Justice for all.

Something that came over a legal listserv I belong to.

The State of Missouri charged a Kentucky resident with a crime. The Kentucky resident filed a request for representation by the Public Defender and it was accepted, meaning the guy is poor and the State agreed he was poor. The trial is, of course, in Missouri and the Defendant has to commute, stay in a hotel, eat out, and all the other fun costs associated with travel. These come from his own pocket. His friends in Kentucky, sympathetic to these costs, pool some money in a "Defense Fund" for his benefit. Many of them specify that if the money is not all used up, they want their share of the remainder returned to them. The Fund is turned over to a friend of the Defendant's in Missouri who puts the money in a bank account in the friend, not the Defendant's, name.

The case goes to trial and the Defendant is acquitted, but during the trial the court learns of the existence of the Fund. After the conclusion of the trial and the rendering of the verdict, the Court orders the Defendant to turn over to the Public Defender the entire amount remaining in the Fund for legal fees. The problems I have with this are as follows:

• This seems like some sort of an implied trust and I am not sure the Court can order the Defendant, as only the beneficiary of the trust, to turn over the corpus.
• The Trustee is not a party before the Court and has never been served with process. I am not sure the court has jurisdiction to order the Trustee to do anything when he is not properly before the Court.
• This seems unjust when the Defendant won the lawsuit. While I acknowledge that in the American system a criminal defendant with assets pays their legal fees regardless of the outcome (the high cost of innocence at times), when the State has charged him with a crime and he is found not guilty, how is it just to then require him to pay the State for defense against the very charge the State itself brought. If the State failed to make its case, there is at least a colorable position that the case should not have been brought to begin with, which means that the Defendant's costs should not have been incurred. That being the case, it seems disingenuous for the State to collect additional fees that the State caused. This smacks vaguely of the idea that this Defendant "got off" in spite of the fact he must have been guilty or he would not have been arrested and charged. Last time I checked, guilt did not follow arrest or even poverty in our legal system.

I should probably also note that to stop this Order would probably require a lawsuit, probably a Writ of Prohibition. The cost of getting and winning that suit would most likely vastly exceed the amount of funds in the Fund. It won't be worth the money to fight the system so this poor guy will probably have to roll over for the State of Missouri and get buggered. As a non-resident, he can't even vote the next time that judge comes up for retention.

What do you think?