law firm doing shady sh**t in CA (too complicated to exlpain in title)

[dead0man]

link-The Desert Sun  So people are being convicted of minor code infactions, pay their fines, then months (sometimes years later) another "fee" comes in, usualy for >$20k to pay for their own prosecution.  They were not told about any of this in court, the fees are not reviewed by a judge, they come with threats on liens on property if not paid and ADDITIONAL fees will come due if they try to appeal.

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OH!  well I guess that makes it totally ok. 


I'm sure Torie will be in to explain why this isn't a problem.

[Dereich]

The size of the fees in and of themselves don't worry me; I've required people pay over $10,000 on misdemeanor charges myself when that is what was required for victim or city restitution. What concerns me is that a private firm involved in prosecution at all. The article explicitly describes these cases as misdemeanors. California really lets their district attorneys outsource cases which could by statute have jail time as punishment to private firms? That's insane! Almost everything I do is subject to public scrutiny, from my time sheets to my emails, and I'm required to write disposition statements explaining the terms of settlement and why we came to that disposition for nearly everything. I just cannot believe that other states would hand over prosecution without those kinds of safeguards that might have gotten this caught sooner.

[Associate Justice PiT]

The size of the fees in and of themselves don't worry me; I've required people pay over $10,000 on misdemeanor charges myself when that is what was required for victim or city restitution. What concerns me is that a private firm involved in prosecution at all. The article explicitly describes these cases as misdemeanors. California really lets their district attorneys outsource cases which could by statute have jail time as punishment to private firms? That's insane! Almost everything I do is subject to public scrutiny, from my time sheets to my emails, and I'm required to write disposition statements explaining the terms of settlement and why we came to that disposition for nearly everything. I just cannot believe that other states would hand over prosecution without those kinds of safeguards that might have gotten this caught sooner.

     While they date back to the 1970s and pertain directly to the City of Los Angeles (i.e. are ultimately of limited relevance), I am familiar with anecdotes from former prosecutors of how it is typical to treat misdemeanor prosecution in a haphazard fashion with little regard to the dispensation of justice. It does not surprise me that something like this could happen.

[Torie]

It is so sad that our search feature is defunct. I see that Dead0 expressed his love for me, and my profession, just by accident. To be honest, I have never heard of the concept that a defendant in a zoning violation case is liable to pay the prosecution's legal fees in an enforcement action. That certainly is not the law in NY (now that I know a lot about NY zoning, serving as I do on the local zoning board of appeals), but as a former CA lawyer, I was not familiar with this either.

In fact in NY, if the government's position lacks a reasonable basis, then the government is liable to pay the defendant's legal fees, but not the other way around. It is called a "fee shifting" statute. I was going to employ that, if the initiative failed to tank Hudson's weighted voting system, and the City allocated $100,000 to pay all the lawyers if the initiative failed on my recommendation, because I made clear that I was going to sue in such circumstances, and the Mayor's office agreed that the City was likely to be hit by the fee shifting statute.

The alleged lack of notice raises grave Constitutional issues. about lack of due process, and if it is the law, and there is adequate notice, it is horrible public policy.

Municipalities hire outside law firms all the time, to litigate cases. And there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it is often essential. The attorneys on staff often do not have the resources or the expertise to handle such matters.

[Badger]

The size of the fees in and of themselves don't worry me; I've required people pay over $10,000 on misdemeanor charges myself when that is what was required for victim or city restitution. What concerns me is that a private firm involved in prosecution at all. The article explicitly describes these cases as misdemeanors. California really lets their district attorneys outsource cases which could by statute have jail time as punishment to private firms? That's insane! Almost everything I do is subject to public scrutiny, from my time sheets to my emails, and I'm required to write disposition statements explaining the terms of settlement and why we came to that disposition for nearly everything. I just cannot believe that other states would hand over prosecution without those kinds of safeguards that might have gotten this caught sooner.

FWIW, in Ohio there are a number of private attorneys involved in municipal prosecution. In Franklin County for example, the Columbus City Prosecutor's Office handles misdemeanor prosecutions in Franklin County Municipal Court, not just for the City of Columbus, but a number of surrounding suburban municipalities and townships. However, a number of municipalities hire private attorneys/firms to handle their misdemeanor cases in Municipal Court, and all of them hire private counsel to prosecute their mayor's court cases (though it's often the same firm/attorney who acts as their Village/City solicitor).

Yours truly actually works as a prosecutor for a small village's mayor's court (not in Franklin), even though I'm a private defense attorney. I've never found a conflict, though obviously I withdrew from cases that turned out to have that village's police department involved. Remember, municipal prosecution is by its nature based on the subdivision in question.

Even county prosecutors offices technically also "outsource" some work by hiring part-time prosecutors to handle civil or even criminal matters, and many counties have separate, usually private, counsel to handle Children Services cases.