The point Alito is making is that if the prosecutor can&#x27;t get assets frozen, then it encourages guilty parties to spend all their assets prior to judgement.<p>He is not assuming guilt in this case.  He is making the case for why not allowing freezing unrelated assets is  a massively bad incentive which it is in the interest of justice to have counter-measures against.<p>If one believe countermeasures is necessary, it becomes a tradeoff between the necessity of such countermeasures vs. the negative impact they have on the innocent.<p>The bar for that is clearly quite high given that courts e.g. regularly will hold people without bail, or set huge bail amounts as countermeasures against having people run off.<p>In this case it is &quot;only money&quot;, so it&#x27;s not surprising that they court would consider it acceptable in general to freeze funds pending judgement compared to depriving someone of their freedom.<p>&gt; Defendants then cannot hire the counsel they desire, lose their case and go to jail.<p>If the public defender system is not a good enough safeguard for justice, then that is an argument worth making, but the issue then is not the defendants ability to pick counsel, but that a substantial proportion of all defendants are forced to rely on a system that may be insufficient.<p>If you could convince the court that the public defender system is totally inadequate, that would be a strong case for unfreezing enough assets to get adequate representation, but still not necessarily enough to make the case for unfreezing enough for the counsel you might prefer (to take the extreme example: if you&#x27;re guilty and could hire anyone what&#x27;s to stop you from finding a suitable friend or relative who is a lawyer, and pay them every cent you own to defend you, as a means of moving the money out of reach?)