands.
It doesn't seem to - 2 of the top 3 people might be ex-CEOs, but that doesn't mean that all board members are CXOs. That's why I was asking how we see it for all board members, and not just the top 3.
> that doesn't mean that all board members are CXOs
Yes even one contrary example would disprove this statement. I thought the original sentiment was boards are dominated by top executives in industry, and not that literally 100% of board members are currently a CEO. The former isn't obviously untrue to me, the latter is easily disproved.
It isn't even necessarily wrong to have mostly CEOs or ex-CEOs on boards. You really do want experienced businesspeople as board members. But that conflict of interest or "class loyalty" should be kept in mind when discussing whether CEO pay is set by a competitive, open market.
I just acquired this belief from throwaway comments in the FT over the years. I do know that generally boards are filled with CxO people, because they tend to have the right experience.
I'm just complaining about the ethical rot. I have always believed that leaders need to be held to higher standards than anyone else, and, if they want to cry about it, they should distribute their pay to the folks that have to bear those standards, because their "leaders" won't.
Yeah wtf! Isn't a basic tenet of a fair trial to have disclosure of exculpatory evidence and that there should be no private meetings without defence present?
The UK legal system (in all its nations) is very much a broken and unfair one where power alone decides your guilt through abuse of procedure.
Just look at their private prosecution system, the government pays the bills of the private prosecutor but not the defense so you can just run the trial until your opponent is bankrupt.
We cannot have a system where people can be wrongly convicted while being denied a proper defence due to incompetence. Either incompetence cannot be a defence, or convictions must not be permitted to be made where incompetence might lead to an injustice.
Or another way of looking at this: "the prosecution's case would fail if anybody involved on the prosecution's side turns out to be incompetent" should be an absolute defence in any trial and if that situation arises then it must always fail to result in a conviction.