lawyer&#39;s corruption If a corrupted lawyer during a court case intentionally doesn't provide enough given information by his client to the judge, i.e. intentionally doesn't represent given information and loses the case, does such a lawyer commit a crime? If yes, what is the name of such a crime and how to deal with such a situation?
It's hard to say, given how little we know about the case and the information, also what you mean by &quot;corrupted&quot; and what your evidence is. Here are two hypothetical cases that illustrate different possibilities. 1: The accused instructs the lawyer to tell the judge &quot;My client has an alibi against the robbery charge: at the time, he was murdering his brother&quot;. Lawyer deems this to be a bad argument because murder is punished more severely than robbery. The lawyer is doing his job, protecting the interest of the client. No crime or civil wrong. 2: The accused instructs the lawyer to tell the judge &quot;My client has an alibi against the robbery charge: at the time, he was in church&quot;. The lawyer doesn't understand that this is exculpatory evidence, thinking &quot;they never asked about church, there's no point in me raising this issue&quot;. The client can probably sue for incompetence. There are possible criminal charges possible, for example if the lawyer is working for The Mob he might be involved in an actual criminal conspiracy.
You misunderstand the significance of the phrase "innocent until proven guilty." This is in part because you are not considering the entire phrase. The full phrase is that an accused party is "presumed innocent until proven guilty." This does not mean that the accused is innocent, only that criminal procedure must take as its starting point that the accused did not commit the crime. The major implication of the presumption, and indeed its original purpose, is that it places the burden of proof on the prosecution. This means that if a prosecutor asserts that you stole something, you do not have to prove that you did not. Rather, the prosecutor must prove that you did. The only reason to present evidence of your own is to rebut the prosecutor's evidence. Another practical implication is that a decision to detain someone awaiting a criminal trial may not be based on the assumption that the accused committed the crime. On the other hand, that decision is not based on the assumption that the accused did not commit the crime. There is a presumption of innocence, but no assumption of innocence, and the government is not obliged before the person is convicted to treat the person as if there is no accusation or charge. Wikipedia has a decent discussion. If we modify your question accordingly, it becomes How can two people be presumed innocent until proven guilty if their stories conflict? Now the answer should be clear. The prosecutor must develop evidence that shows which one of the people has committed the crime. If the prosecutor cannot do that, neither person may be punished.
Such an action by the lawyer is certainly unethical, but there is no automatic or routine mechanism to detect it and give better advice to Rob, at least not in the US. Rob could get a second opinion, but criminal defendants do not often do this, and there is no requirement to do so. If the situation is extreme, it might be reported, after the fact, and the lawyer sanctioned. But no one is ever required to do a plea bargain, and there is always a chance, even if only a very small one, that a jury will acquit. Whether to try for a trial is a judgement call. That makes it hard to deal with the unethical intention, which the lawyer presumably did not tell anyone about. Rob's only practical protection is to pick a lawyer with a good reputation for not doing that sort of thing, and reputations can be misleading. If Rob does not have money he may not be able to choose at all, but then the lawyer will not be tempted to go to trial to &quot;suck money out of&quot; Rob, because there will be none to suck. In that case the lawyer may, indeed, be tempted not to go to trial when (rarely) that would be in Rob's best interest. Rob would have little protection against that.
In California civil court cases: Will court extend filing deadlines for me if I can prove that my attorney was unresponsive? Generally only in cases of "gross negligence" on the part of the attorney, or other "excusable neglect" (e.g. the attorney died). Not always even then. The typical "gross neglect" fact pattern is that an attorney just wakes up one day, steals all of the client funds in his trust account, and travels to another country, or sinks into a deep clinical depression and ignores all of his cases for a long period of time, often weeks or months. Are attorneys liable for the consequences of missing court deadlines? If missing the deadline failed to live up to the standard of care for a reasonable attorney (usually it will be a breach of a standard of care but in very complex cases it might not), and if one can prove that the missed court deadline caused economic harm, then usually an attorney can be sued for malpractice for missing a court deadline. As a practical matter, there are lots and lots of court deadlines and it is the exception rather than the rule that you can show that missing a particular court deadline caused you harm. But, it certainly happens.
Are police required to contact a real lawyer if you ask? give opinions from a number of lawyers and police in different jurisdictions. The basic consensus is that in most jurisdictions, such behavior will get the case thrown out of court and often get the police officer who tried this fired. HOWEVER there was a case where this was tried and while the case was thrown out on appeal, it was not as simple as the postings in the above article may have made it appear. This story shows a case where the Tennessee police actually did this. While the lower court allowed it because the defendant was "gullible", the appeals court rejected this argument. [T]he conduct of the law enforcement officers in this case, and in particular Detective Henry, is so egregious that it simply cannot go unchecked. That Detective Henry would illegally pose as an attorney and arrange the circumstances of the defendant’s case to make it appear as though he had successfully undertaken legal representation of the defendant is abhorrent. That the detective would specifically instruct the defendant not to communicate the relationship to his appointed counsel, in what we can only assume was an effort to enlarge the time for the detective to gain incriminating information from the defendant, renders completely reprehensible the state action in this case. Given the unconscionable behavior of the state actors in this case and the fact that the defendant was essentially prevented from proving prejudice through no fault of his own, we have no trouble concluding that the only appropriate remedy in this case is the dismissal of all the indictments.
The appropriate course of action would be to demand an evidentiary hearing, present evidence, and appeal the judge's ruling if it is contrary to the evidence in the record. Abandoning your attorney because the judge is sounding ominous would be foolish indeed. You can't do anything about the judge or about DSS.
Should one be unconditionally honest with their lawyer whenever one is being charged with a crime ? Yes. Otherwise, the defendant risks doing one or more of the following: (1) hinder the litigation strategy his lawyer devised; (2) increase the likelihood of inconsistencies that can only hurt the defendant's credibility on factors relevant to the sentencing guidelines; and/or (3) prompt the lawyer to withdraw once the truth is unveiled (whether the withdrawal is on grounds of wasted effort or on moral grounds), which further complicates the defendant's position.
A contract can’t legalise illegality Let’s assume that absent the “simulation” disclosure in the ToS, this would be fraud. The question then becomes, does making the disclosure make it not fraud? Fraud requires dishonesty and deception. These are measured by what a reasonable person would determine from the overall conduct so a small piece of truth in amongst a web of half-truths and outright lies is still dishonest and deceptive. From the perspective of US law, is Bob doing this regarded a scam? No, but only because “scam” isn’t a legal term - it’s slang for fraud and this is fraud Is this a criminal case, or a civil case? Both What evidence can Tom provide to support the lawsuit? Whatever he has. However, in practice, these types of fraudsters are rarely ever caught and it’s even more rare for the victim to recover their money. They are usually off-shore in countries with either poor rule of law or which will not extradite their nationals.