A lot of what many of us know about the legal system comes from late-night television reruns or your friend's lawyer cousin who you turn to when you need free legal advice.The minutiae and gritty details of the systems are generally glossed over, but the NY Times took a look at the Early Case Assessment Bureau downtown where pretty much every arrest in Manhattan is processed.
If you were arrested at any point in the past year (don't worry, we don't judge you) you were one of the 109,000 arrests who were processed here. You'd expect something so faceless as the ECAB to be run like a well-oiled machine, but thing's aren't always as they seem. One defense lawyer, Stephen Worth, said, "It’s like the third ring of hell."
There's been recent outcry against police reports given to prosecutors by the men and women in blue. One case of this is Patrick Pogan, the famous bicyclist body-checker, who initially told prosecutors that the cyclist rode into him and knocked him down. The tape seen round the world clearly tells us that the officer was lying in his initial report. What are we to make of this? Well, a former prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer said, "It starts with the police officer telling the D.A. what happened. So yeah, they can say there’s a miscommunication, but then there’s also lying."
