Nobody gives a shit

tags

Lawyer Police

Notes

So you were baiting these cops into illegal stops?

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So that was it — no follow-up on the bad cop? He was promoted.

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just to be a dick, he loaded the trailer with all this really heavy stuff.

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I didn't bother looking through all that stuff because I just figured my client couldn't have been stupid enough to put anything illegal in there. That was my mistake.

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They search the car and find the recorder, and now the cop is really confused. So he decides he’s just going to arrest the investigator. He finds some guy who has a vaguely similar name with an outstanding warrant and arrests our guy, even though the guy named in the warrant is a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier.

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He has them bring the investigator to him, finds the recorder on his body, and rips it off. He tells us he’s going to delete the entire recording right. Then they just drop our investigator off on the side of the road.

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The judge says, “I always knew they were doing that. I just, until you documented it, I couldn't do anything about it. But I always knew they were doing that.”

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That frustrates the hell out of me. It really does. Because that's just not the way the system's supposed to work, you know? The facts of the case should matter a lot more than the luck of which attorney the court assigns. But when you bring these issues up to these eggheads on the appellate courts, they see nothing wrong.

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No offense to the eggheads, but some of them have never tried a case, certainly not a criminal case. A lot of them haven't even really lived a life. They go to prep school, then an Ivy League college, straight to law school, right into some judicial clerkship, right into some fancy gig, and right onto the bench. They don't collect a whole lot of life experience. And so they have this assumption that the system works as intended on paper. Because that’s all they’ve ever seen — paper. So it’s just like, we don’t really know how it works, or even if it works, so we’re just going to assume that it does.

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when I started this job, I really thought people didn't use their turn signal when they had 500 pounds of contraband in the trunk. I thought those stops were legitimate. But it seems so clear now. If anyone is going to use his turn signal properly, it’s the guy with 500 pounds of drugs in the trunk. Without that exposure, without any experience with how the process really works day to day, on the back end of these things — if you never see the stuff that doesn’t show up in transcripts or in the four corners of the appeal — you’re missing a good chunk of context. You don’t know how these cases really unfold.

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I tend to say stuff like this out loud, and maybe people don't like me for it. But it just infuriates me. I wish I didn’t get so emotional about it. But I just don't know how else to be.

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I can't tell you how many cops we caught lying right there on the stand. And the judges believed us. They suppressed the evidence, right? So they obviously knew the cops were lying. And then nothing happened. The cops were back testifying again.

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In this county, they caught a cop lying to put people on death row. He ends up getting indicted, which is rare, but then the case goes away. Just goes away.

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So within a couple of days we turn all this over to the police and they don't say anything. They don't say, "Oh, we're wrong,” or “We're sorry.” They just call you the next day and say they’re closing the case.

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I realize I can’t avoid that this job means dealing with people. Like, real human people. These are people with lives and family and people who love them.

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Christ, I had ignored my own fuck-ups. You know, I had lived like that for several years. I was a hoodlum. I hung out with criminals. We did some stupid shit. I think we have this amazing capacity as humans to kind of disregard all of our own mistakes and think, “Well, I worked through all of that without ending up in prison — so why didn’t these other people?” But you know what? I didn't work through all of that on my own.

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We want a system that is cold and analytical and reasoned, because we think that that's the only way to achieve fairness. We think removing all the context, taking out all the shit this person had to battle, it creates this objective playing field where everybody gets the same shot. But, you know, in reality, it just doesn’t work like that.

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