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mothballed

There are a gazillion federal prosecutions in the US that go something like

1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty.

2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person

3) Defense is broke

4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument

5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail

6) Person folds when they realize none of their defense is allowed or will be funded, or goes to trial and gets a gazillion years for daring to go to trial.

If you already have a pile of evidence for a crime and an expert witnesses you can keep piling on it's not much of a stretch to dump it on some random person, as we saw here, quite easy actually.

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I have heard prosecutors say that innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether they can convict.

I've known and hung out with a lot of prosecutors. I've never heard one say anything like that outright, but, one of the main issues is that in 99.9% of cases the evidence will not be looked at. They are just not given the time and resources to even take a single glance at the police reports, never mind any forensic evidence. They literally have no idea whether the person is guilty or innocent when they offer a plea deal.

Even your paid defense attorney might never look at the case files at all. Jared from Subway's lawyer got into hot water because he got Jared to take a plea and it turned out he was factually innocent of one of the many offenses he was charged with, and that fact would have been uncovered quickly had the defense attorney ever looked at the evidence, which he said he had not.

In the US legal system, the defense isn't given access to the prosecution's evidence used in the case immediately. In fact, lots of plea bargains happen before the defense attorney knows for sure what evidence there is to tie their client to the crime.

Absolutely. Defense usually has to file a motion, then god forbid the evidence is something like an obscure-format security video; nobody will ever figure out how to get it to the defense or how to play it back.

Most plea bargains are done simply based on the charging instruments.

I doubt any professional prosecutors would say this out loud. This is likely a disciplinable or disbarrable statement.

This is effectively a truth, but prosecutors are generally held to high ethical standards, where they are expected to drop cases / not bring cases if the evidence doesn't point specifically to the defendant.

That said, there are occasionally times when prosecutors have been caught hiding / burying / not sharing exculpatory evidence (something the police / prosecution found which would help the defense's case against the prosecution). The only reason to do so would be to sandbag the case against the defendant even when there is a shadow of a doubt in the prosecution's case.

I can't imagine a basic analysis of the Kik account would require a terribly expensive expert, in theory.

Could the solution be to turn lots of local IT / programmers into potential experts to bend down the cost curve?

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