Outline
- Indigent Legal Services
- Bail System
- Plea Bargaining
Indigent Legal Services
The legal system accommodates both the rich and poor. Nevertheless, legal representation is not equally accessed. In some cases, lawyers ask more than $200 per hour making legal services to be out of reach for many. That is why the judicial system came up with sources of legal assistance for the indigents so that they can get legal representation. There are four main sources of legal services for this group. There are the public defender programs, assigned counsel systems, contract attorney systems, and legal aid services. The public defense programs are non-profit organizations, private or public, with part-time or full salaried staff members (Robins, 2014). The local public defenders conduct their activities autonomously and are not under a central administrator. The assigned counsel systems entail court appointment of attorneys. These are selected from a specific list. The contract attorney systems involve agreements made between governmental agencies and private law firms or attorneys to provide services for a certain amount in a given period of time. The legal aid programs are non-profit, and they endeavor to provide legal services in areas that are not covered by public defenders. Among the four, the services of public defenders are the most widely used. A study conducted by U.S. Department of Justice in 1996 revealed that when all prosecutorial districts were considered 28% of inmates used a public defender as compared to 23% and 8% for assigned counsel and contract attorney system respectively. The remaining 41% used a combination of one or services. Although the public defender service has its drawbacks, it appears to provid...
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A plea bargain is compliance between a prosecutor and defendant in which the accused offender agrees to plead guilty in return for some compromise from the prosecutor. The New Jim Crow, explains how most Americans have no clue on how common it is for people to be prosecuted without proper legal representation and are sentenced to jail when innocent out of fear. Tens of thousands of poor people go to jail every year without ever talking to a lawyer that could possibly help them. Over four decades ago, the American Supreme Court ruled that low-income people who are accused of serious crimes are entitled to council, but thousands of people are processed through America’s courts annually with a low resource lawyer, or no lawyer at all. Sometimes
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The New York Times bestseller book titled Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case examines the O.J. Simpson criminal trial of the mid-1990s. The author, Alan M. Dershowitz, relates the Simpson case to the broad functions and perspectives of the American criminal justice system as a whole. A Harvard law school teacher at the time and one of the most renowned legal minds in the country, Dershowitz served as one of O.J. Simpson’s twelve defense lawyers during the trial. Dershowitz utilizes the Simpson case to illustrate how today’s criminal justice system operates and relates it to the misperceptions of the public. Many outside spectators of the case firmly believed that Simpson committed the crimes for which he was charged for. Therefore, much of the public was simply dumbfounded when Simpson was acquitted. Dershowitz attempts to explain why the jury acquitted Simpson by examining the entire American criminal justice system as a whole.
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The courts found that the respondent's rights had been violated because the state had not provided proper research facilities. The court charged the department of correction with finding a way to provide appropriate legal service for inmates. They said the program should be economic accessible.They said it could be a law student, lawyers or public defenders. Also they said they should have access to law libraries. The state responded by setting up several libraries.The respondents wanted libraries at every prison.The courts founded the state plan to be fair.The prison got the the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) for a grant to cover 90% of the cost of setting up the libraries and training a librarian and inmate clerks. The state said this would benefit all
Paralegals have become an essential part of today's legal system, and as the profession becomes one of the leading and fastest growing occupations in the U.S. economy; these individuals perform delegated tasks under the supervision of attorneys. Education has played an important part on this matter; it has facilitated this development by allowing lawyers to use these skills professionals as agents to delegate specific tasks such as legal research, gathering of information and the drafting of specific legal documents under the supervision and final approval of their principals. This has been very significant because now; we can enjoy a speedy process in a cumbersome legal system. From en economic standpoint, it has also been beneficial by decreasing the substantial amount of the legal cost a firm could incur if only lawyers were allowed to perform this kind work.
The criminal trial process is able to reflect the moral and ethical standards of society to a great extent. For the law to be effective, the criminal trial process must reflect what is accepted by society to be a breach of moral and ethical conduct and the extent to which protections are granted to the victims, the offenders and the community. For these reasons, the criminal trial process is effectively able to achieve this in the areas of the adversary system, the system of appeals, legal aid and the jury system.
people in these 21st century society wonder, “When is Justice to be done?” For district attorneys,
Furthermore, having power or lacking power has an effect on an individual’s ability to navigate social institutions. Reinman illustrates how the legal system works by the experience of the poor and people of color with social institutions. The criminal justice system is structured in that the status and class of the individuals are relevant to punishing the individual without looking at the internal and external factors affecting the poor. Black Americans are economically disadvantaged as they are earning less than “one-tenth the median net worth of white households” (1) and the blacks are more likely to live in treacherous inner-city conditions, therefore the racial divide in the criminal justice system is a major result of the economic bias in the country. Henceforth, the criminal justice has been shaped in that “African Americans are more likely to be arrested, indicted, convicted, and committed to an institution than are whites who commit the same offenses” (1). Too often,
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