No Justice

If you are a poor person or a moderately wealthy person and find yourself charged with a criminal offence and you are innocent, the consequences of proving your innocence (for that is what you have to do in practice despite learned legal theory to the contrary) can be ruinous. In order to get a defence you will have to lay out your savings, sometimes even sell your home, to pay the lawyers to defend you. You cannot into today’s complicated legal world, defend yourself competently, even if you are used to dealing in legal matters without an expensive legal team. The Government refused to lay out taxpayers’s money on these defence costs. The Government has decided that this is just, and such a person that I have described, on being found not guilty by the courts, would be lucky, under a present system, to recover a small fraction of what that person has laid out to in defence costs. Being found not guilty means ruin, not prison.