You could likely have a free initial meeting with a lawyer to confirm a law had been broken and get a general idea of their fees and your odds of success.
Sounds like it would be your brother’s word against the public defenders. Sounds tough.
Yes, you could file paperwork for a lawsuit. Affording the legal help and winning the suit are different matters.
Just trying to answer seriously and not assume too much the answer is a simple yes/no. There is no real barrier to filing a lawsuit. Fill out the paperwork and file it with the court. Boom, you’ve sued someone. The bigger question would be if they have qualified immunity (or whatever lawyer version is similar to that) or if it would actually go anywhere. You’d want to talk to a real lawyer (IANAL). That’s at the very least unethical, possibly criminal.
One extra step, the judge has to allow it.
Is this a meta joke regarding a similar confusing post on Lemmy. uk?
Could have sworn I saw something like that earlier
Then can you link said post?
really hard to link on a phone at this time also don’t know how.
You’re gonna have to explain how a public defender has the power to jail anyone. Prosecutors coerce people to take deals thousands of times every day. Not only is that legal, and normal, the system would collapse without it.
Yea but after being threatened to take the deal or else?
Yes, that’s exactly how it works. It just seems normal because it’s on Law and Order, but threatening people with prison is coercive.
Prosecutors don’t coerce people, exactly. It’s more a case of, “hey, we’re pretty sure we can get a conviction if we go to trial, and if we get a conviction on these charges, we’re going to ask for the maximum jail time and/or fines. But if you agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge, you’ll spend less time in jail.” And TBH, the state usually can convict, since most prosecutors don’t like taking weak cases to trial, and the system is pretty heavily tilted in favor of prosecution for multiple reasons.
It’s not like, “take this deal or we’re going to break all your fingers and kill your mom”, but it does lay out the risks of taking a case to trial. I don’t think that’s coercive by most definitions, any more than your boss telling you that you can either get to work, or they’re going to fire you is coercive.
But yeah, the sheer volume of cases that goes through the courts requires plea deals, because otherwise it would take decades for a case to go to trial.
This is… Very confused.
You need to give more information before anyone can even make sense of this question. A public defender isn’t a prosecutor; they don’t have the ability to have anyone arrested, or prosecuted. The defendant is the client of the public defender, and the public defender is bound by professional ethics to act in the best interests of their client. The public defender is bound by attorney-client privilege, and anything that they were to disclose to the prosecutor would be inadmissible, and potentially grounds to see them sanctioned or disbarred.
So I really can’t understand any circumstances here where a defense attorney would be pressuring their client to take a bad deal and somehow threatening their client’s mother.
I can see it happening, clearly the brother don’t know anything about the law. Public defenders have a lot of cases dumped into them overwhelming them. One of the first thing they advice clients is to take a plea deal, maybe the brother is pushing back against it so he/she resulted in blackmail about jailing the mother. It’s still shitty of the public defender to do.
But the defender has absolutely no power to jail the mother. Effective threats and blackmail require you to have some kind of ability to follow through on some level, and a public defender doesn’t.
Moreover, there are very few that would, since attempting to do that to a client would likely be some form of gross misconduct that could get you sanctioned or disbarred.
That’s why he’s banking on the brother to not know that. Besides it’s the brother’s words against the public defender’s.
That scenario is so improbable that, without any evidence other than an incoherent post on NSQ, no one can reasonably claim that’s what’s going on.
Ok, I get it now. You’re on the side that public defenders cannot do anything shady.
The brother is alleging that the public defender threatened him that he will jail his mother if he doesn’t take the plea deal. Is that really improbable?
The fastest way for a case resolution is for the defendant to take a plea deal. That’s a minimum of one day of work. A trial can take weeks or even months. Like I said public defenders are overworked and under paid. They want the cases assigned to them done quickly.
Add. Public defenders cannot pick and choose cases. Once a case is assigned to them they have to take it even if they still have ongoing cases.
Is that really improbable?
Yes, it really is.
Public defenders do what they do because they love it, and they believe that it’s important. Pretty much everyone that works as a public defender could make far, far more money in private practice, with a much lighter case load. These are largely people that are ideologically motivated. So yes, it’s highly improbable that a public defender is not only going to fuck their client over–which would be a breach of their ethical duty already–but would then go on to commit an offense that could see them disbarred.
They may not always be effective due to their caseloads, but it would be very rare to find one that’s malicious.
