Over the past century, the American lawyers lost the right to regulate themselves, and instead fell under the power of the judges. So American lawyers are afraid to do things in court, that the judges don't want them to do. America's army of nearly 1 million lawyers, is almost totally under the control of a few thousand judges, with their entrenched culture of bribery and fraud and miscarriage of justice.
Some USA lawyers don't like this, but they are helpless and can't fight it. Most lawyers in America have, to one degree or another, signed up with the devil, to do things the way the devil wants them done.
That means that any time you hire an American lawyer, he already is in a conflict of interest. He has to make the judge happy first. And if the judge wants to make the government happy, or make somebody else happy who is paying a big bribe, then guess what? You are destroyed. It doesn't matter what you paid the lawyer. He works for the judge, first and foremost.
So a totally unique factor in USA legal corruption is the amazingly dishonest profession of American lawyers, these lawyers who "play the game" with America’s judges and politicians and police. It is a savage culture of legal fraud, where lawyers work with judges to rob and terrify people, especially minorities, but also foreigners, and above all those who dare to question the system.
People accused of serious crimes have the "right" to a lawyer, but this may mean only a crooked lawyer who is stage-managing the victim to help the government and prosecutors. If the lawyer does not help the government, he can be put out of work and not "assigned" to any more cases, or treated badly the next time he is in a courtroom. This legal fraud is the core of the danger to those who visit America. A lawyer, who is "representing" you in the USA, whether the government is paying him, or even if you are paying him yourself, may just be a stooge who is helping the prosecutors to put you in jail.
Most American court cases never go to trial, never see a jury; it is the job of the victim's lawyer to "sell the deal" that the judge has decided will happen, or else. This is how people accept a "plea bargain" so they accept going to jail for 3 years even though they are innocent, instead of going to trial before a jury.
Because of the corruption of lawyers under the thumb of the judges, there's a very fake and phony aspect of court proceedings in America. They are really fake "show trials" in many cases, sometimes very obviously so, where both purported "sides" of lawyers are actually working together for the government, or for the big corporation or rich person that is bribing the judge.
You will also find, in the American legal system, that you essentially have no recourse whatsoever against wrongdoing by your own lawyer. A lawyer can sell you out, betray you, steal your money, engage in malpractice, help out the other side, hide the evidence that proved you were right, or commit felony crime against you, and there is nothing you can do about it, so long as the lawyer made the judge happy, and the judge got his cut of any money the lawyer stole from you.
There is a huge amount of bribery in America, perhaps even more than in the courts of any other country in the world. Even some American ex-judges have admitted the near-universality of bribery there. Nearly all bribes are given to the judges by lawyers; this is considered the safe way to bribe a judge. Bribery is rarely spoken about, just understood. Rich people pay huge amounts of money to law firms with connections, the lawyers walk around with a certain amount of cash in their jacket, and they pass it to the judges in their quiet moments together. It is mostly all cash of course. Sometimes the bribery is blatantly obvious, because of the other crimes that lawyers and judges commit in broad daylight together. In the courtrooms you can see the judges being extremely friendly to their rich lawyer friends who pay big bribes.
Jury trials are actually very rare in America, unlike what you see in the movies. Most cases are settled through some deal or extortion or intimidation, before there is an actual trial. If there is a jury trial, they tend to stack the jury with un-educated idiots who will tend to believe whatever lies they are told by the judge and the government. If you are trying to fight a rich person in court, the judge might let the fancy lawyers for the rich person say anything they want, while he tells you to shut up as soon as you start talking. The judges have a thousand ways to rig a legal proceeding, to benefit rich people or the government.
Yes, there are appeals courts, but these are just more judges, who are often friends with the lower court judge who originally sold you out. The appeals judges tend to go along with the lower court judge, unless you have suddenly acquired some politically powerful backing on your side.
Americans love to talk about "taking it all the way to the Supreme Court!", but this is a nearly empty hope. The U.S. Supreme Court simply refuses to consider most cases that are presented to it.
When the USA President talks about "advancing the cause of freedom", he basically means freedom for big corporations to do business. He's not really talking about actual personal freedom for real people. But he grins when he talks about "freedom" because it's a good word of salesmanship, people hear him and some of them can be duped into believing that America cares about personal or political freedom.
Hollywood movies and American television are a major element of political myth-making. Around the world, people derive an image of America, and its legal system, from these fictional creations on film. America's propaganda about having "the greatest legal system in the world" is one of those phony stories that Hollywood is helping to sell.
It is also a myth sustained by the few trials about which there is a lot of publicity, like with the celebrity trials of Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson. Judges behave very differently when the cameras are rolling, or the media is reporting everything that goes on, and millions of dollars are being spent on lawyers. But in the 98 percent of court activity that does not have big media coverage, the judges of America provide a bizarre sideshow of horror.
In the Hollywood version, the judges in American courts are like kind uncles, smiling and being wise and calmly dispensing justice. But in reality, American judges sometimes scream at people like disturbed perverts, and show off their bribed corruption right there in the courtroom. Sometimes judges engage in flagrant extortion, where you have to agree to pay money to the judge's lawyer friends as the price to stay out of jail. It is really that bad. You can find no end of documented horror about American judges behaving like criminal lunatics, and it is getting worse all the time.
It is just getting worse and worse in America's legal system. For some years now, the USA judges and lawyers have gotten used to denying people justice, to the great flow of bribery money, and even to committing felony crimes in broad daylight and getting away with it. It just keeps on escalating. Though a social explosion is lurking beneath the surface - with judges starting to get murdered, and people lighting courthouses ablaze - the people who run America are letting the current system chug along as it is, justice be damned, and to hell with the people who seem to have no way to fight back..
It can't go on like this forever, but it may get a lot worse first, despite the fair internet visibility on documented American legal corruption. One should note a brave and promising grass-roots attempt at judicial reform in the USA called, which attempts to place onto American ballots, a referendum for a new procedure to give citizens a real right of redress against corrupt judges. It is a wonderful and beautiful idea that deserves success, and will help transform America if it moves forward.
America, indeed, does not have the rule of law at all. Instead, it is just the rule of lawyers, lawyers who crave money and power.
There was a time, long ago, in the USA when lawyers were illegal. All persons in court had to represent themselves and have a decent grasp of the law.
This had several effects:
1. It kept legal action short. You could only keep a case going as long as you could afford to be gone.
2. It kept the law simple. When everyone is forced to know the law you don't end up with the million page monster that USA current laws are. This is, I think, the biggest bonus. How can you keep the law when you don't even know the law? It became a big problem currently in the USA, and corrupted or greed lawyers and judges make money on it.
But at the same time if you kill the lawyers then the criminalities will be in an even better place than before. One problem with the current legal system is that it's believed that two lawyers, both fighting hard for their clients, can after much muckraking and slander finally uncover the truth and find justice. And I come back to the same question: what defines justice? How can a lawyer knowingly fight on behalf of guilty man and demand for his client what is not justice? What defines justice? Is it money?
As one can notice there are a lot of problems in the modern American legal system: corruption, untruly revenues and often unequal access of citizens to the judgment. The system is sophisticated and uncontrolled.
Analyzed all the previous information I can state with very much confidence that American legal system needs reforms in the area of organization.
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[1]from the preamble to Supreme Court Rule 4