Failure To Play The Odds

Anyone who is subject to criminal penalties needs to gain a cursory understanding of why chance favors the well prepared. Game theory is often used to describe Economics and less employed for criminal justice, but we think the analogy is appropriate. In short, you have to learn the rules of the game, hire the best player you can, and engage in the game to prevail.

Our first premise is that, as with any complex system, the American criminal justice system functions at some percentage of efficiency less than 100%; and this fact is not subject to serious debate. The question then is how to exploit those inefficiencies to a defendant's benefit. A corollary of the first premise is that you must engage in the game to reap the rewards of those inefficiencies. For example, in the case of a Fourth Amendment violation, even if the officer swore out an affidavit and walked into court and swore that he had violated your rights (unlikely), you would not benefit unless you had filed the proper paperwork asking the court to suppress the fruits of the illegal stop and subsequently dismiss your case. Curiously, it is often the more educated clients who fail to grasp this very fundamental concept, and conversely, at least in our limited experience, the more uneducated that immediately "get it," as it were. The former people concentrate on the facts they believe should mitigate the charge, even though the only facts that matter are the facts the police officer will testify to; a defendant's word is useless at the beginning of a criminal case and no prosecutor will lend their ear to a defendant's plea.

Instead, you must engage the system, file the appropriate pleadings at the proper times, fulfill all procedural rules, and finally understand how the rules work for and against you in your particular case. When a person asks how they can afford a lawyer we understand exactly where they are coming from, largely because we believe that the criminal justice system needs to be overhauled - and that every defendant needs to speak with a Salt Lake City DUI defense attorney before they ever consider pleading guilty; we argue that without this safeguard, people are suffocated by the system and that too many people plead guilty to serious criminal offenses they often are not guilty of beyond a reasonable doubt. But the fact is that there is no way to negotiate the legal system without a lawyer, just as there is no way to play a board game without knowing the rules, or go hiking to a particular destination without a map and a compass. Disregarding money for the moment, people who represent themselves without legal aid are wasting their time because even if they are fundamentally correct, they do not know the rules of the game.