http://www.justiceontrial.org/blog/ - <em><strong>BUNK JUSTICE</strong></em>

BUNK JUSTICE

Posted by: Justice On Trial

WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALLTelevised Interview with John Bradley from Justice On Trial
March 8, 2006, Reno, Nevada

BROKEN JUSTICE: John Bradley, Director of Justice On Trial, an advocacy organization for the wrongfully accused, and host, Dennis Grover, discuss the “CSI EFFECT” on juries along with other television programs (1/2 of the nation’s top 20 programs deal with crime) some of which portray the justice system in dramatically naive and, often, totally false perspectives. Bradley explains the IRRELEVANCE OF INNOCENCE and PRESUMPTION OF GUILT so pervasive in the legal system in the U.S. today. Bradley explains that it is guilt not innocence that is presumed from arrest through conviction.

Other topics discussed are the dangers of plea-bargaining as one of the reasons for the amazingly large population of innocents in American jails and the justice system’s reliance on the honesty of those administering it with the disappointments that dependence brings.

Dennis Grover: “Good evening. Welcome to LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. I’ve been saying on this show repeatedly and I hope that we can drive this point home tonight and explain a lot of things to you. This country is totally without a justice system. We have a legal system, but we do not have a justice system.
John Bradley has graciously come in tonight to help me out. John has
a website, JusticeOnTrial.org and has been studying this and studying the courts and has been having some successes that he will be talking to you tonight about. John, welcome to the show.
You sent me 2 information sheets, or articles, whatever they are, but
they are your opinion, no they are not your opinion because I have seen this – exactly what you’ve written going on and many people deny it. Prosecutors will deny that what you are going to tell people tonight actually goes on. It does. Believe me, it does. So, I want to start right out with this article that you wrote about broken justice. What an appropriate name.”

John Bradley: “Yeah.”

Dennis Grover: “It just simply is not justice. You start out with what you term the CSI effect. Would you give them or me or everybody an overview of what that is?”

John Bradley: “Sure. With regard to the title ‘Broken Justice’ you’ve heard of the term that ‘Justice is blind’, well I’ve come to believe from what I have seen that it is not only blind, but is brain dead at this point in time. Some of the things you were mentioning have come from dealing with actual cases which we get through our website, so I come to this place, Broken Justice by virtue of the tears and trials of a lot of innocent people who have been reamed by the system.
CSI is one of – the CSI effect is what it is called, and it is not only
called that by me, but by legal professionals, both defense and prosecutorial legal professionals. What it is is that right now on all of our networks, 6 of the top 10 shows deal with crime and justice. Shows like CSI, Cold Case Files, like Law and Order and 2 new ones that are just coming out Injustice on NBC and Convictions on CBS – brand new, hasn’t even come out yet – these are sustaining the networks now. They are all about crime and punishment.
For many people and for people who come into juries, their only
experience with a justice system is what they see on these crime shows. They come to see themselves as experts in criminal justice by virtue of what it is they see on these shows. They are using their TV crime busting experience in trying to determine the guilt or innocence of people when they are on the jury. Both defense attorneys and prosecutors are beside themselves with this. They don’t know how to deal with it because the jurors who think that they have some sort of expertise are starting to evaluate forensic evidence as an expert might in making a determination of guilt or innocence.
It’s gone so far as when a jury is seated, many times they will ask
them if they are fans of these shows so that they can determine whether they are going to have to deal with this particular juror. So it has become a situation where our entertainment is starting to drive the criminal justice system in many ways and it is adversely effecting, unfortunately, what happens in trials.”

Dennis Grover: “But one thing that I have to say bout what is on TV on these programs, is they portray that there’s justice going on. They portray what should be, but it’s not what happens when you’re in the courtroom, and actually it is so far from it that it’s really appalling if you have experienced both.”

John Bradley: “Well that’s true. The jurors have expectations of defense attorneys and to what they should bring to show the innocence of the defendant and they have expectations from prosecutors what kind of evidence they should bring to for. Why didn’t you do a DNA test on this one? That’s really not within the realm of the juror, those kinds of things. One of the biggest problems with the CSI effect is that the jurors tend - because of what they view as their expertise - they tend to grossly misinterpret the concept of reasonable doubt.
They look at a preponderance of evidence as presented by the
prosecutor as evidence of guilt rather than if there is a reasonable doubt to acquit. They discard the idea of reasonable doubt. They don’t really understand it. They take this preponderance of evidence and think that the defendant must be guilty and it really – as you were saying, they have greater expectations of both the defense and the prosecution as to what should happen in that courtroom as to what really ever does. This is really – so defense attorneys who don’t have the resources to go out and do the investigation that the jury is expecting, don’t want those kinds of jurors, and the same with the prosecutors.”

Dennis Grover: “But those jurors, I mean the jury, is supposed to be a jury of our peers. It is supposed to be somebody like you. But, like you say, they go in with this concept already in mind of what is supposed to be in there.”

John Bradley: “Well it’s a warped view of what happens in a courtroom.”

Dennis Grover: “Boy, I’ll say.”

John Bradley: “When what really happens does happen, they’re disappointed. And when their expectations aren’t met, either from the prosecution or defense, it effects their verdict.”

Dennis Grover: “Well they’re even not just disappointed, they’re – they don’t – many jurors I’ve talked to that have been there, don’t even believe it. It’s like something foreign from what they think it should be. Which in fact, I think it is.”

John Bradley: “Well, it is. The justice system has gone far field from what it was conceived to be. What happens in the courtroom today is nowhere near what the Founding Fathers in devising the system initially envisioned. It’s – for example, prosecutors are commissioned and swear under oath to see that justice is done in the courtroom. But they don’t.
To them, they interpret justice as changing criminal behavior, as taking
criminals off the street as getting convictions. There’s ideological mandate to convict. Irrelevance as far as innocence is concerned, or guilt, is rampant among prosecutors. They don’t look at whether or not a defendant is innocent or guilty. They look at if they can convict him. Period. End of story.”

Dennis Grover: “There is a conviction to convict. Is there enough possible evidence that they can get a conviction. That’s what matters.”

John Bradley: “That’s right. To win is the ultimate. Before the show started, I read to you a quote from a Superior Court Judge, Burton Katz, who has written a book called "JUSTICE OVERRULED." He was a prosecutor for 13 years and then as many years as a Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles.
He says that it is an adversary system. ‘It’s really gotten into not
seeing justice is done, but an adversarial combat between defense and prosecutor that encourages adherence to our keen rules and procedures that sanctifies forum over substance, it rewards trickery and deceit and truth is but an inconvenience’, Judge Katz says. ‘Winning is everything. Guilt or innocence is irrelevant. This is the engine that drives criminal justice.’ This is from a 13-year veteran L.A. Superior Court Judge. It’s not something we made up. This is from someone inside the system saying the system is definitely broken.”

Dennis Grover: “I’ve heard this from other Judges also, this same type of comment, describing what it is. As far as I am concerned, what you just said, it is. Why then do they wait to retire to write a book? Why don’t they, when they are sitting there, say ‘Hold on here. Let’s get some changes going in this system.’”

John Bradley: “That’s one of the questions that we have for the Judge. He laments throughout this book that – well, initially he did not – as I told you earlier – he did not want to be a prosecutor. He really wanted to be a defense attorney, but no one would hire him initially. He was just out of law school and there wasn’t any place that would hire him, but he got a good job offer from a District Attorney’s office. He went there as a prosecutor and wound up 13 years later being there.
He lamented for all the time he spent and all these problems that he
saw, yet didn’t do anything about it. So it really is a question that we have on him. Well, this is all well and good that you came out now, 20-odd years later, and say you got a big problem, but when you could have done something to help, you didn’t.”

Dennis Grover: “If one Judge, sitting up there on that bench, one time would say, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t right.’ That is the time to do it. When they sit there – and I have seen this, and I know what’s going on behind the scenes and in their minds – when they sit there, knowing that they are basically picking on somebody to get a conviction, to make a point to society which goes on, and nobody can tell me it doesn’t, because Judges have told me. They are using a case to dictate the direction of a county or of a state, or some particular thing when they know it’s wrong. Somehow, somewhere, they need to be held accountable for that action when they know better.”

John Bradley: “Well hardly anyone in the justice system is held accountable.”

Dennis Grover: “None that I know of.”

John Bradley: “Law enforcement really isn’t.”

Dennis Grover: “No.”

John Bradley: “Prosecutors are virtual Gods. They’re almost totally immune to any kind prosecution for anything they do. They lie and cheat and steal throughout a trial with total impunity. It’s called judicial immunity and it is growing. That cloak of immunity around prosecutors has gotten much, much larger and thicker in the last decade or two, and it just grows and grows and grows.”

Dennis Grover: “And the word that just blew me away, which I thought was made up by a bunch of people in the back allies, is testilying. Testilying. It’s their word!”

John Bradley: “Yes. The Judge talks about that. It’s the law enforcement’s word. This is what police do to get somebody convicted and police justify it – I recommended this the last time I was here – but anyone who has interest in seeing why this kind of thing occurs, should see the film "INSOMNIA." This is a mainstream film which was made in 2002. Robin Williams, Hilary Swank and Al Pacino star in a film about an L.A. homicide detective who makes a determination that this defendant is a heinous criminal, and he is. He’s a child molester, but it’s possible that he may get off from this crime that he’s committed, so Al Pacino, playing this detective, plants evidence. From there, it adversely effects everybody around when he – they so often do this. They make a declaration of guilt. It’s almost a prophecy of guilt. They say, ‘Okay, this guy may not be guilty of this crime, but I know he’s done these other things that we didn’t get him for, so we’re gonna convict him here.’ Or ‘I think he’s guilty because I just feel it. My experience tells me this guy’s guilty, but we don’t have enough evidence to convict him. I’ll fix that.’”

Dennis Grover: “Yeah. It goes on. If they don’t like something that somebody’s doing over here, but it’s not against the law, they just simply don’t like it, then they go and find something else and basically, I’ve seen people framed.”

John Bradley: “Oh, absolutely.”

Dennis Grover: “Innocent people doing nothing, and here comes a group of law enforcement types, out of nowhere talking about something that totally has nothing to do with that person, nothing whatsoever, but yet they find themselves in the court system, jerked into it and charges against them – against something that is just foreign to them.”

John Bradley: “We have a case now where it’s really politically driven. The detective involved who is responsible for the case - I mean without him, there is no case – he made up evidence about a gun being provided by the defendant to the killers. He said in all his affidavits, swore to in all his affidavits, that he had evidence that the defendant provided a gun to the killers. Evidence exists. When in fact, the 2 ballistics reports that he had showed clearly that there was no question about it, that the gun owned by the defendant could not possibly have been in the universe of weapons used in the killings. So what he had was evidence to show absolutely that the gun could not have been part of the crime, and he said that it did. He swore to this to Judges and in 12 different affidavits, used this information as key evidence to arrest and charge this guy who has been in jail for 4 years, 3 months as of today.”

Dennis Grover: “Has not gone to trial?”

John Bradley: “Has not gone to trial. He’s supposed to go to trial in May, so we’ll see.”

Dennis Grover: “What you are saying is, all he wants is a conviction. Period.”

John Bradley: “Well it’s being driven politically. It’s a very highly politically charged case. One of the relatives of the victim is a very powerful person and has mandated that this person, the defendant should be convicted, and has elicited the services of her very good friend, this homicide detective to help her accomplish that. So far so good. She’s had him in for 4 years now, so…”

Dennis Grover: “No.”

John Bradley: “It’s all politically driven. There’s just -

Dennis Grover: “Well correct me if I’m wrong, John, but my vision of justice and the judicial system is that it’s there for the purpose of getting bad guys off the streets and putting them away. But not to create bad guys. That’s what they’re doing now.”

John Bradley: “Well yes, it’s for that, but when the prosecutors are commissioned to see that justice is done, that also means to make sure no innocent people are wrongly convicted. That’s where they missed the boat. Nobody thinks about that. Getting the criminals off the street is the main focus. There is collateral damage that they will admit occurs. That collateral damage is 2 things. One is innocent people going to jail. If you press a prosecutor, he will tell you that, ‘Okay, we’ll admit to 5%,’. Well, we feel it is closer to 10%; with 2.1 million people in jails in our country, that would be up around 200,000 people. That’s number one. Number two is that the person who did the crime, but wasn’t convicted, is out on the street doing other crimes.”

Dennis Grover: “Exactly.”

John Bradley: “That’s something you’ll never hear them talk about. That 5% that they admit are in jail that haven’t done anything, and the people who actually committed the crime are out there doing whatever crime – “

Dennis Grover: “If you have 200,000 people in jail for 200,000 crimes – “

John Bradley: “That they didn’t commit.”

Dennis Grover: “- that they didn’t commit, you in fact have 2,000 – “

John Bradley: “200,000 – “

Dennis Grover: “ – 200,000 criminals walking the streets.”

John Bradley: “That’s right. And we suspect it’s higher than that. I mean when you consider that Barry Scheck with his Innocence Project says he’s exonerated – on DNA, that’s all they will accept is DNA because it is so finite – some off of Death Row, some after 20 years. This is one guy working with a few students from Northwestern University. How many others are out there? It probably exceeds 200,000.”

Dennis Grover: “That’s very possible, but it shouldn’t be 1%. It shouldn’t be any – there should be some way that they can prove that they are innocent.”

John Bradley: “Well the jury system is supposed to do that, and this CSI effect is exacerbating it because the idea of reasonable doubt is not well-explained to jurors, and not well understood. So I think more people because of this perceived expertise by jurists now, where as 10 years ago when there weren’t as many of the crime shows that are on now, that they weren’t as prone to look a the preponderance of evidence that they were more prone to say, ‘Whoa, it’s possible this person is innocent. We can’t convict him.’ Now, they look at it differently and say, ‘There’s so much evidence against him, he’s probably guilty.”

Dennis Grover: “Right.”

John Bradley: “It’s a whole different feel. I think it means more people who are innocent are going to jail these days.”

Dennis Grover: “But now let’s talk about evidence. I’ve seen this in case after case and have talked to people. They have their little games. That’s something that just irritates me. There should be no game. The law is, to me, this is this way, and you can’t do it. I mean that’s the law. It says you don’t do something, you don’t do it. But now they’re looking for the evidence, not only to say they did it, but they play with it. They play games between the defense and the prosecution. They have their little tactics.”

John Bradley: “You’re right. But it’s really more than a game. It’s a war. They play it with the rules all on their side. If a defense attorney does some things that are against the rule of law he’ll be censured, he’ll be fined, he’ll be punished. But prosecutors are not. They withhold evidence, they manipulate witness testimony, they withhold exculpatory evidence. They do all these things and if it comes out in trial, often it doesn’t, but if it comes out at trial, they merely get a slap on the hand and the Judge says, ‘Well don’t do that again’, or ‘If you do that again, we won’t admit it’ or something, but they don’t get punished, they don’t get censured, they don’t get fined, it doesn’t effect their job as long as they can say to their superiors, ‘I was doing it to get a conviction.’ ‘Okay, well that’s fine then.’”

Dennis Grover:: “Yes. Not to find the truth here.”

John Bradley: “Nobody’s interested in the truth.”

Dennis Grover: “That’s a sad statement, John.”

John Bradley: “Well, it’s true. I mean even defense attorneys are interested in truth, but they have limitations. They – once a defense attorney, a private defense attorney runs out of resources, I mean he can’t do all his cases pro bono, and so he then is faced with a situation of plea bargaining. I don’t know whether you know the statistics on that, but 85% of the convictions in this country, are not convictions at all. They are plea bargains. They are negotiated convictions.”

Dennis Grover: “Right.”

John Bradley: “And the prosecutors look at this as a confession, and they list it as a conviction, but it’s really not either of those. There are many people – they’ll go to a defendant and say, ‘We have you charged with this, this and this. We have evidence for this, this and this.’ (When in fact they really don’t have the evidence.) They’ll say, ‘You have your choice here. You say you’re innocent, and that’s fine, we believe you are, but we have this evidence and we’ll take you to trial and you’ll have to prove it at trial.’ Now it’ll take you in the case of a serious crime, 3 years to get to trial. That’s probably somewhere around the average, with appeals and filing motions – 3 years to get – ‘We’ll knock this out, and knock this out, reducing the seriousness of this crime, and we’ll give you time served, and you’ll only have to serve 2 more years. If you go to trial, that’s 3 years down the road, you may get sentenced to 15 years, and you could possibly do 18 years or more, but we’ll give this to you now – “

Dennis Grover: “Yeah.”

John Bradley: “Someone says, ‘But I’m innocent.’ ‘Well, all right. You go ahead and take a chance on getting convicted and waiting 3 years for that chance…’ So what do people do? They promise them all kinds of things that they really don’t have any authority to promise. For example, a lot of these molestation cases are plea bargains. They tell them that they’ll only have a certain amount of time on this, where you have to go in and sign up and have your presence known – whatever – I forgot what it’s called – for a specific amount of time and then we’ll drop it. Well, in most cases, it’s a lifetime thing. Once you are registered as a sex offender, you’re always – but they don’t tell them that. And they promise them things they can’t really deliver on. I’ve seen this happen – “

Dennis Grover: “And you have no recourse; none, zero.”

John Bradley: “Once you’ve plead out, there’s just no recourse. Here is a case where innocence really is irrelevant. And the other one we were talking about earlier, is that there are many cases and laws in some states dictate that even if a convicted defendant brings irrefutable evidence of his innocence to the court following the conviction, it it’s outside of the statute of limitations, if he’s had a fair trial, the Judge will tell you innocence doesn’t matter. If you had a fair trial and you were convicted, we can’t look at it. There are many states that have this law, where the law dictates that innocence is irrelevant.”

Dennis Grover: “There’s no logic involved in all of this. If a person is accused of murder and the prosecutor has all his evidence; he has the smoking gun, he has everything, why would they even consider a plea bargain unless they are not sure that they have the evidence? If a guy didn’t murder somebody, why would he plead to a toe stomping so that he can – it doesn’t make any sense.”

John Bradley: “Prosecutors maintain that the system would come to a grinding halt if it weren’t for plea bargaining. It saves the court so much time and money that that’s why they do it. That’s why they, out of the goodness of their hearts, to save the taxpayer money, they offer these deals even though they could convict no problem. That’s what they say. And the person who is looking at what they promise him thinks – well, I have an example of one case in Pennsylvania where the guy was accused of molesting this young relative and it turned out – well, he denied it and later on had evidence that showed that he was innocent but he had to plea guilty to a plea bargain and they told him that he would only have to register for 5 years and so on, but that they would not accept his evidence and they were going to convict him.
He went and plead guilty and some 13 years after the crime was
committed, after the trial and all of that, after his plea bargain, his name and image showed up on not the Amber Alert, but the website that has all the sex offenders listed, whatever it’s called, and a co-worker came to her boss and said she didn’t work in the same place with a rapist and she threatened to leave if he didn’t. They suspended him and eventually fired him, even though he was innocent and evidence to show that he was innocent. And during the course of all of this, trying to get this overturned, he bankrupted his family, they lost their house and went through every cent they had. It’s just a sad state of affairs.”

Dennis Grover: “That’s the whole thing. You cannot afford to defend yourself. You can’t.”

John Bradley: “Well, you’re facing the deepest pockets that exist – the government.”

Dennis Grover: “There’s no bottom in the government’s pockets. They run up the criminal – and they take you down, and I know many people who have gone through this and have gone broke. I’ve had – this is a gripe I have with lawyers or attorneys. They will work a case right up until you’re out of money. You’re ready to go to trial, and Joe Bob’s gone.”

John Bradley: “Either that or he forces you into a plea bargain. Do you want to go to a Public Defender – nothing against Public Defenders, because I think some are very good, but they’re all overloaded as a rule, and they aren’t given the same resources the prosecutors are. So, yeah, you’re faced with possible conviction or going further into debt or whatever it is and they come along with this bargain deal, and what do you do? Protect your family – “

Dennis Grover: “I don’t know what the answer is but I also have a complaint with the charges of attorneys. They’re absurd! I mean if somebody – I mean I’ve had an attorney look me straight in the eye and say, ‘I’m $300 an hour’. There’s no way they can prove that worth. I don’t care how big their office is – “

John Bradley: “That’s cheap today.”

Dennis Grover: “I know. Okay, so let’s work with $300 an hour. That’s $2,400 a day if they work the full 8 hours. I know the bars open earlier but that’s $2,400 a day. It doesn’t make any sense. And they say, ‘Well, I’ve got a big office to maintain,’ well, you’ve got 5 other grunts down there and they’re all bringing in $200 an hour. It makes absolutely no sense. They’re not worth it John. I’m sorry.”

John Bradley: “Oh I agree. Those excessive charges, and they are excessive in many ways, when you look at some of these high profile cases where millions are spent, it’s just totally off the page. One of the strategies of the prosecutors is to run the defendant out of resources. One of the ways to do that is to run up the $300 an hour guy, one of the best ways I’ve seen them do that is what I call the law of jumble where they take and do paper dumps on the defense. They dump thousands and thousands of documents that in order to determine whether there’s anything in those documents that might affect the defendant, either the attorney at $300 an hour or the $200 an hour guy or even a $75 an hour paralegal has to review this and go through it all and they know that so they just keep loading it on the defense until they can’t afford it anymore.”

Dennis Grover: “And they give it to them all out of order, so that they have – they’re assured of that. It’s a game. I see that as a game, not as treating a person with some kind of respect or justice. I mean if the guy’s a murderer, whack him. I’m all for it. But if there’s a doubt, if they don’t know for sure, they shouldn’t be playing games with this. This is a person’s life.”

John Bradley: “Well, even if it’s not a capital case, this is – you forget that they are there to convict, not to acquit. They believe that whatever it takes to convict, I mean if you’ve got to fudge a little bit here, or do some testilying here or run the guy’s – you know have him mortgage his house and sell his car – but they get a conviction – “

Dennis Grover: “They don’t care whose life they’ve ruined.”

John Bradley: “They don’t. You’re case #470309 and whether you have a cancer patient mother or whatever – “

Dennis Grover: “It makes no difference. It’s irrelevant to these people.”

John Bradley: “I guess in law school 101, it’s do not get personally involved with your client. And certainly prosecutors must face that same thing where they can’t get personal. This is one of the problems with these crime shows. You see the altruistic police helping little Joey’s dad and all these things and doing stuff free because they believe in the defendant and you see these attorneys like on this new show INJUSTICE where they go around doing things at no cost at all to the defendant, the person they are trying to help, and in the real world there is just nothing out there like that. It would be nice if it was anything like that at all, but it’s – “

Dennis Grover: “It’s just like you say. Don’t get involved with your clients. I mean, in the next county here, we have whore house 101, only the person walks away smiling.”

John Bradley: “Well I suppose there’s a parallel there.”

Dennis Grover: “I’m sorry, but it’s true. You’ve got to really think about this in terms of common sense. These are peoples’ lives. This is not a game. They are accusing you of a crime, which a crime to me is causing somebody else grief. That’s a crime.”

John Bradley: “But see, they don’t look at it that way. They don’t look at they’re doing anything. All they do is assemble the evidence and let a Judge or jury decide. That’s what they’ll tell you.”

Dennis Grover: “But the Judge is a prosecutor. Am I wrong?”

John Bradley: “No. You’re absolutely right.”

Dennis Grover: “Am I getting too excited? I’m sorry, but a Judge is a prosecutor.”

John Bradley: “Well, most are former prosecutors. He is not an impartial referee, as we would like to believe. We like to believe that a courtroom is tilted as a playing field towards the defendant; that the defendant is given the benefit of the doubt. But he is not. The Judge rules in most cases, in most rulings, for the prosecutor. The defendant must prove his innocence. He is not presumed innocent at any point along the line. He must prove his innocence to a Judge or jury in order to be acquitted.”

Dennis Grover: “That’s backwards.”

John Bradley: “It’s absolutely backwards, but since the prosecutor isn’t there to do justice, but only to convict and there is nothing that he finds outside of his bag of tricks, so to speak, in order to convict, then what you have is a system as we said earlier, that is broken and in fact is brain dead.”

Dennis Grover: “It’s a meat grinder.”

John Bradley: “Yes. It’s a conviction machine.”

Dennis Grover: “Nothing to do with justice.”

John Bradley: “No. Conviction is what the system is geared to do.”

Dennis Grover: “You know I grew up and for many years I used to laugh at attorney jokes, until somebody said ‘What do you call a lawyer if they can’t make it as a defense attorney? Your Honor’. That used to be funny. It’s not now.”

John Bradley: “Well they deal with such a massive part – I just saw a statistic the other day, I don’t know how true these are, but I was told that 1 in 5 people in the state of California has had some criminal involvement of some kind. I don’t know whether DUIs are incorporated in that or what, but that’s a pretty high percentage of people who had to be in the system. However, when you look at the largest inmate population of any building on this planet is right down in L.A. The L.A. jail has 7,000 inmates – over 7,000 inmates. It has the largest inmate population. And we in the United States imprison more people per 100,000 than any country – any country, not just civilized or westernized countries, but any country.”

Dennis Grover: “We’ve got 700 million laws on the books. How can anybody not be a criminal?”

John Bradley: I don’t know what it is, but Canada imprisons per 100,000 population, 116. England is like 154, Mexico is 500 and something, as is Russia, 560 or so. The United States imprisons 775 by some estimates. 775 people to 100,000. This is 7 times more than Canada. Are our citizens 7 times more criminal than Canadians or British people? There’s something wrong here.”

Dennis Grover: “I think it’s – personally, you know, I think it’s designed that way. I think it’s an industry and I think that the prosecutors are feeding the industry.”

John Bradley: “Well it is, and there is a myth that exists today that this increased convictions and we’re seeing a decreased crime rate. We talked earlier about the plea-bargaining. You’ve got the situation where in the case of a plea bargain, the prosecutor handles as a conviction, which it really is not and many times it’s an innocent person, and what normally happens there, as I said, is they reduce the seriousness of the crime, so what you have is a less serious crime. He gets a conviction for what he was charged for. When you see that all these things are being reduced like this, it’s handled as a reduction in the crimes committed. So it really is a myth. The two are not related. It’s not the convicting that’s reducing the crime, it’s – there’s no relationship there. It’s a myth that is promulgated by the people who are paid to convict and promoted and their reputation is based upon their conviction record.”

Dennis Grover: “Reputation. This is something they want. They want the conviction record.”

John Bradley: “Well they have to have it in order to keep their job. If there is a prosecutor who has a row of acquittals, he’s fired. He’s being ineffective. He’s not doing what they tell him he’s paid to do. You have to maintain a certain level of convictions, or you can’t work here anymore. This is, as I said, it’s a system that is badly in need of a total overhaul. I don’t know that there’s a way that that can occur.”

Dennis Grover: “Well first of all – I don’t know how you’d do this. I ‘ve been trying to figure it out for a long time. But first of all, you have to inject these people with morals and common sense, or one or the other. I don’t care, but something – “

John Bradley: “It seems like the must start out that way. They start out as moral – the same percentage of them are as moral as the same percentage who don’t work in that system, and something happens in there. I think – when I look at law enforcement, I realize that these guys do perform a function. They do protect us to a certain degree. There’s a lot of things – danger in the job – there’s a lot of things.
But there is something that happens. And that is if they make a
prophecy or a declaration of guilt about someone whom they are arresting, and can you imagine a police officer is arresting someone who he presumes to be innocent? No of course not. So he, in order to arrest somebody, has to believe in their guilt, so suddenly he finds that there are some things that may take away from that prophecy of guilt, so he fudges a little bit and he gets away with that. Everybody says, ‘Great, you convicted this guy. You got a criminal off the street.’ And that sort of grows. It seems to me the longer they’re on, the more they know how to do to get a conviction when it might be tough to get a conviction. They do this by withholding exculpatory evidence, by twisting witness statements, by even inventing evidence and planting it.”

Dennis Grover: “And this is acceptable.”

John Bradley: "Well, it’s acceptable to them, but we can’t look at these people who are out there to protect us and accept that they would do these things so egregiously. If it was us and we were innocent, would a police officer do something that would get us convicted? You can’t accept that that is going to happen. It’s hard for us to realize that until we are personally affected, a member of our family, or friends, or ourselves are up against the law. We see these things as – I’ve seen them in these cases I’m dealing with – it’s so common, it’s so pervasive in the system today that everyday I am stunned by what I see happening out there.”

Dennis Grover: “I am too, and you tell people, but people assume that others are going to act responsibly. And the reason they assume that is because when you judge somebody in the private sector all you have to go on is yourself. And you think to yourself, I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. And I know all the reasons why. Why would somebody else do it? Then this dirt bag over here does it, and you don’t have a clue it’s even coming your way.”

John Bradley: “Well it’s true; it is a projection. It is a projection of our own morals onto others, thinking that that’s what – you know when I started this 5 years ago, I had a guy who came to me and said I need you to help me if I’m charged with these crimes. I agreed to do that, because I knew he was innocent. The circumstances were that I was fairly certain or as certain as an outsider could be that he was innocent. So I said, sure, yeah you’re innocent, I mean what could it be? And before this he had been sending me all these documents that were - I thought the guy had gone off the deep end – saying that the police were doing this, and that this was politically charged and yada, yada, yada. So now I see that and I’m telling people about these things you and I are talking about. Their eyes start to roll, and it’s like ‘OH, I gotta go.’ They don’t want to hear this. They don’t want to hear that people out there are capable of doing this to other people. Especially people who have sworn under oath - “

Dennis Grover: “To not do it.”

John Bradley: “That’s right. To uphold the laws and make sure that we’re all secure. They’re doing worse things, in many cases, than the criminals that they’re supposed to – “

Dennis Grover: “There’s no question about it. The other thing that has really bugged me in courts, and I see this all the time, is procedure. The court, and I’ll use one right here, has a list of procedures. If you’re going to do this, you do it this way, you write it this way, you use these words, and there’s a procedure for everything from filing a motion to going to the bathroom. There’s a procedure for everything. And if you come in to that courtroom with evidence that is indisputable, there is no doubt that you didn’t do that, and you didn’t follow their procedure, the evidence is moot. What the hell – how did we get there?”

John Bradley: “I don’t know. It’s like the Judge said in what I just read you, where these are procedures and rituals almost. It’s almost as if the people are wearing wigs, you still – “

Dennis Grover: “To cover their empty heads!”

John Bradley: “Well I guess they still inadvertently still do that. They have the ritual of the Tories and – We saw this recently, in the last coupe of years, where in Southern California (I don’t know if it occurred up here), there was a set of mandated jury instructions that had to be read. A rocket scientist couldn’t have figured these things out. It was very confusing. And someone, I don’t know who it was, took the time to go through and reduce this 4 or 5 paragraphs to like 3 sentences. Now they use the alternative. So it’s possible I guess to make some positive changes to the system.”

Dennis Grover: “Usually they won’t accept the 3 sentences.”

John Bradley: “As a rule, yeah.”

Dennis Grover: “Because they need those 17 pages.”

John Bradley: “One of the things that I think – you mentioned it earlier. If it was all as easy to understand as this, then why would you pay somebody $300 an hour?”

Dennis Grover: “Exactly.”

John Bradley: “You know, I think that’s part of the whole system. After all is said and done, all of these people, except law enforcement, are attorneys. Why would we want to simplify something that we’re making money from interpreting for you - ”

Dennis Grover: “And knowing how to present it to the court and win.”

John Bradley: “Yeah. It’s like teaching somebody Chinese and then you no longer are paid to interpret for them.”

Dennis Grover: “Right. Exactly.”

John Bradley: “I think that that’s probably one of the things about attorneys that you mentioned earlier that makes them sort of a little bit disingenuous, charging such fees as that – “

Dennis Grover: “yeah. It makes no sense. They’ve gotta have their huge castle-like offices for – and they don’t do anything. I mean I have seen so many times, over and over, people losing their case even though they have an attorney and can afford an attorney, they lose the case because the attorney spent all his time preparing the bills instead of the case. I’ve seen it over and over and over. That’s one thing that they can do with the system.”

John Bradley: “Yeah. Well, actually not. I mean actually if you were to go through these fee schedules, you’re going to find there’s a few things in there that probably shouldn’t be, and not as precise as we would all like it. They’re not even good at that.”

Dennis Grover: “I know. I meant go back to the case of the young attorney who was 38 years old, fell over dead and got up to Heaven and asked ‘Why am I here, I’m only 38 years old?’ And He looked in the book and said ‘Well, according to your billing hours, you’re 175!’ That used to be funny. But it’s not funny anymore.”

John Bradley: “Well, we can laugh at it until we need an attorney to get out there and defend us, you know? What we’re talking about is why we need an attorney and why the system has become so – “

Dennis Grover: “But we need an attorney to interpret the procedures not the law. That’s what’s sad. And don’t ever let it be said we need an attorney for anything, but that’s where you can really get some protection.”

John Bradley: “Well you know it’s funny because one of the things is – one of the cases I’m working with now, ruling after ruling after ruling doesn’t follow the law. I’m talking to the defense attorney and I’m saying, ‘What’s going on here? The law says – you said it was like a 99 % chance that it would be ruled this way according to the laws governing this, and it went the other way. What happened?’ Well, they don’t have to go by them. They don’t have to go by the law.”

Dennis Grover: “Judges don’t have to go by the law.”

John Bradley: “They don’t. You know that’s what precedent is. Precedent establishes new law. Judges can do virtually anything they want really. I mean they – “

Dennis Grover: “And they do.”

John Bradley: “They do.”

Dennis Grover: “And they’re totally immune from any kind of recourse.”

John Bradley: “The judicial immunity probably doesn’t protect them as much as it does prosecutors, but it certainly does cloak them pretty heavily.”

Dennis Grover: “Nobody I know has successfully sued a Judge, and there are Judges that deserve it. There are Judges that deserve it, and I’m saying it and I know it.”

John Bradley: “Well, they’re just people. After all is said and done, there is going to be a certain percentage of them – you put a black robe on them and put them up in an elevated seat, doesn’t make him immune to all those same things that effect everybody else, particularly in that system.”

Dennis Grover: “I will give them a little bit of credit for having a difficult job. I wouldn’t do it. If a real Judge – you are put in charge of somebody’s life, and you better be damn sure that you’re making the right decisions. That’s not the case. That’s what I’m talking about.”

John Bradley: “We’re seeing a lot of, I mean that I can think of, there have been 3 or 4 cases where disgruntled defendants or people somehow associated with defendants have gone after the Judges. One was killed in Chicago or whatever, and Judges are now hiring bodyguards, that kind of thing. It is a tough job and there are a lot of problems with it. You can’t satisfy everybody – “

Dennis Grover: “No. That’s to be expected. I don’t care what you’re doing, you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to piss somebody off. It’s going to happen. But when they build –like right here the Federal building – when they build an extra floor between each floor for the Judges and they’ve got bullet proof benches and they’ve got cattle calls so the Judge doesn’t have to get near the people, they do that from day one, not because they think they might have a bad Judge – the whole place. They’re building another judicial palace right down town here. Same story. Judges cannot go anywhere where the people are.”

John Bradley: “You hope that you protect them and you give them this elevated status, that they are going to be impartial, that they are going to really be a referee who – but they wind up just being a magistrate who interprets law and rules for the prosecution in most cases. You know. And they interpret the law in such a way that they can rule for the prosecution. That’s what it gets down to.”

Dennis Grover: “I think that’s back to playing a game, and I think that’s back to being bold faced lies. Because that’s what they’re doing.”

John Bradley: “Well it is. It is the biggest part of the system that is broken. If we’re able to put some fairness in these trials, civil and criminal, then that would sort of filter back I would think to law enforcement. If the prosecutor and the Judge didn’t wink-wink when they knew that a police officer was testilying, if prosecutors didn’t rely upon police officers to help them withhold evidence and not produce evidence at trial and to manipulate witnesses, then - they’re in control of that. They can tell a police officer, ‘Well you can’t do that because it’s against the law.’ So that’s probably the biggest place where the system is broken; at that level. It would all filter back to law enforcement and throughout the system, if we could find some way to rectify those terrible inequities that we see in trials both civil and criminal.”

Dennis Grover: “It’s become a position of against society – it’s a job against society instead of a service for society as it was meant to be. There will always be criminals, there will always be crime, but not – quit manufacturing it, I guess is what we’re saying.
We’re getting a little short on time. Oh, we’re real short on time.”

John Bradley: “Okay.”

Dennis Grover: “Thank you for your work. Thank you for being here.”

John Bradley: “Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.”

Dennis Grover: “It’s been very enlightening; at least for me. I hope for all of you too. Anyway, give us a call if you need any help or if there is anything we can do. We’ll be there.”

John Bradley: “Thank you.”

Dennis Grover: “Thanks John.”

END
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