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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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But another possibility is that regardless of how much public scrutiny their might by in terms of population numbers, there's not going to be any meaningful outrage in ways that matter, and more importantly the scrutiny that they do get they want.

This is a fair point, speaking generally. I'd like to think that every new scandal of outright venality moves the impression slightly at the margins. And the scrutiny I'm referring to applies to the defense attorney's role as well. The federal public defender bar (private and public) have a well-earned reputation of being the gold standard in the field, and that's only maximized when each one knows that every filing of theirs is going to be picked apart by an interested public (as happened in the post above!). To your point however, despite a cavalcade of outrageous conduct, there hasn't been much broad appetite to meaningfully change how the FBI operates. Just like prosecutorial misconduct, any spike in interested remains niche and therefore easy to ignore.

In a world where both the state and the individual investigator or prosecutor could be liable for large amounts, does this result in more enforcement? Or does it result in a far heavier thick blue line, where every release to defense attornies goes through four layers of 'did you redact that important thing

I didn't think about this point and I have to concede that's a strong possibility. It's basically a battle of equilibria to see whether greater openness forces greater transparency or higher efforts to maintain secrecy.

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