In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants

In China I recall that "the burden of proof was on the parties" and both sides were asked to submit all relevant evidence to the court. Then there were a couple of meetings where my lawyer met with the other side's lawyer to review the evidence.

If you're the plaintiff and you have evidence that supports your version of events, you give it all to the court. If you're the defendant and you have exculpatory evidence, or anything that shows that the case is frivolous, you give it all to the court. The judge can then ask for more evidence, or utilize what's provided.

My legal team didn't need to sift through ten years of emails in order to find a few needles hidden in the haystack. The process wasn't adversarial. The parties can't use "discovery" to get trade secrets or proprietary information. And the costs were near enough to zero.

I wouldn't even say that it's a "better" system. I'd characterize US-style discovery as simply broken, and the Chinese system as something that works in a common sense way.

> > . Two years on, and we were just at the beginning of "discovery" -- an amazingly invasive process that appears to be unique to the US legal system. > > This is common in almost all legal systems.

This statement is false, both the German and French legal systems do not have something like discovery. To confirm for yourself just Google "is there something like discovery in the German/French legal system". Considering that many legal systems are based on these two (one could argue the German one is based on the French as well) I think we can conclude that not having discovery is in fact common.

> How else would the defendant get to examine the evidence against them and how else would you provide evidence if there was no discovery process? > > Its hard to imagine there would be a legal system without it.

Here is a link how the German system works without it. It also explains why for German legal practitioners it is a concept that violates some of the core principles of fair justice. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/german-way-discovery-just-don...

> [How] would you provide evidence ...

You don't sue people for fun, right? It's either they did something to you and you have damages, costs, paperwork, records, CCTV footage, medical examination records, whatever, or you want them to do something based on some regulation/statute/right.

Discovery usually tries to show that so and so higher up knew about it all along, no?

You are basing that claim on the "it is impossible to not have the same problem as US have" assumption.

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3 months? Small claims?

Federal civil court averages 33.7 months from filing to trial. Needless to say, it can be a lot busier than that in slower districts. (~43 months in the 2nd District!) And then there are appeals, etc...

Best case, we were looking at 40 months from filing to trial in the 9th District, which is statistically nominal, but the whole process would probably have taken far longer.

Current statistical table: https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/data-tables/2024/12/31/st...

I've never heard of a single 21st century US (Federal) civil case that went to trial in less than a year, to say nothing of three months. I can point to a mountain of cases that have been dragging for many years.

In civil (and criminal) law, yes, but in "förvaltningsrätt", public law, it's somewhat different. Cases are judged mainly from documents and sometimes the state can sort of force you to provide documentation in a manner similar to discovery and subpoena. It's also where you might end up with a reversed burden of proof, notably in tax cases.

It's still a much saner jurisdiction in many respects, especially for physical persons. You might get marginally nicer judgements in commercial law in certain US states, though I'd personally prefer both swedish law and swedish arbitration due to a combination of lower costs and the average quality of commercial law here. The Stockholm Chamber of Commerce arbitration institute is actually rather popular among international corporations for roughly these reasons.

Dirty and thuggish cops are way more common than Americans think. The more benign form is detail and overtime fraud. But I'd bet the dollar amount easily rivals property crime value in your town.

Theft and fraud in businesses is more common than software people think. Kickbacks to purchasing managers, for example. You're less likely to encounter this than a casually dirty cop, but it's out there.

> you’ll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking it up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix anything

So you you think, without those few bad folks, these systems would not tend to break, or that these few bad folks are not being challenged? I.e. do you think these few bad folks are completely inconsequential at a systemic level?

If good people can't run the system right the system is broken and good people ought to support its reform or replacement.

i wish people, before they commented on really really serious things, did a bit of reflection.

> effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever

the agency of individuals in totalitarian/authoritarian institutions has been examined/analyzed/written about at enormous length since the rise of fascism in the early 1900s. the short answer is you're wrong but i'm not going to try to convince you (you have to want to learn to be receptive). instead i recommend a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-Penguin-C...

EDIT: i'm being rate limited. to the guy below

> how even a system full of good intentions

you're just proving all of my points - you just can't fathom that the laws really were written with immoral intentions because "the law" is sacrosanct for you.

i note again: the 13th amendment abolished slavery except for in prisons. it's written explicitly in section 1 (no bad faith interpretation needed). please discuss for me the "good intentions" therein.

There's a long running historiographical debate about the relative influence individuals have over the ultimate course of historical events compared to systemic factors

For many years, it was popular (particularly in revisionist circles) almost entirely to deny individual agency and to rely instead exclusively on systemic arguments which highlighted the power of geography, ecology, culture, technology, and other complex systems to shape human events. That revisionist approach emerged partially in reaction to the near universal overreliance of prior generations of historians on the so-called "Great Man" theory of history, which assumes events are largely attributable to the decisions of a select group of politically powerful individuals. Nearly all of those individuals happened to be white, male, and wealthy, and thus Great Man history suffered not only from blindness to systemic factors that can shape events, but also to the experiences, contributions, and agency of anyone who was not rich, not white, not a man, or even simply not politically powerful enough to count. In other words, they ignore nearly everyone who has ever lived.

Although academic history has long since moved away from the Great Man theory, it remains a popular trope of low quality popular history books, and increasingly it has become clear that purely systemic, revisionist approaches with no consideration for the effects of individual actors are also inadequate to explain historical events.

Sometimes systems are more powerful than people, and no amount of good will or effort is going to fix a problem. The Vikings abandoned Greenland during the Little Ice Age because they had no way of controlling the climate or adapting efficiently to the changes. The climate system was more powerful than any individual Norse settler or group of settlers could ever hope to be.

Sometimes systems are weaker than people, and leaders can bend them to their will. After nearly 1000 years of independence from secular authority and mostly uncontested religious domination in England, the Catholic Church in the 16th century formed an incredibly powerful institutional system of religious control built on vast endowments of land. It was by and large extremely popular with the common people and historically served a critical role in bolstering the king's position by promoting a respect for hierarchy that naturally encompassed both their own elevated status as priests and the position of secular authoritarian rulers, who ruled as God's representative on Earth. Despite the Church's enduring local popularity, its immense wealth, its deep connections with the broader Christian world, and the powerful hold fear of excommunication and damnation had on most Christians, King Henry VIII managed to completely transform the institutional, legal, and property-managing system of the medieval English Catholic Church, sundering it entirely from Rome, depriving it of essentially all of its land holdings, and subordinating its institutions entirely to royal authority. And he accomplished this in a shockingly short period of time, only around a decade.

Why did Henry decide to throw his lot in with the Reformation? Was it because he saw the injustice of monks, priests, and friars siphoning off so much of his subjects' wealth to Rome simply to subsidize the already luxurious and decidedly un-Christian lifestyle enjoyed by the pope? Not at all, in fact in the years before his marriage to Katherine of Aragon soured, he wrote a book defending the pope, who promptly named the king Defender of the Faith in gratitude and recognition of his scholastic achievement. Did Henry instead recognize an opportunity to enrich himself? Probably not, the evidence suggests he wasn't that savvy about money, but luckily for him, he had Cromwell to take care of the pounds and the pennies. Ultimately, he just needed a divorce. Because if he failed to produce an heir, the danger of civil war would be intolerable, and Katherine was clearly beyond her childbearing years. But the pope wouldn't give him one, and Henry was a raging narcissist willing to burst through any boundary in service of his own ego, even risking his soul to break from Rome.

So individual idiosyncrasies can also affect the course of events, we can't just look at systems, and we can't just look at individuals, we need systems too. The relative influence of each over how a complex institution like a justice system develops is a highly contingent and fact-specific analysis. Sometimes the climate can push winters to be too cold even for the hardiest settlers. Sometimes an entire nation's centuries-long, enduring religious beliefs and ideologies can depend solely on the whims (and lust) of a single egotistical dictator. And sometimes when such a basic function is this messed up, you might actually find that there are indeed a limited number of individuals responsible, and that replacing them with competent or less malicious individuals will actually solve the problem.

That's the trick though, and where the systemic and individual-focused explanatory variables start to bleed into each other. If it is systematically impossible to find good people to staff these institutions, then yes merely swapping out individuals will not fix the situation because by definition you are swapping out bad people for other bad people. However, I seriously doubt that it is impossible to do so in this case, because even if the US justice system is messed up and broken, this is about the most messed up and broken that it gets. I think it's fair to say that 99.999% of the country does not experience systemic justice problems to the same extent as Maverick County, which is why so many people are reacting to this story with justifiable shock. So even assuming ad arguendo that it is systemically impossible to find truly good people to work in law enforcement or the judicial system, we know it's at least possible to find better people than they have in Maverick County.

Some other White South Africans have taken sides with the same political grouping (I don't know their position on that issue).

I'll bite. It's a little bit more, but I knew a 19yo guy who flashed his girlfriend at a public swimming pool and is on the registry for life. Like most people on the registry he'll spend a significant portion of the rest of his life in and out of prison for minor violations of the registry[].

[] e.g., he was driving across country and stopped for a couple of days at a friend's house in Illinois. He was in a traffic stop and while talking to the cop, the cop realized he'd been in Illinois for over 72 hours and was given another prison sentence for failing to register.

Being put on the sex offender registry happens after conviction. The comment you are responding to is talking about how unconvictable trumped up charges are used to scare people into taking pleas so your challenge doesn't make sense in context.

Tarrant County. Mentally ill but competent to stand trial. I’m sure there’s more than one. Source: 1 year in lockup (solitary) with them, often criminal trespass or public urination charges.

Your solution to crime isn’t working very well, but that’s OK, nobody’s telling you what to do.

We can just observe the society you have and wonder how you can simultaneously not take responsibility for your outcomes, and bash others who make different choices and have better outcomes.

From your post it sounds like you feel that you do know better, and the only issue you’re having isn’t your policy, but your “lack of homogeneity”, which makes it impossible to improve anything.

The "official" line about Europe is "they get to live this way because we protect them" or some such.

Similar things are uttered by the same people about Canada, but with more denigrating comments.

In absolute terms the US is much wealthier than either. But like always with statistics it's important to look at the distribution, not the average.

Staying on topic: the Canadian legal system is probably about as bureaucratically dysfunctional as the US, just without the private super-prisons and the monetary shakedown. Which is to say it's dysfunctional and broke.

Seems like "they hate us for our freedom!" has done a complete 180 as of late.

Man the European/anti-US folks are really triggered this morning. Yeah criminal justice moves slow in the US and isn’t perfect at all. It’s a huge thing from local police and courts to the FBI and… even more courts. As for lawyers there’s a reason for the joke “what do you call a million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”

You'll save yourself a lot of time and confusion by accepting that neither side is jealous of the other. I don't want the lifestyle Europe is selling.

Calling European freedom true freedom compared to American one is laughable and I say that as a European. Almost no country in Europe comes close to the freedom granted by the bill of rights.

Corporations and oligarchs effectively own European governments too. Just possibly a bit less than in the US.

This is the exact reason why Putin invaded Ukraine.

Ukraine started to get closer to European Union: more transparent, more democratic, less corrupt and richer.

When Russians saw that it was possible in Ukraine, they would get rid of Putin. So he invaded.

> European society proves that Americans could have true freedom and quality of life if it weren't for corporations and oligarchs effectively owning our government.

Europeans have far more restrictions on their rights of speech, self-defence, and freedom of conscience than the Americans. They are also substantially poorer than Americans, and those numbers get worse when you account for America’s average being skewed lower by having a higher proportion of recent immigrants with lower earning potentials.

If you think people are voting against their own interests, what's probably happening is you don't know what their interests are and don't even realize that you don't know. Other people's interests are obviously not the same as yours but often they're not even what they publicly claim so you won't find out without actual empathy and effort. But it's easier to just be a bigot than understand other cultures.

Does rule of law require the same investments as healthcare?

Isn't America spending the most per capita on healthcare in the world with horrible outcomes (life expectancy 4 years behind poor countries like Portugal)? Aren't there public healthcare systems outside of Europe?

Doesn't America have an insane amount of natural resources and the benefit of controlling world's exchange currency to make up for any additional defence (and offence) expenses?

Seems to me a like story to help cope with a subconscious inferiority complex.

>but there really is a skepticism about some Europe nations, can they - and the bloc - sustain its 21st century advances and social safety nets while adequately paying for its own defense?

Yes. The EU's defence is a political unity issue. Not a spending one. It needs a unified foreign policy where that makes sense and the like. Not countries receiving preferential gas pricing and pusyfooting when it comes to giving arms to Ukraine or the like. It's greatest single threat is russia. One may think they spend a far greater share on it's military and so Europe should too. But it's economy is smaller than Italy's and it has no capacity to fight the block.

These are separate issues. Healthcare aint cheap anywhere for the state, but its perfectly fundable for any but the most poor and broken countries in the world, to a very decent level. But US is broken in another way - everything is for-profit, no real oversight, and unrestricted capitalism full throttle. Then you get what you got.

There are 2 absolutely basic pillars of modern free society worth living in - 1) how it takes care of its weak and injured ones (healthcare and social services); 2) and how it builds a better future via good available public education. US fails in most if not all of those. There are aspects it excels in but they are not primary markers of happiness, life fulfillment, low stress and such.

When I spent a year in Germany circa 1999 I thought the food labels sucked compared to food labels in the US. There were cigarette vending machines on the streets all over Dresden and they even had little candy vending machines below them.

When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better.

The established process for making plutonium fuel is to grind uranium oxide together with plutonium oxide in a high energy ball mill, then pack the powder into pellets, sinter them, and then have somebody stick the pellets into a fuel rod with gloves. The process creates Pu nanoparticles, once of which could give you lung cancer if it gets deep into your lungs.

In the factory Karen Silkwood worked at they couldn't control the dust to the extent that people could work without wearing respirators. The factory successfully made fuel for the Fast Flux Test Facility but being forced to wear respirators was a "normalization of deviance" that regulators would not grant to subsequent MOX (mixed-oxide) facilities in the US. In France on the other hand, wearing respirators was seen as just fine.

It was a difficult problem to determine the occupational hazard at that kind of factory, confused by the "Healthy Worker" effect such that people who work in almost any job are healthier than the average population. Circa 2015 the evidence was clear that MOX workers really do get lung cancer, I think it's no coincidence that the US shuttered a planned MOX factory around this time.

Ukraine is and was literally the poorest european country. Even before this war.

As a context because I see people downvoting it - that slogan was on a semi-famous picture of how the invaders left one of the houses. It was painted on there.

You should have seen what Ryssians say about Europe

> those with the capacity to make the system more fair are incentivized to maintain the status quo

Often true... but networks of incentives are subtle in how they build up. It's rarely just macro, societal-level incentives.

Anyway... one major aspect is that lawyers do law for a living. It's an industry. An industry that thrives, and has thrived since at least antiquity, by representing the interests of well paying clients.

Besides that... formal truth is expensive. It's expensive to have a procedurally validated scientific truth (eg drug testing). It's expensive to create a judicial truth via trial. Very expensive. That's why we do so little of it, even though judicial (and scientific) ideals demand quite a lot of it.

Most legal matters are settled by lawyers negotiating. Courts are a rubber stamp, and (usually) theoretical last resort. Most (vast majority) criminal convictions involve a confession. In Medieval Europe they would publicly torture convicts, obtain a confession and then hang them. These days, you can confess and serve 2 years in prison... or contest and serve 12.

Otherwise, courts could not handle the volume.

The problem here is high standards. People know about the ideals of justice. Expect justice to live up to these standards. IRL it never has. Not close. Justice is an institution of society that exists to solve problems. Often sticky, ugly problems. The ideals play a role, in keeping that institution balanced... but the ideals are not the balance.

> Nitpick: Process is expensive. Process does not yield justice by itself. It (assuming it's crafted right) just makes the outcomes more consistent.

While I agree, and it's an important distinction, I think it's probably true conversely that the chances of justice for the average person are increased by the imposition of "good" due process.

The weasel word "good" there means that I can disagree with any specific instance, but I mean to say that I don't think process is inherently bad. Bureaucracy is definitely a bane of most of our lives, but the obvious alternative, a greased-wheels process where somebody makes decisions quickly and without significant accountability, is great only if the decision maker is on your side, and terrible otherwise.

Where is this untrue currently?

Sure. I didn't mean to say that justice is 100% corrupt and unavailable to normies.

I said that it is different.

Pharisee here.

Joshua and the other judges were chiefs. They lead armies, built alters, pronounced judgements and whatnot. Often advised by prophets.

Mosaic Law, the scrolls of the torah, dod not exist at this point. Not even according to the bible. This came later, during the time of kings.

The stuff quickly scribbled on rocks by The Almighty so that Rabbi Moses could go deal with that whole mess down below... it's sparse. It's got a list of things god likes to eat. A recipe you are not allowed to make.

It doesn't even tell you what to do when a Midian Schiester sells you a faulty woman. Not one word on right to representation, if you can believe it.

American' legal system is based on a mostly illiterate culture's legal tradition, form the black sea. It's very good at dealing with disputes involving fish, pillage and private property.

Also... who ya'callin godless. Get your own god. You can go back to Thor if you don't like what you got here.

> godless people did to it what the Pharisees did to the other system.

Oops, sorry about that.

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Reform is necessary. In a literal and figurative sense both. Reform the Police should be the message. Make the Police force live up to that old line "to serve and protect", to provide justice.

Yeah, to get proper value out of a service it usually needs a little more funding, not less.

I personally still call the USA "the most advanced 3rd world country posing as a 1st world country"

GDP of Mississippi and Bavaria, Germany are about the same.

You would be simply insane to think that Bavaria wasn't far far wealthier than Mississippi though.

This doesn't show the limits of either the US or European ways of life but rather GDP itself as a figure. It has it's uses but that's it. Lay people are far too dependent on GDP as a meaningful indicator of wealth. Professional economists use a variety of metrics to compare and contrast different areas and systems.

All that GDP per capita and there are still hungry children in West Virginia and single mothers that can't afford to eat healthy food because of their medical debt.

Shame.

People posting GDP figures in a thread about jail injustice are why the US has jail injustice.

This comment also illustrates why many have an issue with Americans.

“We’re rich” is not a reasonable defense against hurting people, yet it is consistently what Americans choose as their defense.

GDP per capita doesn’t mean much when people are slaving away / need 2-3 jobs to survive / are starving / can't feed children.

All evidence shows the US is a failed democracy.

And they don't even care if it hurts them too, as long as the out-group suffers more.

it's lots of gross things that many educated americans refuse to engage with/consider and rather deny as "behind us".

you're partially right (i was mistaken) and only as of very very recently:

https://www.thepomonan.com/news/2023/10/2/7investigative-cal...

> AB32 included exemptions which allowed private prisons to focus on other profitable "community corrections" programs, such as day reporting centers, counseling facilities, halfway houses, rehabilitation centers, medical offices, and mental health facilities. Currently, these exemptions are worth around $200 million a year. Included are locations that mimic detention facilities and are run by organizations that also run private prisons in California.

https://www.ilrc.org/biden-administration-partners-private-p...

> 09/26/2022

> Pasadena, CA - Today, an en banc 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that GEO could block California’s AB 32 (People not Profit, Bonta) from going into effect for the duration of the lawsuit, pending further review from District Court. AB 32 is a state law signed in 2019 which banned private prisons and private immigration detention centers in the state.

I do not know if this applies to the Conservation (Fire) Camp Program

The previous poster's point is, I presume, that the upkeep of a prisoner costs a hell of a lot more than $10/day. Specifically, the California Dept of Corrections quotes $133,000/year.

https://www.lao.ca.gov/PolicyAreas/CJ/6_cj_inmatecost

You're aware Yugoslavia had an ethnic war not long after that right?

People in the States know how fast our country can fall and don’t accept “well, we’ve still got a ways to go” as an excuse for the descent.

The so-called best shouldn’t compare itself to others, it should compare itself to itself from yesterday. And in those regards, we are descending rapidly, especially for those of us LGBTQ+, women and minorities.

Do not forget how fast Saudi Arabia and other countries changed from their liberal views to literal theocracies.

None so blind as them what won't see.

I'm European. We don't have favelas, as far as I've seen. The destitute in my country, and there are plenty, have far higher living standards than in yours.

Take a little drive round Memphis, or New Orleans. The parts you wouldn't normally go.

Plenty of poor brown people who live here would be happy to tell you how shitty it is. Nuff said.

My immediate thought when reading this was that the number of people is much higher today than 50 years ago, but before my kneejerk reaction I decided to check the math. Assuming the results of a quick google can be trusted, we have around 4 billion more people today than 50 years ago, which means that entire percent of the population growth in the past 50 years are people in slavery. That's staggeringly higher than I would have estimated before reading any of this.

Colonization has only ended in express terms. In many parts of the world, including essentially all of the developing nations where slavery has expanded in the past half-century, the dominant economic activity are forms of extraction at the behest either multinationals, OPEC, China, or USA.

> is sadly the natural state of things

Sadly, the even-more-natural state of things involves the total extinction of all known forms of life and nothing but the cold vacuum of space.

So we should be very careful not to equate that particular kind of "natural" with other concepts like "unavoidable" or "acceptable".

> Imprisonment is indeed a newer development.

Ancient Greece and Rome are "newer"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamertine_Prison was built in the 7th century BC.

It was stamped because of the industrial revolution, slaves can't buy goods, not moralism

> people without the credential can still be good at their job

Yes, and some can be very bad at their job. The goal of requiring one to pass a bar exam in order to practice law is to minimize the number of practicioners who are horribly incompetent, because of the serious damage it can do.

It seems to me that a judge who doesn't know how the law works can do even MORE severe damage.

It's because this type that anti-intelectualism that make USA justice system seems like a circus, and the best clown, the one that convince the public win

The Bar exam is supposed to be a legal litmus test of some kind