Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices.
If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.
If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
>If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
I read this wrong the first time, but the thing I thought it said is an I idea I'm now very happy with: We should make all asset seizures from guilty defendants (which don't have identifiable victims) go to the public defenders' office.
That would in one fell swoop provide a significant amount of funding for the chronically underfunded public defenders' office, and deprive law enforcement of the perverse incentive to engage in de facto theft by asset seizure solely for the purposes of padding their own budgets (because at present that is often where it goes).
The perverse incentive wouldn't be to seize more assets -- it would be to generate more guilty convictions for defendants whose assets have been seized.
That's arguably a good point, but I think it's mitigated substantially by the fact that the overwhelming majority of those defended by the public defenders' office haven't had their assets seized (because they haven't got any), and any individual defendant with so many assets having been seized that it starts looking like a value proposition for the public defender to throw the case has probably got enough extra stashed somewhere, or enough friends, that they aren't being defended by the public defender anyway.
I'm not saying it would never happen, but it would certainly be a lot more rare than "hey look, this shady fellow has got a lot of money, let's prosecute him instead of criminals who are causing more damage to society because it's more profitable to the law enforcement agency who gets the money."
Edit: It would also be possible to just remove the moral hazard. In the rare case where the public defender is counsel for a defendant whose assets have been seized, then in that case if the defendant loses the assets don't go to the public defender, they go somewhere else. Like, say, lead abatement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006368
Edit 2: Really, you're probably right. I think I'm just defending it because I had a thought late at night before thinking it through and immediately posted it, and now I feel like I should be defending my idea even if it isn't any good. Almost all of these "x found money is allocated to y thing" plans are the wrong way to go -- the amount of money something needs to operate is unrelated to the amount of ticket revenue or asset seizures or whatever.
But it shouldn't be allocated to law enforcement either, for the same reasons. That is what really needs to be changed.
Maybe it all should go to lead abatement -- putting it in the general fund just hands the perverse incentives to Congress. Allocating it strictly to lead abatement puts it in the hands of people with no obvious relation to asset seizures and so no obvious ability to unjustly increase the number of seizures or fraudulent guilty verdicts for pecuniary gain, and solves a serious problem that also happens to be an extremely cost-effective use of the money.
If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.
If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.