EightGaugeHippo said:
US law is either too confusing or just too 'tarded for me to understand.
I'm not a lawyer, but took Criminal Justice (with intent of going into forensics) a long time ago. Truthfully it's actually pretty simple at it's basic level. It's people who tend
to make it retarded as long chains of precedents are established.
The basic deal is that we have two seperate legal systems. Criminal cases which are a person against the goverment are handled differantly and have higher standards of proof and evidence than Civil Cases which involved differant courts and have much lower standards. The idea being that a person going up against the collective might of the US goverment needs more protection for things to be fair, than a person going up against another person or private group. In most cases this makes sense.
In Criminal Cases we have a standard of evidence where something must be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt", they key word being "reasonable" as there can be a doubt cast on anything. What this means is that the goverment has to prove a case to a virtual certainy, even someone who is "very likely" to have committed a crime is to be let free to avoid mistakes. Most countries do not have this level of protection, and this is one of the big reasons why you wind up seeing some rather high profile criminals being let free when it's obvious they committed the crime, all they have to do is introduce a reasonable doubt into the case. A prosecutor can have a perfect case, but if say the defendant pulls out an Alibi that the prosecutor can't disprove that case is meaningless. In the US it can't be say 90% likely
that someone did something we're aiming for that 99% so to speak.
In civil cases the standard goes to "A preponderance of evidence" which basically means whomever can make a better case. The guy who gets 51% wins the case. In some civil cases the standard is "clear and convincing testimony" which basically means evidence isn't nessicarly going to be present or relevent, and comes down to whose lawyer makes a more persuasive arguement, however that gets complicated.
The problem with the US legal system is how we handle precedent, basically when a judge or jury makes a ruling on something it becomes part of our living body of law.
To use a criminal example, the BASIC details of "Mapp Vs. Ohio" is a big one for this involved a case where a bunch of cops looking for a missing fugitive went to the house of Mrs. Mapp looking for the guy with a warrent. They went into the house and searched and couldn't find the guy, but they DID find pornography. Understand that pornography by it's very nature is illegal in the US, most of what is called "porn" is not pornography in a legal sense. There is a very specific standard for getting something declared "porn" and made illegal, it has to be obscene and without any redeeming merit. This being a key element in things like the current Supreme Court case involving video games (which I won't get into, or how it applies). At any rate they used this porn (probably kiddy porn or something they knew was banned) to try and cajole her into spilling the beans on this escapee. She didn't comply and was arrested. In court she complained that they shouldn't have been able to search her house the way they did, since there was no reason for them to toss her place and find her porn stash looking for a fugitive. In this case the Judge agreed with her.
That's a simplistic version, and it's been a while, so I could have the details wrong in places, the bottom line though is that as a result of that ruling the standards for search and seizure in the US changed, and the scope of warrents was carefully limited. For example a policeman with a warrent to find a fugitive can't open a breadbox, and if he does and finds drugs or an illegal weapon it's not admissible (and incidently can't be used to pressure the people in the residence). Later interpetations of Mapp Vs. Ohio lead to further rulings which themselves spawned more precedent, ad infinium. The end result being that our right to "Protection From Unreasonable Search and Seizure", one of our base laws, works far differantly than the intent of the founding fathers and the examples they left behind.
In both civil and criminal cases, arguements oftentimes come down to people argueing precdent vs. precedent to make a case for who is right in a legal sense.
I can't figure out the logic behind this paticular suit, but there are requirements that attorneys have to be on record in most places. You can't in general have a secret attorney nobody knows about for a number of reasons. As amusing as the idea of masked prosecutors, and secret superhero attorneys are in various wierd kinds of fiction, that kind of thing isn't allowed in the US. It's pushing any definition I know of because legal advice is differant from representation, but I suppose some wierd precedent could be used to argue that the paperwork counts as representation when that lawyer isn't on record as representing the clients.
