How can the justice system be altered to not favor the wealthy?

Well, for one thing, people have to admit (in the justice system and elsewhere) that this is, in fact, the case. Denial is strong, my friend, in those fields.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Supposing it was admitted. What next?

@cockswain Lawyers must be arbitrarily attached to cases.

Limit the costs of legal actions, and/or force money spent to cause a lawsuit be divided equally between the sides involved. So instead of having to compete with what they spend, any amount they spend to persecute you, they also have to give to a fund which you can use to defend yourself.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Good idea. How would they be paid?

@cockswain Capped salary.

Human justice is always going to have some imperfections. The best we can do is keep trying to make justice more fair. Yet sometimes your definition of “fair” might not coincide with that of others. In such cases extraneous factors such as wealth may tip the balance.

Have you ever heard of the saying “good ole boys”? until a new Police Chief came along, politics and who you know completely engulfed our department. favoritism was shown to certain officers, especially when it came to officer misconduct. our new chief changed all of this.

He established a Matrix system, which eliminated the “good ole boys”, politics and favoritism. in other words, if two officer were on misconduct charges, both would be treated the same, based on the Matrix system and not on “who they know”.

The Matrix has worked like a charm in my department. it comes down to equality. the same should apply to the criminal courts. a criminal court Matrix system would treat each guilty party equally. this would eliminate the wealthy receiving lesser sentencing, than compared to the average John Doe.

@john65pennington

Great idea, but most of the apparent disparity seems to be between the penalties for so-called “white-collar crime” and crimes of violence, which are more often committed by people from “economically challenged” backgrounds. Not so easy to compare the two.

The simple answer is that it can’t. We do the best we can. We provide Legal Services attorneys to those who can’t afford them. There are many lawyers who donate their time, pro bono. But there’s no way you can remove the influence of money from the justice system.

If lawyers are arbitrarily attached to cases, they will be bought after the fact. They will be paid substantial additional fees to do a better job. The rich person will hire their own team of lawyers to “assist” the lawyer they have been assigned. There will be thousands of ways to get around this.

Even if you cap salaries, there are plenty of other ways of supplementing the salaries for the rich. You could provide generous expense accounts. Or bonuses or whatever.

Also, if you capped the amount of money lawyers could be paid, many fewer people would become lawyers. They’d go where the money is, and where the money would be is the ways that rich folks get around the rules of the system.

What we should be doing is working hard to detect and root out corruption. Especially in the judiciary. We should be working to get more money into the Legal Service departments. Perhaps most importantly, we should be working to give people skills to get jobs and to solve their problems without violence. If we reduce criminal justice to a minimum, the rest is family and civil law. Those are different issues, which I am too tired to deal with now.

By the way, most situations that courts have to deal with are civil and family court cases. People think of criminal law, but most money is spent in other legal forums. To equalize the effect of money there is very problematic indeed. Imagine if everyone could file a civil suit and be guaranteed equal representation. Scary, scary.

@wundayatta “What we should be doing is working hard to detect and root out corruption. Especially in the judiciary. We should be working to get more money into the Legal Service departments. Perhaps most importantly, we should be working to give people skills to get jobs and to solve their problems without violence. If we reduce criminal justice to a minimum, the rest is family and civil law.”

Excellent suggestions! : ))

Have a system of public defenders as the only available representation in court. Everyone gets the same level of defense and the state gets level of prosecution. On cases where the state is applying a great deal of prosecutorial resources, the defense gets an equal level.

Make major white collar crimes capital offenses.

@ETpro

Good luck getting everyone to agree on the meaning of “equal level.”

Contingency fees have been one way the system has attempted to balance this. Capped fees and arbitrary attachment would work against providing good legal service generally as there’s no motivation to (1) perform well enough to attract better and better clients, or (2) put more work in once you’ve reached the cap.

In so many ways, the solutions seem to be treating symptoms rather than the cause. I’m sure people are aware of the debt associated with law school.

What if law school were free? Large firms would be less able (although not unable) to attract top law students if it weren’t necessary to earn high salaries to repay debt.

Don’t discount the effect of greed on those in the legal profession. : )

You can’t. Because at the end of the day, it is all about money.

Welcome to the human race.

Don’t discount the effect of greed generally. ;-)

As I stated, this doesn’t mean law firms won’t still attract people with high salaries. However, many people do go to firms for five years for debt, or plan to and then get sucked into the life and lifestyle.

For those of you suggesting penalties for white collar be reformed, might I refer you to this question I asked last week? Thinking about that prompted me to ask this question.

Greed is exploiting, enslaving, and trampling the human rights of the “have-nots” all around the world. I can’t think of anything more destructive to world peace.

@CaptainHarley I think everyone can agree that what OJ Simpson can get and what some kid from the hood can get in the way of a defense is not an “equal level” right now. But I know full well that those that can currently afford the best legal system money can buy would fight fiercely to keep their unfair advantage.

Of course they would.

I like the ideas so far of having lawyers be publicly employed, with salary caps, and distributed equally to the prosecution and defense. But this raises problems. If a farmer can now fight Monsanto on equal footing, there will be an explosion of cases. Therefore we’ll need way more lawyers and courts. Let’s say law school was subsidized by the gov’t to reduce the debt by law students, thus creating more incentives to become a lawyer in this new system with lesser salaries. Suddenly we’ve got taxpayers supporting a huge breeding ground of lawyers, which is unlikely to be popular. While I’m generally liberal in philosophy, I’m not necessarily an advocate for making the entire legal profession a gov’t agency.

How could we pay to create more lawyers and a larger legal system? What sorts of salary caps could we impose on them that would still give them incentives to enter this profession?

The more I’m thinking about this, the more problems I can envision. If suddenly every citizen could sue a corporation, we’d have a new nightmare on our hands.

I really just want criminals to not be able to pay their way out of justice.

@ChazMaz – has so succinctly summed up the entire reality of life in one sentence. There are always going to be people who work harder, are smarter and come up with a way to get rich and then they can afford the best in caviar and lawyers.

I like that system because I have always worked my butt off and I have achieved a modicum of comfort in my lifestyle and I don’t want to give it up so that some one who has never worked or has not applied themselves can have the same as I. That removes all incentive for anyone to excell at anything whether it is a professional football player or the guy at MacDonalds who works hard and becomes a manager or buys a franchise instead of flipping burgers between buns.

Probably if you can’t live by those rules you have to go find yourself a communist country, but I don’t think there are any left, maybe China a little bit. There all the workers are theoretically equal. Or maybe a hippy commune somewhere, are there any of them left?

Most of the nation is one severe tragedy or illness from bankruptcy. I don’t think people in need are all communists or lazy. It may be reality that some that work hard are able to do better than others, but how much do you need before you are just greedy? How much does one have at the expense of who? People equate financial success with happiness.

Wose than that, some people equate money with personal value: if you have a lot of it, you’re valuable, if you don’t, you’re not. Now to me, that is SAD!

Agreed. No amount of money can make you funny, clever, lovable, intelligent, or skilled.

Money is power. And the justice system is a jury of your peers. And people with any kind of power; such as money, fame, beauty or sexuality, or good ol fashioned political power; always fare better in a system of your peers than those without. To completely fix the justice system would be to completely change human nature.

Although Im not saying it cant be improved on.

@cockswain We would have to have an initial review on the merits of a case, but if a farmer has a caes against Monsanto of Gargill and the case has merit, that farmer should be able to sue the corporation. They should not feel coewd by the legal team that would swarm over them and consume everything they have. Thinking about this makes me like the idea all the more. Perhaps this is a way to dismantel the corportocracy.

I’ve evaluated this question in my mind to the point of nausea, yet simply can’t construe a method with which to alter a justice system to not favour the wealthy without discarding wealth itself, and even in these circumstances another conventionally accepted form of power would very likely emerge in place of wealth.
A typical suggestion has been to alter the occupations of lawyers in some regard but this would not be simple. Lawyers endure extensive training and amass equally extensive debt as a result, accordingly to afford them only a set amount of money would be unreasonable and would be fought against vigorously, likely to their avail.
Regardless of whether lawyers were distributed at random (as has been suggested) there would remain inequality in the courtroom because some lawyers are better at their job than others. What happens when the “evil corporation” is genuinely innocent of a crime of which it’s been accused but gets a terrible lawyer? Is that not as unjust as a working class man receiving the same defence?
Another thought is that corruption can be generally dispelled from the legal system. This is a very noble gesture but unfortunately the more powerful characters will always have means at their disposal, be them wealth or other assets, to “swing the vote in their favour”. If judges or juries refuse bribery or the arguments of better trained attorneys then perhaps blackmail could be used as a threat.
The basic conclusion i’ve reached on the matter is that if you are powerful (whether due to wealth, status, influence etc) you are typically powerful in all facets of society and will naturally be inclined to fight to retain this power which is quite easy given that you’re more powerful than most who would wish to seize said power from you.
With this conclusion drawn, it actually seems as though most western legal systems are well developed to deal with potentially unjust situations, especially given the common requirement of juries. So it’s not all bad news for the common person.