Many Criminal Lawyers Take the Defendant's Money; Do Little Trial Preparation; and Urge the Defendant to Plea Once He/She Has No More Money to Turn Over to the Defense Lawyer - A Process Known by Judges and Attorneys as "Fee and Plea"
What this means is that the defense lawyer keeps asking for more and more money from the defendant or the defendant's family, prior to trial (and possibly during the occasional trial which is started), and as soon as the defendant and his family run out of money, urge the defendant to plead guilty. Meanwhile, the defense lawyer, knowing that 19 out of 20 of his/her criminal cases are going to result in a conviction by a "Guilty Plea", even though the client may not be guilty, does not do all that needs to be done to prepare for trial, because the vast majority of his cases wind up with his/her client pleading guilty. The lawyer who gets the most and does the least for the client becomes the most financially successful criminal lawyer, because he/she retains a large part of the legal fee without doing the promised work or getting the needed experts, or conducting the needed investigation. From the criminal lawyer's standpoint, it can be said that as long as the prosecutors are corrupt and abusive, there is very little the criminal lawyer can do without large sums of money to try to overcome the corruption and abuse, so why not take as much as you can get, and do as little as possible. How do you fight a corrupt prosecution, which refuses to accept or turn over exculpatory evidence. The defendant is not allowed discovery rights as a general matter, and the prosecution is permitted to obtain millions of dollars of discovery over a period of several years or more. How can you fight this, the criminal defense lawyer would probably say.
The criminal lawyers probably believe that to fight the system is too costly and could impact adversely on the other 18 criminal cases which he/she needs to settle through as favorable a plea arrangement as possible.
Another factor is that federal judges are appointed in far fewer numbers than the matters which are presented to them for handling, and it is generally known that federal judges tend to hand out harsh sentences for those who dare to go to trial and lose, as most of the defendants are bound to do because of the abusive and corrupt practices of the prosecutors.
In any event, regardless of the cause, what can be done about this Fee and Plea method of convicting 95% of the persons who are accused of criminal conduct, many of whom would not be convicted if the criminal system were just?
Defendants should discuss this problem with their attorney before committing to the attorney (because by giving the attorney the money requested, the defendant is preventing himself from hiring another attorney, due to lack of funds).
Defendants and their attorney should prepare a game plan with various goals, and the attorney should report every week or two on the accomplishment of the goals, or lack of accomplishment, and the defendant should be involved, to keep the lawyer on track. The defendant has got to assume responsibility in this regard because of the prevalent practice among defense attorneys not to do what needs to be done to obtain a just result. The attorneys know more than the clients, and are not telling the clients how bad the system really is, until the money supply runs out, and then the attorney can't act fast enough to convince the client to plead guilty.
Why doesn't the lawyer start off the first interview with a statement that the indictment is tantamount to your conviction because of the corruption and abuse in the criminal system, and you might as well plead guilty right away, and save yourself and your family a lot of money. By pleading guilty today you can probably get a much lower sentence, and get it over with more quickly.
The result is that we have the largest prison population, per capita, of all civilized countries, which undoubtedly is because the accusation is the conviction, without due process and without any trial. At the same time, the prosecutor's fame, compensation, power and importance shoot up, and the last thing the prosecutor wants to hear is that he/she did anything wrong, or that he has convicted hundreds of innocent persons (meaning, convicted persons who would not have been convicted under the rules of the game if the prosecutor had stayed within the rules).
Remember, the rules are designed to prevent innocent persons from going to jail, and we purposely permit some guilty persons to go free in order to ensure that innocent people are not convicted, and jailed or executed. We are obviously failing in this respect, and not only with hundreds of innocent persons being convicted or murder and being executed, for a crime they did not permit. The situation is much worse when it comes to non-capital crimes, where the press is not focussed on the illegality of the system, and in fact is a major cause of the abuses taking place through their editorial policy of advocating more heavy-handed enforcement against alleged criminals (whether they committed the crime or not).
Copyright carl person.
James Silverstein is the worlds worst lawyer. He is stupid and mean and he's a con man who turns on his client in the worst imaginable ways. He and his crony, Peter Knech are dark dark ugly characters who will make you lose faith and steal you money. I hope no one has to go through what they put us through and now they are lying through their teeth to win at all costs.
ReplyDelete