I remember seeing a page or interview of a defense attorney
Posted on: June 26, 2023 at 14:29:19 CT
JeffB
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who handles federal cases during all of the craziness over the kid killed in Florida. He was saying that most people plead in federal criminal cases and of those that don't the prosecutors win a ridiculous percentage of the cases. Perhaps 98% conviction rate? He said that the feds can have almost an unlimited budget, almost forcing defendants to plea as they run out of funds to pay the legal fees. Then when they go to court the feds can and do lie under testimony and the federal judges never punish them for it.
Bottom line, if they want to get you they will get you almost every time.
My wife worked for a controller at a company when she first got out of college. A great guy, but his first job as controller had come into a company whose owners had been cooking the books. Shortly after he got there the company collapsed. The owners fled to South America and many people who had bought homes they were building were left holding the bag. Many had secured big loans, made down payments... and homes were partially finished or not started yet and the builder was bankrupt.
The feds felt they had to charge someone and they couldn't get the actual perpetrators so they went after this young guy, who was also not long out of college. The pressure was on them to nail someone... anyone, and this guy was the fall guy.
He hired attorneys and found the new job as controller as the negotiations dragged on. After a few years had expired his attorneys recommended that he go ahead and accept the fed's offer to plead guilty to a felony and he would get probation. He kept refusing that, because he said that he had done nothing wrong. They told him he was fighting the federal government and they had much deeper pockets than he did. Fighting them was a losing battle and they would bankrupt him before the trial even started.
He eventually reluctantly agreed, and when he signed the papers, one of their attorneys admitted to him that they really had no real evidence on him.