cromulentenough: dataandphilosophy: ... - Exploring the Interesting

cromulentenough:

dataandphilosophy:
kirbymatkatamiba:
mitigatedchaos:
theunitofcaring:
Popehat pointed me to this distinctly Orwellian transcript from a federal court case, in which the defendant, who wants to plead guilty, asks if she has to affirm in the plea agreement that her public defender did an adequate job when he’d actually missed all their meetings, missed key court deadlines, and couldn’t answer questions about what she was charged with:
The Defendant: What I meant to say is that at the end of the plea, it says that I have to submit and say I have been … that “I am satisfied that my defense attorney has represented me in a competent manner,” … I don’t want – I’m scared to go to trial because I don’t think that he’s going to, you know, put a fight for me. Your Honor, he didn’t submit any pretrial motions at all.
… Do I have to have the clause in there about my attorney? [referring to the part of the plea colloquy where she’s asked if she’s satisfied with her attorney's representation]
[Prosecutor]: Yes. You’re asking me?
The Court: Yes, you do. Who are you asking?
The Defendant: Just – I don’t know.
The Court: Well, you turned to [the prosecutor]. That’s part of [Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure] 11, ma’am, because you have to be satisfied with the representation and understand the terms and conditions of your plea agreement.
But in terms of satisfied with the representation, it doesn’t
mean – There’s – In terms of competent representation, it doesn’t mean that [your public defender] has to look at and touch every single aspect of the case. If [the prosecutor] reached out to [your public defender] and said,
okay, count number one and count number ten, which happen to be what we’re seeking your client’s guilty plea on, here’s the discovery information that directly relates to Count 1 and Count 10. If he reviews that,
that’s a diligent lawyer who’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing.
…
The Defendant: Why is it the fact that even if I’m willing to take the plea, that clause about him, about my attorney? Why do I have to submit to the fact that he competently, you know, advised me in the matter?
The Court: Rule 11, there’s certain things that must happen if a person says I wish to plead guilty. As part of Rule 11, you have to believe that your lawyer is competent and has represented you properly.
The Defendant: Your Honor, I don’t believe that, but at the same time I’m scared to go to trial with him because I don’t think that he’s going to do me justice.
The judge says that if she doesn’t want to go to trial and probably get life in prison, she has to plead guilty, and she’s not allowed to plead guilty until she affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel. If she will not agree that she was competently advised, it goes to trial, and her trial lawyer will be the one who missed meetings with her and a life sentence is on the line.
She affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel.
The whole thing is just nightmarish, but to me the most nightmarish bit is that it was over a marijuana dealing operation. She was facing life in prison, she got 121 months with the plea, this whole charade of a just system charaded along, over her boyfriend growing and selling weed.
So, uh, have your usual reminder that fuck the American criminal justice system.
Now imagine the incentives of privatized for-profit prisons and prison labor on top of that - TUoC surely has, but there are still too many people that support it.
This probably wouldn’t even be that hard to remedy if they just allocated more money to hiring public defense lawyers, but who will do that? (Certainly not the state where they tried to draft the governor in due to a chronic shortage of available public defenders.) Republicans don’t actually believe in good government - they believe in the myth of bootstraps and tax cuts. Democrats don’t believe in it either, so instead of solving it we’ll just get some other bullsht social program that empirically doesn’t work, or schools that don’t discipline bad behaviors until they end up on the wrong end of a cop.
This all undermines the public’s faith in the justice system and the state generally, which makes policing itself harder, likely increasing crime. (For instance, similar failures involving simultaneous under- and over-policing continue to undermine the inner cities. Some people there now believe it is done on purpose, and they likely wouldn’t believe prosecutors could protect them from drug gang retaliation - so why would they cooperate to get rid of the drug gangs?) You can try to get around that with propaganda, and indeed to a degree they do, but it has to bottom out at reality somewhere.
Even imagine a simple rule like “as much money has to be allocated to your defense as they spend prosecuting you”. I bet most Americans would even consider that fair. But where will the political will to materialize it come from?
Note that (in the linked document) an appeals court ruled that this judge denied the defendant her right to counsel, and vacated her convictions as a result.*
So this has nothing to do with a need to hire more public defense lawyers, or with less money being spent on defense than prosecution. This is a case of misconduct by a specific judge and a specific defense attorney, which caused a ruling that was *correctly invalidated* by an appeals court.
(And yes, everything else about this case is messed up. But this specific insinuation that @theunitofcaring seems to be making, that being pressured into pleading guilty because of an incompetent defense attorney is just allowed, is not true!)
*To be clear, she still probably went to prison (I don’t know); the appeals court only ruled that she was pressured into her guilty plea, making it and its consequential convictions invalid. Essentially this just resets the case back to before when she decides whether to plead guilty or not guilty.
Eh, it’s certainly related to the fact that public defenders are massively overworked: the fact that a judge looked at this situation and thought it was remotely reasonable is related to their experience of prior public defenders.
But I read tUoC as saying, like Popehat does in the article, that what we see here is a care for the forms of “justice” over actually doing the right thing. This is a case where it’s abundantly clear that something is wrong, but the judge doesn’t care, the prosecutor doesn’t care, we’re supposed to have rights and instead we have, as tUoC called it, a charade.
i’m also reminded of like, the fact that you’re under oath and you often have plea deals where you didn’t do something but you don’t think you can win the case so you plead guilty. When i was religious i could easily see that being a huge deal to me and making me not want to plead guilty even if it was what was best for me. what would happen if you said ‘can i plead guilty but not under oath? because i didn’t actually do it but i’m just saying i did for the plea deal’?