And Fallen my friend we are making some common ground progress here. Right now, I live in the deep south. About as racist as it gets here. For a time, I dated an attorney. A criminal defense attorney. I am not going to say that a particular group committed more crimes than the others as I did not look at it from that perspective.
I am here to tell you that yes she got more black clients than white ones. Mobile is also about a 80% black population so that would make some sense. The ones that paid got equal representation by her. The ones that were guilty, got the minimum legal representation required by law. And she would fight for a lesser sentence etc. The ones that were innocent she fought hard for, often for less money. There was some principle of justice and conscious used, but make no mistake this is about money to the attorney.
She absolutely knows that 40% of her cases were built on LEO or prosecuting attorneys willful abuse of the system towards the accused. I never thought to ask her if there was more system abuse to blacks over whites but it stands to reason that if whites have more money to defend, it is less likely that the prosecuting side are going to try and screw up and fabricate chyt to get a conviction. You still have the 60% left that are either going to be guilty or not based on the actual truth of the acts rather than the trumped up ones.
Of her cases, 75% were felony drug cases. White clients took money out of accounts (parents etc.) to fight the battle. Black clients paid cash from undisclosed sources. Not her business but she basically knows that it probably would not pass any drug sniffing test if it were subjected to it. Her canned defense for these habitual black offenders will always be lack of opportunity, lack of education, racial tensions, etc. That was a given excuse for every client that was black and habitual. In other words, they have no other choices to make, so they break the law. And she will be the first to tell you that this is all part of the game of justice they play. It's simply the canned approach to defense of this segment of her clients. This usually plays well for sentencing rather than guilt or innocence. But it is the immediate leverage to use. Never mind that they came up with $20K, that is all confidential to the courts.
Of her clients, the whites were more likely to get no jail time, but they were also more likely to foot a larger legal defense bill as well. The larger the offense, the larger the retainer. I witnessed many times people paying 20K before she even wrote the first response to a charge. 50K was not unheard of if you were facing a good stretch of prison time. Watched a white girl with 14 previous bust, get no jail time for her 15th felony drug arrest, while her black client may get 2 years for cocaine possession with 1 prior. But the white girl had a daddy coughing up 80K, whereas the black man was tapped at 20K and his family has mortgaged the house to get there. So this could appear to be racial on the surface, when in fact its not. O.J. as we know bought his way out of trouble.
Expecting them to defend for free is a wonderful Utopia idea, much like any social hand out. Each attorney here has to provide a percentage of hours to the state for Court Appointed cases. She gets paid less than a third of her going rate and she will defend them to the minimum the law requires. They all hate doing it, so they all have a desk agreement to just get these done as quickly as they can to move on the bigger fish cases. The judges know it as well. Everyone is trying to move the garbage through the system at that point.
Asking the attorneys to do this for free....is like asking a cop to do their job for free, or you to do your job for free. Good luck with that.