Courts are not instruments of justice; when your case gets into court it will make little difference whether you are guilty or innocent; but it’s better if you have a smart lawyer. And you cannot have a smart lawyer unless you have money. First and last it’s a question of money. Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.
While what Darrow said was (and still is) indisputably true, I think a bigger concern is the expansion of police and prosecutory powers to the point where it is literally impossible to go a single day without violating some statute or other in such a way that law enforcement, should someone “take a disliking" to you, could use it to hound you in whatever way it pleased. I base this assertion on many conversations I’ve had with a former D.A. friend of mine. Yes, you need to be wealthy to afford a lawyer who can actually help you prove your innocence rather than take a plea bargain -- but I think the solution is not to make everyone rich (or to make everyone poor) but to overhaul the justice system... not that that is going to happen any time soon.
While what Darrow said was (and still is) indisputably true, I think a bigger concern is the expansion of police and prosecutory powers to the point where it is literally impossible to go a single day without violating some statute or other in such a way that law enforcement, should someone “take a disliking" to you, could use it to hound you in whatever way it pleased. I base this assertion on many conversations I’ve had with a former D.A. friend of mine. Yes, you need to be wealthy to afford a lawyer who can actually help you prove your innocence rather than take a plea bargain -- but I think the solution is not to make everyone rich (or to make everyone poor) but to overhaul the justice system... not that that is going to happen any time soon.
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