It’s not a protection racket, because the person you’re paying isn’t the person who would otherwise threaten you. And an attorney cannot represent both sides. That’s like Professional Ethics rule number one.

Besides, the government doesn’t have the time or resources to criminally prosecute most minor violations of the law. If you end up in a position where you need a criminal lawyer, it’s rather likely you did something really foolish to attract enforcement attention.

And if you can’t afford an attorney, you can always take your chances with a public defender. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

At least in the US, this view seems misinformed. The US holds 24% of the worlds prison population and imprisons .7% of its population.

An unfortunate reality is that US law enforcement tends to be selective in its enforcement and prosecution based on geography and class. A college student may get a slap on the wrist(expulsion) for a drug offense while a street kid goes to jail.

These figures don’t change my advice at all. Punishment and procedure are two separate subjects. If you think the punishments the US imposes are severe, that’s an even greater incentive not to commit crimes you can’t afford to defend yourself against.

And the vast majority of prisoners aren’t being convicted and sentenced due to parallel construction or other such trickery. In most cases, they’re the result of a garden-variety guilty plea, often to crimes of lesser severity or magnitude than the original charges.

>not to commit crimes you can’t afford to defend yourself against.

I'm more worried about the cost of defending myself from crimes I didn't commit than the cost of defending myself from crimes I did commit...

Odds are you have nothing to worry about.

A dude recently got kneeled to death by cops (not president authorized death squads or court authorized death squads, mind you, normal cops) for allegedly a fake $20 bill. I think there is plenty to worry about.

Why, are you passing around counterfeit currency or doing anything else to attract police attention?

And I’m not justifying the police’s behavior, mind you. Total miscarriage of justice and abuse of power.

This is close to the “nothing to hide” argument, but even then it doesn’t work. People with nothing to hide, doing nothing wrong, are scared of being targeted. That is a completely unacceptable situation. That is definitively illegitimate governance that asks for violent retribution.

Also, [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

As long as you don’t piss off a billionaire.

Innocent people plead guilty. 66% of drug crime exonerations were from guilty pleas, not trials. This fact invalidates most of your reasoning in your last two replies above.

http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE.G...

It doesn’t invalidate my advice that you should hire the best defense counsel possible. We have an adversarial trial system because we don’t know of any better system to get to the truth of a dispute or a charge, and if you find yourself on the wrong end of it, you’re well advised to come armed with the best defense possible.

Case in point: the very document you posted says, “The proportion among adult sexual assault exonerations is particularly low, 4%. Perhaps avoiding the stigma of a sex-crime conviction is so important that few innocent rape defendants plead guilty...”

Are innocent people imprisoned? Yes, that happens and that is terrible. I don’t think any right minded individual wants that. But as the document itself pointed out, most innocent prisoners plead guilty. If they had good defense counsel (which they almost certainly didn’t) and they were in fact innocent, then they would not have been advised to plead guilty. The document itself says that most innocent prisoners plead guilty to avoid pretrial detention, which no competent criminal defense lawyer would recommend.

The existence of exceptions to a general observation doesn’t mean the general observation is invalid, just like the existence of cosmic rays screwing up a computational answer doesn’t make the general design of a CPU a doorstop.

This is what I was referring to:

> If you end up in a position where you need a criminal lawyer, it’s rather likely you did something really foolish to attract enforcement attention. And if you can’t afford an attorney, you can always take your chances with a public defender. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

> If you think the punishments the US imposes are severe, that’s an even greater incentive not to commit crimes you can’t afford to defend yourself against.

Those come across to my eyes as “you’re the idiot who got yourself here, shoulda thought of consequences sooner.” But given

1) unequal policing that targets the poor,

2) police corruption that goes uncorrected,

3) overworked therefore often inadequate public defenders,

4) the practice of throwing the book at anyone who dares go to trial among other ways of coercing a plea deal,

it is way too easy to be innocent and poor, with your only real options being “plead guilty for 3-5 years” or “go to trial with the deck severely stacked against you and risk 30+ years.” With 95% of cases pleading out, there’s simply no way that innocents caught in the system are anywhere near “cosmic ray” levels of rare. Which brings us back to this statement from ‘harimau777 way upthread:

> A system where you are only protected if you pay isn't justice, it's a protection racket.

You disagreed with the second half of that statement, and that’s fair. Maybe a better way to state the main sentiment there is: A system where you are not protected unless you can pay isn’t justice.