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prussian advisor posted:I'm sure it's been used successfully in the past, but every time I'm seen a defense attorney claim directly to the jury that the cops framed his client by planting drugs on him, it has crashed and burned. If the facts of the case are bad enough that that could be argued with any real chance of success, though, any halfway-competent prosecutor would've dropped the case a long time ago. You also can't argue the facts of other cases even in a general sense during a criminal trial, like it seems like you're suggesting. This is a good thing, since it would open the door to all sorts of unethical bullshit from defense attorneys and prosecutors both that don't belong in the criminal justice system. If the jury decides that all cops are liars entirely on their own, without prompting from the defense attorney, that's another matter entirely. There's also a ton of mileage to be had by the state's reluctance to spend money on basic forensics for most cases. Where I practice, the state forensics lab ran out of money ages ago to do much of anything because every single marijuana bust with a competent lawyer required a certificate of analysis on the marijuana. It really is hilarious; the state burns through its standard annual forensics budget in a matter of months every year confirming that weed is weed. So when it comes time to do things in cases the public might actually care about (ie to actually pull fingerprints on a gun with bodies on it), there's no money for it and you can leverage pleas and reductions just by exploiting the self-inflicted budget crisis. I'm fairly certain operating orders came down through unofficial channels for street level cops to get ballistics tests on handguns before the opportunity arises to do any meaningful forensics. The funny part is that the actual operability of the weapon (the only thing they actually can afford to test) is irrelevant in 99% of cases. But the test destroys and contaminates any potential DNA or fingerprint evidence. So you can have a ball throwing jury requests at the prosecution with the threat that you'll call their own forensics people and make them concede that the procedures followed in the case were sloppy, slipshod, and actively destructive to potentially defense-friendly forensic evidence. They will generally cave rather than allow their own budget priorities come to light. And these are cases which actually implicate the public safety, often involving guys with robbery and burglary rap sheets found in proximity to stolen handguns. quote:A big issue going forward will be manpower, however--there just isn't enough hours in the day for a felony prosecutor or public defender to watch all the vide from every cam for every offense. There needs to be major funding increases for both sides for it to make a meaningful difference at the trial level. Broadly speaking, though, if you stripped all the truly bullshit prosecutions out of the mix for crimes of no particular importance, I think you'd find that suddenly everyone would have a great deal more time and money to fully investigate things worthy of investigation. When your state budget priorities are driven at the local level by an endless stream of forensics test to verify that weed is weed so that you can hammer teenage boys for being teenage boys, complaining that the budget isn't there to do things of genuine importance rings pretty hollow.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:14
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 09:25 |
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