As someone who is not a lawyer but works with them, your article is well-written and I can tell you've thought about it a lot, but, it's not even close to accurately describing the internal workings of the legal world. I could probably write a whole article just responding to yours, but a few things:
1. Lawyers LOVE plea deals. And settlements, for non-criminal cases. 98% of federal criminal cases end in plea deals and if my memory's right, it's in the 90s for state criminal cases as well. Lawyers love it when they don't have to go to trial and can clear off their calendar for the day. No one who's actually in the legal field views settling a case as anything sketchy or "less than" than going to trial. If anything, I'd say that more lawyers violate ethical standards by convincing their client to forego their trial and take a plea deal that's not in their best interest.
2. People from outside the legal field view their cases as slogging along at a snail's speed, but for the people in the legal field, they're going at a breakneck pace. You speculate that a couple of weeks is "plenty of time" to review all the evidence in a case and make a decision. That's laughable. You might not even know what evidence there is within a few weeks. You have to meet with your client, find out their story, file an appearance as their attorney, get any pleadings that were already filed in the case, determine what evidence the prosecutor has on them, figure out what points of law and fact can be argued, subpoena places to get records which will take at least two weeks, figure out potential witnesses, find those witnesses, convince them to talk with you, meet with those witnesses and find out what their story would be if they were to testify, prepare questions that you would ask them if you go to trial, subpoena them, try to reach a plea deal with opposing, review their offers with your client, prepare a counter-offer, and then hope to hear back. Decide what evidence you want to use as exhibits. Disclose your witnesses and exhibits to opposing. Look over opposing's disclosures with your client and see if anything makes him change his mind about that initial settlement offer, ....I sure hope you only have one case to work on!
As it is, in federal cases, defendants have a right to a trial with 70 days of being charged. Most of them waive that right. Why? Because they want their attorney to have more time to gather evidence to support their position. If you were to have a trial within a few weeks, the only thing you would get is a lot more appeals as evidence continued to be discovered after the trial date.
3. You seem to be under the impression that lawyers are the ones that are writing the laws and that they write them to be as complicated as possible for their own benefit. Actually, when laypeople write the laws they end up being a lot more convoluted and cause more issues down the road because 1) there will be contradictions, and 2) they don't define terms. Take a law that says, "no one can drive with marijuana in their system". Seems simple, but what does that actually mean? That you can't be under the influence? Or that you can't have any chemical components from marijuana in your system, even though they could be around for weeks after you smoked it? Sloppy writing like that makes the judicial system have to go back and determine what the intent of the law was a lot more than writing seems overly-detailed but is precise.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. The typical criminal case is not that complicated. Even the average felony case is something like a burglary or a $4k employee theft. An attorney can review all the evidence in a matter of hours, sometimes less.
The biggest time sink is dealing with the client’s feelings. They can spend hours telling you they don’t want to go to prison.
“It should make sense to treat lawyers like we do plumbers - not with disrespect, but just as normal people whose job it is to do standard maintenance on slightly unpleasant infrastructure and get paid a reasonable moderate amount for it.”
I don’t agree with everything in the post, but I DO think that if we could wave a magic wand and make people think of lawyers (of which I am one) this way that would be a big step toward improving things.
I sometimes joke that we should go back to a system where all of our laws fit on a stele in the middle of town. Jokes aside, it would probably be better in some important ways, lol.
Yeah. Eliezer had a story where each law has to have a legislator that takes responsibility for it by reciting the whole thing (and when that legislator is replaced they have to find a new one to take it over), which also feels like a good variant to stop them being too long.
Law’s should explicitly state their intent, and be overturnable/ avoidable /revocable if the proceduralism violates the spirit of the law e.g. neqa/ceqa blocking green edgy projects including high speed rail
AND laws by sections should have a number of information budget - bit budget or word budget if you will - that has to be raised separately for a set of law in order to increase complexity. Measuring the laws in the compressed form allows for not penalizing the repeated use of the same ideas or needing to make laws overly terse to read, but would put some limit on the sprawling complexity available to the legislature.
AND there should more DIY e-file options for the public to utilize the legal system for routine things without involving lawyers.
These are all things that could be done legislatively, but political will/vision is lacking because at any given time most people aren’t thinking about the legal system and how shitty it actually works. Kind of like how everyone loves their private health insurance until they have to use it, and find out what a legalistic bureaucratic mess it is when something non-routine happens.
May I suggest touring the sausage factory a few times before making pronouncements on how to make better sausage? It's not that you're not a lawyer; even lawyers who don't work criminal law don't have a clue about what happens in court. Most will never see the inside of a courtroom unless it's for their own speeding ticket.
So first and foremost, how many more pleas do you want? Ninety-five plus percent of defendants plead. In the last two years, I've had two trials (one jury for sexual molestation felony, one bench for a DWI misdemeanor), five deferred prosecution agreements (where the client agrees to pay restitution and behave in exchange for the charges being dropped), and three complete dismissals. Everyone else (at least 200 clients) plead guilty.
Particularly for misdemeanor cases, the system is built on pleading guilty in exchange for a sentence of time served. People who can't afford bond can't afford to wait in jail, not only losing their jobs and missing their rent and child support payments, but also getting charged for the "luxury" of being in jail. In my rural county, it's $60/night. For all too many of my people, their guilt or innocence is irrelevant. They can't afford to stay in jail, let me investigate their case, file motions and attend hearings to argue why the evidence was inappropriately collected, and take the matter to trial. (And unlike a private attorney, my services are a relatively small flat fee; had I been charging a standard rate by the hour, a recent case in which the client was insisting on taking the case to trial would have easily run him that $20K or $30K. As it was, he paid about $800.)
The laws are so broadly written and interpreted that it is virtually impossible to come to the attention of law enforcement and not have committed some crime. The police know it; the prosecutor knows it. He can make plea offers knowing that most people will be more scared of losing at trial than taking the punishment. That sexual molestation trial? That morning, the prosecutor was offering to amend the charges to time served (he'd spent over 400 days in custody) at either a misdemeanor that would require registration as a sexual offender or as a felony that would just carry the loss of rights of being a felon. He was not willing to plead to either and instead took a chance on getting 45 years in prison; very few people are that stubborn.
As a matter of public policy, I agree that the exclusionary rule is not the best way to deal with police misconduct in searches and arrests. I work in a small rural county; I know to expect a Fourth Amendment issue the second I see certain officer names. The same officers illegally search and arrest over and over, and they are protected not just by the thin blue line, but by the prosecutors and judges.
My solution is simple: if illegally collected evidence is used in a case, the officer is automatically charged with the crime of "improper evidence gathering." If the case is a misdemeanor, it's a misdemeanor; a felony, a felony. We will never stop criminals with badges until we treat them like criminals instead of misguided overzealous heroes who can't be expected to know that permission to search a vehicle from the vehicle's owner is not permission to search the purse of an occupant in the vehicle, to use one of my cases.
As for speed of cases, I came into my county with some of the longest cases in the office (e.g. in jail for more than a year between arrest and trial/plea) and now have a very fast case turnaround. A felony case, in which the client says "yep, they got me dead to rights" and takes the first deal offered still takes at least a month. There's the initial appearance that only has to be within 2 days of arrest (3 on a holiday weekend). The case is automatically scheduled for a bond hearing within seven days (in my county, the next Thursday).
Half the time, I haven't been able to get to the jail to talk with the client about the charges, evidence, or plea offer, so we schedule a docket appearance or a preliminary hearing in one to two weeks so I have a chance to meet with them. We don't do grand juries in my county; the preliminary hearing is in front of the judge to determine is there's enough evidence to proceed with a felony and bind the case over to circuit court. And in terms of outcome, the preliminary hearing is irrelevant -- if the prosecutor indicted a ham sandwich, the judge would bind it over. The only reason I have prelims at all is to get inconvenient facts the prosecutor might want to have ignored stated under oath. (E.g. client was charged with felon in possession of a firearm. I got the arresting officer to admit that the client had twice called the sheriff's department because of threats made against him, threats that the sheriff's department had refused to investigate or recommend charges for.)
The circuit court for felonies only meets once a month, on the second Wednesday. If you're scheduled to have a prelim on the following Thursday, too bad.
And again, this only applies for the folks who admit they're guilty and are willing to take the first offer. You have an alibi? That'll take time to run down. You have witnesses who will testify the other guy threw the first punch? Hope you know their phone number by heart while you're in jail. You want us to watch all the body cam footage to check if the police actually followed procedures? Time, time, and more time.
And contesting evidence ... let's walk through that. I file the motion. At the next docket (up to a month away) we set a hearing, which might be for the next docket day. Then the judge may wait until the docket the month after that to give his decision. Two months of holding pattern that is entirely possible to make no difference in the outcome.
It's a mess, amen. But on the criminal defense side, many of the delays and problems are the result of the perverse incentives of police, judges, and prosecutors, not us.
I agree that many lawyers love doing plea deals in practice, but they end up doing them because trials become longer and more cumbersome. The dynamic is that people add complications to trials until they hit the limit of complexity they can reasonably handle, then use plea deals in many cases because there's no realistic option to avoid them (this also causes issues with charging some things as felonies, because then people don't want a plea deal and there's not enough court slots to do trials for all of these).
But this is still not a system that tries upfront to be efficient. It's one that's designed to be maximally accurate and avoid shortcuts, and then makes them as a compromise with reality when it has to. It's not designed upfront to enable easy or more plea deals, or to allow shorter trials for cases where plea deals tend to be avoided.
Re lawyers not slogging - I agree that lawyers work incredibly hard. I think they end up taking forever because the system is implemented to measure effort rather than results (or when it does measure results, it often gives no or negative weight to speed).
For the third point - lawyers don't write the original laws, but they do build up the system for processing it and advise the people who wrote them. I agree that in terms of assigning blame much of it should go to non-lawyer politicians who have even less interest in writing things that work well. The length of trials and processing is mostly procedural. It's not that there's specific guys going "hohoho I'll make this longer to annoy people". It's that the priorities are careful work and dotting all the is, and going "maybe we should just skim this" makes you come off as a bad lawyer.
The business world is similarly burdened by rules, some of which are used as “moats.” A moat is what you’d imagine it being, a series of obstacles that protect existing market players from newcomers.
There is also a universal response to risk in that when a disaster (no matter how improbable and unlikely to repeat) happens, the immediate response is almost always to make a rule or check to prevent it from happening. Even as all these burdensome checks and rules accumulate, no one is assigned to clearing out old rules or assessing the risk of being so risk averse. The rules just amass over time, which could be why newcomers with less accumulated internal rules are still able to rise despite said moats.
Yeah. An advantage the business world has is that incumbents tend to be replaced by newcomers over time. But that's a bigger problem when it comes to replacing the legal system
An ancillary article I'd love to read some day is why the USA in particular is cursed with so many lawyers per-capita vs. the rest of the industrialized world. Is it something in the lousy assemblage of laws? The Contingency-fee system? Do we use lawyers for routine processes in the US that people in .. eg. Germany do not use lawyers for? Maybe we can learn from others' experience.
This is very unscientific, but culturally the US is just very into contractualism (ever since having the first written constitution) and the rules being what they say.
Possibly (wild unfounded speculation) it's downstream of the history of multiculturalism being composed of people without shared background means you have to specify more things since it's harder to just assume people will interpret the blank parts the same way when you're coming from different cultures).
“If we’re worried about police abuse of power we should just have rules about firing police officers who abuse their power, not weird evidentiary game theory that only makes sense if you think the point of a trial is to be an elaborate chess game between lawyers trying to show off how smart they are and not a simple process to reach a reasonable decision.”
Given the realities of police unions that would be nearly impossible. It would be more practical for courts to blacklist officers from giving testimony once they have a history of misconduct.
It's called Giglio. Evidence of a police officer caught lying under oath can be introduced at every hearing in which the officer is a witness. The police officers just bounce from department to department, betting that none of the defense attorneys in the new jurisdiction will know that he's a liar.
A bit of unsolicited advice: this article is full of assertions which, as such, come off as... well, uninformed and without empirical basis. However, if you were to reframe them (to yourself, at first,) as questions, you would find a lot of vigorous and stimulating debate surrounding these difficult issues.
Advisory Opinions once did a great set of episodes on criminal justice reform where they first interviewed Matt Martens on his book, and then in the next episode read some very thoughtful counterpoints from other professionals at all levels of criminal justice. It's a humbling experience to go through in a way: Matt is very convincing, but the correspondents also make very solid arguments. There are some things where you have to realize that, if the right thing were obvious and easy... we'd have done it already.
As someone who is not a lawyer but works with them, your article is well-written and I can tell you've thought about it a lot, but, it's not even close to accurately describing the internal workings of the legal world. I could probably write a whole article just responding to yours, but a few things:
1. Lawyers LOVE plea deals. And settlements, for non-criminal cases. 98% of federal criminal cases end in plea deals and if my memory's right, it's in the 90s for state criminal cases as well. Lawyers love it when they don't have to go to trial and can clear off their calendar for the day. No one who's actually in the legal field views settling a case as anything sketchy or "less than" than going to trial. If anything, I'd say that more lawyers violate ethical standards by convincing their client to forego their trial and take a plea deal that's not in their best interest.
2. People from outside the legal field view their cases as slogging along at a snail's speed, but for the people in the legal field, they're going at a breakneck pace. You speculate that a couple of weeks is "plenty of time" to review all the evidence in a case and make a decision. That's laughable. You might not even know what evidence there is within a few weeks. You have to meet with your client, find out their story, file an appearance as their attorney, get any pleadings that were already filed in the case, determine what evidence the prosecutor has on them, figure out what points of law and fact can be argued, subpoena places to get records which will take at least two weeks, figure out potential witnesses, find those witnesses, convince them to talk with you, meet with those witnesses and find out what their story would be if they were to testify, prepare questions that you would ask them if you go to trial, subpoena them, try to reach a plea deal with opposing, review their offers with your client, prepare a counter-offer, and then hope to hear back. Decide what evidence you want to use as exhibits. Disclose your witnesses and exhibits to opposing. Look over opposing's disclosures with your client and see if anything makes him change his mind about that initial settlement offer, ....I sure hope you only have one case to work on!
As it is, in federal cases, defendants have a right to a trial with 70 days of being charged. Most of them waive that right. Why? Because they want their attorney to have more time to gather evidence to support their position. If you were to have a trial within a few weeks, the only thing you would get is a lot more appeals as evidence continued to be discovered after the trial date.
3. You seem to be under the impression that lawyers are the ones that are writing the laws and that they write them to be as complicated as possible for their own benefit. Actually, when laypeople write the laws they end up being a lot more convoluted and cause more issues down the road because 1) there will be contradictions, and 2) they don't define terms. Take a law that says, "no one can drive with marijuana in their system". Seems simple, but what does that actually mean? That you can't be under the influence? Or that you can't have any chemical components from marijuana in your system, even though they could be around for weeks after you smoked it? Sloppy writing like that makes the judicial system have to go back and determine what the intent of the law was a lot more than writing seems overly-detailed but is precise.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. The typical criminal case is not that complicated. Even the average felony case is something like a burglary or a $4k employee theft. An attorney can review all the evidence in a matter of hours, sometimes less.
The biggest time sink is dealing with the client’s feelings. They can spend hours telling you they don’t want to go to prison.
“It should make sense to treat lawyers like we do plumbers - not with disrespect, but just as normal people whose job it is to do standard maintenance on slightly unpleasant infrastructure and get paid a reasonable moderate amount for it.”
I don’t agree with everything in the post, but I DO think that if we could wave a magic wand and make people think of lawyers (of which I am one) this way that would be a big step toward improving things.
I sometimes joke that we should go back to a system where all of our laws fit on a stele in the middle of town. Jokes aside, it would probably be better in some important ways, lol.
Yeah. Eliezer had a story where each law has to have a legislator that takes responsibility for it by reciting the whole thing (and when that legislator is replaced they have to find a new one to take it over), which also feels like a good variant to stop them being too long.
Law’s should explicitly state their intent, and be overturnable/ avoidable /revocable if the proceduralism violates the spirit of the law e.g. neqa/ceqa blocking green edgy projects including high speed rail
AND laws by sections should have a number of information budget - bit budget or word budget if you will - that has to be raised separately for a set of law in order to increase complexity. Measuring the laws in the compressed form allows for not penalizing the repeated use of the same ideas or needing to make laws overly terse to read, but would put some limit on the sprawling complexity available to the legislature.
AND there should more DIY e-file options for the public to utilize the legal system for routine things without involving lawyers.
These are all things that could be done legislatively, but political will/vision is lacking because at any given time most people aren’t thinking about the legal system and how shitty it actually works. Kind of like how everyone loves their private health insurance until they have to use it, and find out what a legalistic bureaucratic mess it is when something non-routine happens.
Very bad and wrong piece based on pure bullshit.
Found the idiot bot in the room. “Muh AI”
Lots to think about, sir: and I shall meet you at noon! After current writing obligations are met.
Public defender here.
May I suggest touring the sausage factory a few times before making pronouncements on how to make better sausage? It's not that you're not a lawyer; even lawyers who don't work criminal law don't have a clue about what happens in court. Most will never see the inside of a courtroom unless it's for their own speeding ticket.
So first and foremost, how many more pleas do you want? Ninety-five plus percent of defendants plead. In the last two years, I've had two trials (one jury for sexual molestation felony, one bench for a DWI misdemeanor), five deferred prosecution agreements (where the client agrees to pay restitution and behave in exchange for the charges being dropped), and three complete dismissals. Everyone else (at least 200 clients) plead guilty.
Particularly for misdemeanor cases, the system is built on pleading guilty in exchange for a sentence of time served. People who can't afford bond can't afford to wait in jail, not only losing their jobs and missing their rent and child support payments, but also getting charged for the "luxury" of being in jail. In my rural county, it's $60/night. For all too many of my people, their guilt or innocence is irrelevant. They can't afford to stay in jail, let me investigate their case, file motions and attend hearings to argue why the evidence was inappropriately collected, and take the matter to trial. (And unlike a private attorney, my services are a relatively small flat fee; had I been charging a standard rate by the hour, a recent case in which the client was insisting on taking the case to trial would have easily run him that $20K or $30K. As it was, he paid about $800.)
The laws are so broadly written and interpreted that it is virtually impossible to come to the attention of law enforcement and not have committed some crime. The police know it; the prosecutor knows it. He can make plea offers knowing that most people will be more scared of losing at trial than taking the punishment. That sexual molestation trial? That morning, the prosecutor was offering to amend the charges to time served (he'd spent over 400 days in custody) at either a misdemeanor that would require registration as a sexual offender or as a felony that would just carry the loss of rights of being a felon. He was not willing to plead to either and instead took a chance on getting 45 years in prison; very few people are that stubborn.
As a matter of public policy, I agree that the exclusionary rule is not the best way to deal with police misconduct in searches and arrests. I work in a small rural county; I know to expect a Fourth Amendment issue the second I see certain officer names. The same officers illegally search and arrest over and over, and they are protected not just by the thin blue line, but by the prosecutors and judges.
My solution is simple: if illegally collected evidence is used in a case, the officer is automatically charged with the crime of "improper evidence gathering." If the case is a misdemeanor, it's a misdemeanor; a felony, a felony. We will never stop criminals with badges until we treat them like criminals instead of misguided overzealous heroes who can't be expected to know that permission to search a vehicle from the vehicle's owner is not permission to search the purse of an occupant in the vehicle, to use one of my cases.
As for speed of cases, I came into my county with some of the longest cases in the office (e.g. in jail for more than a year between arrest and trial/plea) and now have a very fast case turnaround. A felony case, in which the client says "yep, they got me dead to rights" and takes the first deal offered still takes at least a month. There's the initial appearance that only has to be within 2 days of arrest (3 on a holiday weekend). The case is automatically scheduled for a bond hearing within seven days (in my county, the next Thursday).
Half the time, I haven't been able to get to the jail to talk with the client about the charges, evidence, or plea offer, so we schedule a docket appearance or a preliminary hearing in one to two weeks so I have a chance to meet with them. We don't do grand juries in my county; the preliminary hearing is in front of the judge to determine is there's enough evidence to proceed with a felony and bind the case over to circuit court. And in terms of outcome, the preliminary hearing is irrelevant -- if the prosecutor indicted a ham sandwich, the judge would bind it over. The only reason I have prelims at all is to get inconvenient facts the prosecutor might want to have ignored stated under oath. (E.g. client was charged with felon in possession of a firearm. I got the arresting officer to admit that the client had twice called the sheriff's department because of threats made against him, threats that the sheriff's department had refused to investigate or recommend charges for.)
The circuit court for felonies only meets once a month, on the second Wednesday. If you're scheduled to have a prelim on the following Thursday, too bad.
And again, this only applies for the folks who admit they're guilty and are willing to take the first offer. You have an alibi? That'll take time to run down. You have witnesses who will testify the other guy threw the first punch? Hope you know their phone number by heart while you're in jail. You want us to watch all the body cam footage to check if the police actually followed procedures? Time, time, and more time.
And contesting evidence ... let's walk through that. I file the motion. At the next docket (up to a month away) we set a hearing, which might be for the next docket day. Then the judge may wait until the docket the month after that to give his decision. Two months of holding pattern that is entirely possible to make no difference in the outcome.
It's a mess, amen. But on the criminal defense side, many of the delays and problems are the result of the perverse incentives of police, judges, and prosecutors, not us.
So to address these in order
I agree that many lawyers love doing plea deals in practice, but they end up doing them because trials become longer and more cumbersome. The dynamic is that people add complications to trials until they hit the limit of complexity they can reasonably handle, then use plea deals in many cases because there's no realistic option to avoid them (this also causes issues with charging some things as felonies, because then people don't want a plea deal and there's not enough court slots to do trials for all of these).
But this is still not a system that tries upfront to be efficient. It's one that's designed to be maximally accurate and avoid shortcuts, and then makes them as a compromise with reality when it has to. It's not designed upfront to enable easy or more plea deals, or to allow shorter trials for cases where plea deals tend to be avoided.
Re lawyers not slogging - I agree that lawyers work incredibly hard. I think they end up taking forever because the system is implemented to measure effort rather than results (or when it does measure results, it often gives no or negative weight to speed).
For the third point - lawyers don't write the original laws, but they do build up the system for processing it and advise the people who wrote them. I agree that in terms of assigning blame much of it should go to non-lawyer politicians who have even less interest in writing things that work well. The length of trials and processing is mostly procedural. It's not that there's specific guys going "hohoho I'll make this longer to annoy people". It's that the priorities are careful work and dotting all the is, and going "maybe we should just skim this" makes you come off as a bad lawyer.
This is why they call lawyers a rent seeking class. They create work that only lawyers can understand and decipher. Thus necessitating more lawyers
The business world is similarly burdened by rules, some of which are used as “moats.” A moat is what you’d imagine it being, a series of obstacles that protect existing market players from newcomers.
There is also a universal response to risk in that when a disaster (no matter how improbable and unlikely to repeat) happens, the immediate response is almost always to make a rule or check to prevent it from happening. Even as all these burdensome checks and rules accumulate, no one is assigned to clearing out old rules or assessing the risk of being so risk averse. The rules just amass over time, which could be why newcomers with less accumulated internal rules are still able to rise despite said moats.
Yeah. An advantage the business world has is that incumbents tend to be replaced by newcomers over time. But that's a bigger problem when it comes to replacing the legal system
An ancillary article I'd love to read some day is why the USA in particular is cursed with so many lawyers per-capita vs. the rest of the industrialized world. Is it something in the lousy assemblage of laws? The Contingency-fee system? Do we use lawyers for routine processes in the US that people in .. eg. Germany do not use lawyers for? Maybe we can learn from others' experience.
This is very unscientific, but culturally the US is just very into contractualism (ever since having the first written constitution) and the rules being what they say.
Possibly (wild unfounded speculation) it's downstream of the history of multiculturalism being composed of people without shared background means you have to specify more things since it's harder to just assume people will interpret the blank parts the same way when you're coming from different cultures).
“If we’re worried about police abuse of power we should just have rules about firing police officers who abuse their power, not weird evidentiary game theory that only makes sense if you think the point of a trial is to be an elaborate chess game between lawyers trying to show off how smart they are and not a simple process to reach a reasonable decision.”
Given the realities of police unions that would be nearly impossible. It would be more practical for courts to blacklist officers from giving testimony once they have a history of misconduct.
It's called Giglio. Evidence of a police officer caught lying under oath can be introduced at every hearing in which the officer is a witness. The police officers just bounce from department to department, betting that none of the defense attorneys in the new jurisdiction will know that he's a liar.
Yes. IMO every state’s judicial conference should keep a list of such officers
The old joke…
99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name…
Lawyers are gammas. Whoever tells the better story wins.
My god they’ve broken containment!
Are we talking about gammas in regular conversation now?
A bit of unsolicited advice: this article is full of assertions which, as such, come off as... well, uninformed and without empirical basis. However, if you were to reframe them (to yourself, at first,) as questions, you would find a lot of vigorous and stimulating debate surrounding these difficult issues.
Advisory Opinions once did a great set of episodes on criminal justice reform where they first interviewed Matt Martens on his book, and then in the next episode read some very thoughtful counterpoints from other professionals at all levels of criminal justice. It's a humbling experience to go through in a way: Matt is very convincing, but the correspondents also make very solid arguments. There are some things where you have to realize that, if the right thing were obvious and easy... we'd have done it already.
I am actively in practice and have lost faith in the box ticking cutthroat arbitrary garbage that is the *system*