ymeskhout
8mo ago
Very rarely, yes, though keep in mind that my caseload isn't representative. The main one that comes to mind was a wheelchair-bound veteran with 0 criminal record who conducted a citizen's arrest using his (legal) gun but got the wrong people. The people he pointed a gun at were literally begging the police at the scene to not arrest him because they understood it was an innocent mistake on his end. I poked enough holes in the state's case that they offered a misdemeanor plea deal with no jail time, down from a serious firearm violent felony. I really didn't want him to take the deal, but he knew it was too risky to chance it at trial.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
I've listened to enough of Marcel's jail calls to know how quickly he can switch from complete charmer to "I will end you if you fuck me over" side when he was talking to his women, and I have to assume he got that back from when he used to be a pimp in his early days. I also watched him represent himself during a trial and he had hands-down the apogee of public speaking confidence. Absolutely rock-solid and unfazeable, despite no beta-blockers and lots at stake. He fit enough traditional alpha male checkboxes that it wasn't completely surprising.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
It's seriously astonishing how much rizz some of my clients have. While incarcerated, Marcel garnered up an endless list of new girlfriends (almost all of whom had no criminal record and had steady respectable jobs) who would show up to his pointless court hearings and even email/call court staff when things weren't going his way.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
My wife is a funeral director and we definitely bonded over our shared perspective of society's less glamorous underbelly.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
People on here often like to prognosticate doom for the Down's kids if they are permitted to be born and grow up, but my dude, I tell you: parents much more likely to be committed to doing best for the kid, much more likely to be two parents, and way less chance kid is going to grow up to be involved in drugs, petty crime, and a string of kids by different partners, not-so-optional extra includes jail time (not no chance but way less chance).
Yes, I've noticed a similar pattern regarding my verifiably low-IQ clients. They're so chill and easy to work with and overall have their shit together. I get whiplash when I see low-IQ reflexively correlated with criminality because while that may certainly be a component (from the standpoint of making it more likely to be caught criming) the far bigger problem is horrendously poor impulse control and sociopathic tendencies.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Thus, back to reflecting on the need to always remember how wide of a range of people there are in this world.
Yes, my stint as a tax preparer was absolutely shocking to me. One guy's income was around $23,000 but he made sure to bring receipts to establish the $3500 he spent on lottery tickets because gambling losses are deductible. He proudly declared how he made $200 over the year, and he seemed genuinely surprised when I asked if it was worth it because he apparently hadn't thought about it before?
My family was well off in Morocco. After coming to America, we were "poor" only in the sense that my parents cut insane corners over spending (80% of our furniture, including my mattress, was from dumpster diving). So my best guess is there is a specific mentality that combines the desperation of being poor (hence why you buy lotto tickets) with the lack of foresight from being poor (hence why you buy lotto tickets).
ymeskhout
8mo ago
What's your job by the way? I've dealt with similar scenarios when I volunteered as a low-income tax preparer. I remember one guy who came in with his sister or whatever and who wanted to claim three kids as dependents even though he earned $500 the whole year. His sister earned way more and could plausibly claim all three kids, and we sort of gently and patiently tried to explain to them that there was no net profit to be gained from spreading the kid deductions/credits around. Of course they didn't believe us and concluded we were a barrier to their scheme and left in a puff.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Yes, depending on your definition. I routinely get appointed to clients for one case who then go on to catch even more charges while they're out. Sometimes a client asks to have me appointed on some of their other pending cases/appeals. Generally though, charges tend to happen in bursts and then followed by a lull of inactivity while they're incarcerated (or optimistically, they temporarily get their shit together). Repping the same client after a lull hasn't really happened yet and I try to avoid it.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Making fun of stupid people for being stupid is sneering.
Intelligence is not the only relevant axis here. I represented someone who had an IQ of around 60-80 and he was one of my favorite clients ever. He got dinged on a DUI and was super respectful and always on time to our meetings, and I really felt for him when he expressed fear and earnest confusion about why he was in trouble. He was verifiably the least intelligent client I've ever had, but he never lied to me or the cops ("Yes I was drinking tonight sir, I am so sorry sir, I am so sorry sir.") and except for that one case he just carried on his life working as a nighttime janitor.
The clients I laugh about above also lack intelligence but to a lesser degree that the janitor. What really sets them apart is their dishonesty combined with the baseless confidence that deludes them into thinking they can successfully pull off their cons.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
I think it's reasonable for my clients to be suspicious of my motivations or how enthusiastically I'd represent them. But I brought up their poor theory of mind in context of how good they think they are at lying, not about their opinion of me.
I know it is a light hearted article, but the whole spirit of sneering and literal anecdotes of mockery and sarcasm with these people is good evidence that you might treat them psychologically differently. Maybe you really really would never work a little harder, polish a little more, fight a little better for a client you were sympathetic too, but that hardly seems deluded to assume.
Well to be clear if I make any distinction among my clients, it's between the honest and the lying (to me), not between the innocent and the guilty. The clients that lie to me waste my time and fuck themselves over and (if it persists past the point of funny) personally offends me. I've had to withdraw from cases many times, and by far the most common reason is client dishonesty. If someone's dishonesty ever reaches a level where it would affect how well I represent them, I bounce. Still though, I'm generally desensitized to clients lying to me because it happens so routinely that it's background noise. Any sneering you identified above was about how pathetic their attempts at lying were. I got along great with Marcel for the most part, and even Ivan was one of the few clients who took the effort to send me a thank you letter from jail. Their lying was too pathetic to be enraging.
Besides the issue of honesty, I definitely like some clients more than others, but it's hard to think about when that actually matters regarding their legal case. I represented a teenager I felt bad for and I knew he was going to be in jail for at least several months, so I spent my own money buying books on meditation and self-improvement. I also had a client who was a unicorn in that she had been homeless for years before ever getting arrested and I did whatever I could on the clock to get her connected with social services. Overall, someone's legal outcomes are beyond my control unless I'm somehow intentionally sabotaging a case. And yeah, I get how inscrutable the rules about attorney-client confidentiality might be to a newbie, but generally my clients are repeat customers and know the deal.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
I'm late on this but chiming in to join the chorus advising against deletion. Getting downvoted can initially feel terrifying because it conjures up the very primal fear of getting shunned by your community to eke out a lone survival out in the savannah, but it's also used as a last refuge when you've got nothing else to offer. I know that whenever I kick a hornet's nest and post about my favorite hobby horse the downvotes will come out the woodwork, but because it's not accompanied with any substantive critique I know it's just ineffectual flailing. Why should something like that bother me?
ymeskhout
8mo ago
FYI I just use a 'paste to markdown' website I randomly found. Transferring footnotes is still very annoying and there's some slight jankiness but hopefully this cuts it way below half an hour
ymeskhout
9mo ago
one would be so generous as to say, "But they did say 'or using motivated reasoning', so maybe they're just saying that they're using motivated reasoning." Nah. It would be interpreted as a way to simply call your opponents Nazis. Of course, if you would like to correct this hypothesis, I will update my understanding of the rules accordingly.
It's possible for facts to be congruent with more than one hypothesis.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
I'm not sure what your criticism is or what word games I'm playing. My post was addressing what is admittedly a very low bar to clear, namely how to present allegations of a conspiracy competently. I'm not denying that lawyers lie or conduct sloppy investigations or do some expert-shopping, but all that is collateral to whether or not the allegations are described coherently and with sufficient detail. Even knowing that the Subway Tuna lawyers shopped around and misrepresented their DNA findings, that doesn't change the fact that their theory was coherent and had enough details. The falsification of my argument would be if the Subway Tuna lawsuit didn't bother with any testing at all and instead filed an affidavit from some rando who said "I have come to believe that Subway Tuna is not in fact tuna" without explaining foundation.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
Not to completely dismiss your talents but I think the biggest factor that made you money was being lucky enough to find someone willing to put up cash on something so bonkers.
Taibbi has no credibility with me. His reporting on the Twitter Files appears accurate enough but he gets indignant when you point out the obvious conflicts of interest of him tailoring his criticism of Twitter to avoid saying anything bad about its new owner. My conclusion from back then was "Taibbi feels constrained from criticizing Musk because Musk is too valuable a source" and the dude just voluntarily tweets out his text message to Musk admitting this. He exhibits very selective curiosity about the stories he covers, stopping short of what becomes inconvenient to his narrative. If his sources are accurate about the declassification of this surveillance report, why doesn't he just get the report itself instead of bizarrely reporting on the number of inches of the binder it's contained in.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
I think the most likely explanation is that Epstein did indeed kill himself, but I also don't consider it unreasonable to doubt that explanation even without any conclusive evidence in favor of the murder theory. If someone wants to hold the murder theory with confidence greater than "hmm, looks sus" then ideally I'd want to see some attempts to shore up the specifics.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved.
Yes you bring up many excellent points. I did not intend to imply that exposing conspiracies is as simple as one person babbling, it depends on a lot more factors than just that.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
Yes, the examples you cite are valid. I could've phrased it better but when I said you only need one leak, I meant one that provided substantive evidence and in the context of a hypothetical TWA 800 cover-up. You're absolutely right that leaks do not necessarily guarantee exposing a conspiracy.
Chiming in to note my severe disagreement with this stance. I believe @somedude was providing a valuable public service, and limited their efforts only to the extent Hlynka continued to engage in the HBD topic.
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