Ah, ok, my mistake. For some reason I assumed Husker was American.

RIP Whitney Houston

Yeah I'm Scottish.

As for being able to try someone again I don't think it's possible however I think there are changes currently being made to the legal system that could make it possible.

I disagree with the part about the legal representation. It appears to me that the prosecutor is the overworked underpaid lawyer and the defence lawyer seems to be the older, more experienced etc etc. All the best lawyers certainly seem to be defence lawyers.

Don't know how it is there, but here, in our federal system 75% of criminal defendants are defended by a court appointed lawyer who is either a salaried public defender or a lawyer in private practice who receives a very low hourly rate (Source). I was on the federal court appointed list to handle appeals, and I was paid $75/hr up to a cap of 20 or 30 hours for an appeal at a time when i was billing my private clients up to $250/hr.

Also in this country, there is a significant disparity in the incomes of public defenders and prosecutors, even when they are paid by the same state government. My younger brother started as a public defender making $29,000 a year when a starting prosecutor received $36,000. The disparity increases with experience. When I was a prosecutor, the elected prosecutor I worked for received a salary of about $118,000, whereas the head public defender's salary was $85,000. The head public defender had been practicing law for exactly as long as the prosecutor--they were, in fact, law school classmates.

Public defenders have case loads expressed in multiples of those of a prosecutor, and in some states it is absolutely ridiculous. In my old state, for example, my part of the state had a public defender's office that handled all* misdemeanors and felonies committed in a 4 county area. It employed 4 lawyers. There were 12 prosecutors employed in those same 4 counties, and they only handled about 20% of misdemeanors (by law, prosecutors got to decide whether they would accept a misdemeanor case, and if they didn't, the arresting officer was charged with presenting the state's case. But a public defender had to represent the defendant in all of them if the allowed punishment included jail time).

My brother is currently a public defender working an impoverished four county area. He handles more than 90% of all felonies prosecuted in two of those counties. There are four prosecutors who divide up 100% of the felonies in those two counties. He literally has more than three times the case load than any prosecutor he battles on a daily basis.

I am good friends with two public defenders here in Vegas. Their experiences are 100 in accord with what I have described from my personal experience. They are absolutely typical for public defenders anywhere in the US.

Don't even get me started on budgets. It's even worse than the personnel disparity. Just to give you an example, as a lawyer on the state court criminal defense court appointment list, I ROUTINELY worked 10s of hours on cases at which my fee was capped at $110. My personal record was spending about 100 hours working on a case for which my fee was capped at $110. I once spent 200 hours preparing the defense of an attempted malicious wounding for which my fee was capped at $580. To put that in perspective, I worked for 1/10 of a YEAR and the state of Virginia decided that was worth $580. Coincidentally, both of those cases occurred in the same year, so in that year the state of Virginia decided that a competent criminal defense lawyer in 1996 ought to make an annual salary of $4600.

The high priced criminal defense attorney is a rarity, and, as a high priced lawyer, s/he is out of the price range of 99.9% of people charged with a crime. At least in regards to this country, you're thinking of the exception. The rule is that the prosecutor here is better staffed, funded, trained and equipped than the defense. Even when the defense is a high priced lawyer.

*In cases in which there were multiple defendants charged with participating in the same criminal act, the courts could not appoint the public defender's office to represent all of the co-defendants for conflict of interest reasons, so all but one of the defendants who could not afford an attorney would be farmed out to private lawyers who had agreed to work for the obscenely low rate paid by the state government.

I don't really know the ins and outs of the Legal Aid system over here (other than reading the occasional controversy in the press over how much it costs us) as thankfully I've never needed it. However, going by some of the high profile cases that I see reported the defendants can be unemployed and yet have the most famous (And I'd assume most expensive) lawyers in the country defending them.

Basically you can go to any lawyer who is willing to take on your case but I don't know how it's decided the amount of legal aid you'll receive or be eligible for.

Mpethy what would you say to a 20 something considering law school today? Would you do it again knowing what you know now?

Our judicial system in and of itself pisses me off, but this just takes the cake.

yes please

Went to the cabin this weekend

I am not sure if I should be ashamed at having watched this film 4 times and yes I am single.

Amy Adams is stunning.

Practicing law is a grind. To make the really good money, you have to have gone to an excellent college, smoked the LSAT, gotten into an excellent law school, and graduated high in your class, preferably while also making it onto law review. This buys you the privilege of being required to bill 2000 hours a year (which means working 2500+ at the office while spending hundreds of off hours trying to build your own client base) for seven years to have a roughly 1 in 8 chance of making partner.

If you are willing to trade off a lot of money, smaller firms offer a marginally better lifestyle. But you wind up trading off 50% of the money or more for a 25% improvement in your quality of life (which really means lower billable hour requirements).

So you want to be really sure that you either want to work like a galley slave for 3 years of law school plus the first 7 years in practice, or you need to be sure that you are willing to live in a studio apartment for 10 years while you work at a job that doesn't pay you enough to both service your student loan debt and own a home.

If you love the law or the eventual financial pay off enough to put up with one of those two lifestyle sacrifices, then I would say go for it. It's hard to do, but you can change careers out of the law if you decide you don't like it. These are intensely personal choices, and nobody can really advise you on what's right for you. But I am happy to supply any facts you may want to have to aid in making your decision.

If I had it to do over again, I would not do it. While in college, I turned down an after college offer to work for a major publishing company at a mid-sized city newspaper. That's the route I would take if transported back in time to my senior year in college. I would have made about 70% of the money I made as a lawyer with 20% of the student loan debt, and I would have had a really cool job that I would have liked as much as I liked practicing law for the 10 years I enjoyed it.

If I had life to do over again, I would have sucked it up and done the extra time in college it would have taken me to go through the entire ROTC program the dumb asses decided they wanted me to do for no reason, and then gone back into the army as an officer.

So, yeah, in retrospect, lawyer would have been my third choice career.

I like when you post, Mpethy

Any tech-heads able to tell me what the difference between these two is?

SanDisk 32GB Micro SDHC Flash Card w/ Adapter
SanDisk 32GB Micro SDHC Flash Card

Why the price difference? And why is the one without the adapter the more expensive one?

Thanks for the perspective. Fwiw until recently my goal was med school but i think my sights have changed a little bit. Obviously theyre entirely different fields, but the intelligence, time, and effort it takes to be successful is similar. A lot of old doctors seem really jaded... hate their job, feel overworked, and underpaid. Its really tough to be motivated to enter the field when everyone seems to hate what they do.


posts like this are the reason ufr will always be my favorite forum on 2p2. Rather than a bunch of 20 year olds who click buttons all day (like myself) theres interesting people with lots to share.

thanks. It's amazing what you can learn from ****ing up, lol.

The cheaper one is faster (4MB/s as opposed to 2MB/s; google "class 4" and "class 2") and in addition has an adapter to fit it into a regular SD slot. As for their pricing policy you'd have to ask someone at Newegg.

I tell my kids all the time you learn way more from losing/making mistakes than from winning.

Peanut butter still gets gum out of 25 year old hair.

Most computers have a SD slot built in, but not a MicroSD slot. So if you don't have an adapter you'll probably have to connect your camera by cable or whatever device you have the MicroSD card in.

Edit: On most laptops that is

This post needs explaining

Name Brand imo.

And if you have a microcenter near you, I think they're about 8-10 cheaper there.

QFT

Pic looks damn good

Here they say, the attentive man learns from other people's **** ups.