I always hear about rich people hiring expensive lawyers to escape punishments. How do they do that, and what stops more accessible lawyers from achieving the same result?
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The key thing is the amount of time/effort they can put in.
My mother was a lawyer in Scotland (now retired). Working in a court department, she mainly did civil cases, but defended occasional small criminal cases too. One case I helped with a little came to mind.
Someone had been charged with criminal damage, because he had damaged the car park exit barrier at the hospital emergency department. He was guilty, and admitted it, so there was no trial as such, just “proof in mitigation”, where you introduce any evidence to justify a lesser punishment.
Because he had the money to pay for it, his case was well prepared. He had already paid for all the damage before getting to court – this helps. (The court would have ordered him to pay anyway, but doing it voluntarily ahead of time looks better.) Admitting it at the earliest point is also viewed positively, rather than wasting the court’s time denying it. Since he’d been an emergency patient, there were also photos of the burns he had been there to get treated.
It’s been a few years now so I’m not entirely certain, but I think the final outcome was that he was “admonished”: the judge told him he’d done a bad thing and shouldn’t do it again – but since the record showed he had been in considerable pain at the time, had apologised and already made full financial restitution, no actual punishment was appropriate.
In other cases, sometimes there are minor technicalities that defeat the prosecution – but only if someone spends the time to find them. A speeding ticket… but the speed camera hadn’t been properly calibrated recently enough, so it can’t be used as evidence. Parking ticket – but the parking restriction sign wasn’t compliant, so not valid.
You can’t (usually) just shoot someone then buy your way out with a seven figure legal bill – but you can make the prosecution’s job a lot harder and make a much better argument for a light sentence if you’re convicted. OJ Simpson got acquitted because he had expensive lawyers *who found flaws in the evidence*: the fact the blood stained glove was the wrong size and actually suggested someone else had been involved saved him. If the glove had fitted, he’d probably be behind bars now, however good his lawyer.
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