Poor people are rarely accused of incredibly complex financial crimes or decades of being a Mob boss, nor do they usually have ungodly amounts of government resources targeted personally at them. Apparently the message the Feds are trying to send is "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Should preface this by saying that I am trying to gain a more full understanding of your logic.
I wonder if you could elaborate on what your point is a bit? I'm not following how being "... accused of incredibly complex financial crimes..." makes it more unjust to be deprived of adequate legal counsel than being accused of possessing marijuana, or selling marijuana for instance.
I think jessriedel above made my point a bit more clearly--the amount of resources available to the defendant ought to be roughly comparable to the amount of resources spent by the government on prosecution. For a routine pot charge, a properly funded public defender's office would be adequate.
For the Conrad Black charges, it wouldn't be, but the only reason the Feds brought a case as complex and questionable against Conrad Black in the first place was because of the large amounts of money involved and Black's personal wealth. Allowing him to use that wealth in his defense restores some balance.
Would it not be preferable if both the prosecution and the defense had fairly limited resources? It doesn't seem better to me for both sides to be armed to the teeth...though I'm sure it's good business for the lawyers.
In other words, I agree that balance is required, but disagree that using more wealth to achieve it is the best way forward. Not only does it destroy value in the economy, it begs the questions seen here about the defense of poor people.
I don't see how you could do it without handing the rich a permanent get out of jail free card. The existing law is complicated. It's complicated because we want the right outcome to happen all the time: We want to provide a subsidy for people who import renewable fuels. But we don't want to subsidize people who import renewable fuels, never take them out of train car, send them back to their country of origin and then import them again to collect another subsidy. But we don't want to make criminals out of companies in the business of importing and reselling renewable fuels if they claim the subsidy on multiple train car loads and then someone down the supply chain goes and exports several of them back out of the country. On and on.
The complexity has two results: a) any given person is almost certainly violating a law at any given time, but b) nobody (not even the prosecutor) can tell you which one without spending enormous resources on legal research.
So if the prosecutor isn't given a lot of resources, and the defendant is rich, the prosecutor will likely choose the "wrong" law to charge the defendant with (because they didn't have the resources to find the one the defendant did technically violate), and the rich defendant pays to demonstrate that in court and goes home free.
We could consider the possibility of some kind of means testing, i.e. more resources to prosecutors who prosecute rich defendants, but it falls apart immediately because you can't always tell who is rich. If you're poor but your parents have money, does the prosecutor get extra resources? (Do you then get railroaded if your parents don't like you and won't pay?) How do you tell when someone has a secret research team being financed off book by organized crime?
It seems to me the only thing that can work is to make the law substantially less complicated. And you can't do that at the level of an individual law. If you're going to ban X, you have to cover all the angles of X or you'll have upstanding citizens going to jail and malicious miscreants roaming free.
What we need is to pick which small subset of existing criminal law is worth proscribing and reject all the rest of it. We need to prosecute murder and rape. Do we really need to prosecute computer crimes, rather than just making them a civil matter? We need to prosecute people who dump toxic waste in the river. Do we really need to prosecute recreational drug use, rather than just taxing it to death? We need to prosecute high value tax cheats. Do we really need to prosecute internet casinos?
Stop banning the mostly harmless stuff that everyday people do and we stop having so many prosecutions that the complete inability to pay for them continues to be an enormous injustice.
It's complicated because that complexity serves the interests of the ridiculous factions in congress and state legislatures and the interests of the sprawling "justice" system.
Google "Joe Bruno prosecution".
Mr. Bruno is a former NY Senate leader who probably acted in a manner most people would describe as corrupt. But after a 6 year, multi-million dollar investigation, the Federal prosecutors didn't charge him with accepting bribes (although they leaked to the press that he did that), they charged him with something like 15 charges of failing to provide "honest services". He was convicted of one count, which was subsequently thrown out of the US Supreme Court.
Now, a few years later, they are charging him again for some other related charge, a charge that may be thrown out on appeal on double jeopardy grounds if he loses. The objective is basically to bankrupt the man, who is in his mid-80s.
Most all white collar crime can be summed up with a few high even charges: fraud, theft, embezzlement, submitting a false instrument. We should be getting rid of dumb laws that rig the process for the prosecution (ie. lying to a federal official as a felony act ala Martha Stewart) and judges should be sanctioning (ie. fining) prosecutors who do things like dump 300,000 pages of shit on the defense team.
Poor people are quite frequently the targets of ungodly amounts of government resources personally targeted at them, especially in Texas and certain counties in Southern California. I also suggest reading up on the history of Joe Arpaio and his former D.A. Andrew Thomas for what they did (and in Arpaio's case, is still doing) to indigent defendants in Maricopa county.
