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Related: About this forumzeemike
(18,998 posts)enough
(13,237 posts)Should lawyers refuse to handle lawsuits brought by victims of police brutality and their families? Should they be required to do this work pro bono only?
Should victims of police brutality refuse to sue police departments in order to keep money out of the hands of greedy lawyers? Should they only sue police departments if they can find lawyers who will do the work pro bono?
cpamomfromtexas
(1,243 posts)I am not a lawyer, but i will gladly seek one out when i need one, as i am sure will the host of this clip and the OP. The US is a litigious society without a doubt, and lawyers enjoy being paid for the work they do...and lets be honest, the work they sometimes claim to do. But if you look historically at the progress this country has made in human rights, that progress has been made in the courts. We protest, we get arrested, and our protest gets litigated in the court system where maybe it changes the meaning of the US Constitution. But not all cases are so dramatic, sometimes they are litigated just to change a behavior. And as we know the US is a capitalist society where money has power. Sometimes it takes lawyers and their clients making money to change a behavior. Eventually cities and the folks who live there get tired of not have the money to fix pot holes and replace street lights so they force a change in how things are done. As a result, lawyers become less involved because the behavior they sued to stop, stopped. So, you can decry lawyers working on police brutality cases as "ambulance chasers" and suggest that the only reason they take these cases is to make a buck and i say "so?" This is how the laws in this country get changed, this is how behavior in this country gets changed, this is how this country progresses toward a more equal society.
Money, and lots of it, is how laws get changed nowadays. The country has not progressed but reverted back to a time when we had an unequal society where the rich get richer, the middle class is disappearing, and the poor get poorer all because of laws getting passed to make that happen now.
Lawyers are just cashing in on that phenomena and 1.2 billion dollars paid out by the ten largest police departments is a drop in the bucket compared to the wholesale theft of the US taxpayer by Wall St. and corporations. Let's say that all the cities combined in the US pay 10 - 15 billion dollars a year to settle police misconduct cases. US taxpayers subsidize big oil to the tune of fifty billion dollars a year, and that's just a small part of the overall money that goes to greedy corporations.
The only way it might progress toward a more equal society is if we make Sanders our next president. But he can't do it alone, we all must fight for it.