In order to achieve greater equality before the law, the justice system should provide an equal level of defence and prosecution for every case in the justice system as much as possible. It should also strive to be as accurate as possible, whatever the method may be. The proposed concept here is to always use assigned defence lawyers, banning the use of private defence lawyers, equalising the pay between prosecution and defence and the use of judge panels rather than jury trials.
Long Description:
Currently the justice system guarantees a person accused of a crime a lawyer but it is well known that assigned defence lawyers will likely be lower quality than private defence lawyers. In fact, it is usually the case that defence lawyers assigned by the court system are likely to be the worst lawyers, or the most inexperienced lawyers and very rarely would they be high quality lawyers working for such low pay.
In order to remedy this problem, the justice system should not create a divide between those who can afford expensive high quality lawyers and those who cannot. Instead, the Crown/State should assign all individuals a random defence lawyer who are paid on the same scale as crown prosecutors. It might be possible to share the same pool of lawyers for defence and prosecution but they may also have to split the pools. It is only important that the pay scale is similar between the two jobs in order to promote the same level of quality between the two tasks.
Additionally, jury trials are likely to be less accurate in adequately examining evidence in difficult legal cases than judge panels. They would also be more prone to be swayed by emotional arguments which should have no bearing on determining guilt or innocence (but that may determine the severity of the sentence). While jurors typically pay a high level of attention in trials, they necessarily lack specialised knowledge to understand evidence leading to a situation where defence/prosecution will bring in conflicting views by experts.
It would be preferable to have a standard pool of experts on particular fields of evidence to offer their opinion and statistical information (such as the statistical accuracy) of evidence, rather than ones chosen by either the prosecution or defence. Additionally, it would be more helpful for there to be a judge panel rather than a jury.
The judge panel could be composed of several variants, the effectiveness of each could be determined via pilot projects (although such a scheme would temporarily lead to imbalanced levels justice):
* A main judge and several part-time judges
* Multiple full judges, the number depending on the level of the court (for instance the Ontario Supreme Court would have 3-5 judges)
* A judge and number of professional jurors who have specialised knowledge in analysing evidence and understand some sort of sentencing science (it would be a new field of study in trying to determine the effectiveness of different types of sentencing on people)
Rationale:
There are three main reasons for this type of justice reform:
- Every citizen is afforded the same level of legal representation in the criminal court system (and hopefully this would expand to the civil court system)
- Sentencing becomes more scientific which will be a step above the established case precedence style of sentencing (which gave us consistency, a point which should not be overlooked) or at least scientific data should be collected on sentencing
- Eliminating the need for jurors, which is a waste of labour hours in the work force and is an expensive loss for the economy
Tools:
First, the system in place for determining the pay scale of crown prosecutors (or state attorneys) will be extended to a second pool of lawyers, the defence lawyers (crown-appointed defenders might be a good name). As a phase-in period the salary of defence lawyers can be capped until it matches the highest levels of crown prosecutors before a full ban on private criminal defence lawyers. Defence lawyers are an important aspect of society and so they should be held to a high standard.
Data should be kept on convicted criminals, the sentence received and the recidivism rate, as well as the type of crime committed. The data itself will be collected on every convicted individual but the published data would necessarily require aggregation to make it anonymous and conform to privacy principles.
The most important metric is keep data on wrongful conviction rates by different styles of justice system. It is more important to eliminate false positives (wrongful convictions) than it is to improve the rate of catching criminals.
What I'd like to talk about later:
Corporate Tax Revisions and Business/R&D Grants
Healthcare - Preventative Care
Nursing Home Funding
Incubator Program
Informed Voter Metrics
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