Is Our System of Justice Flawed?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Every time a high profile court case hits the media (Anthony, Zimmerman, etc) along with all the biased comments that follow on every message board and water cooler, I cannot help but wonder if our criminal justice system is severely flawed.

More specifically I refer to cases like the Morton case where after 25 years, DNA evidence clearly proved he was not the killer. However in this case (and many like it) the prosecutor fought tooth and nail to slow, delay and generally do anything possible to hinder the process, and he did so for personal gain/reputation. I know that it is human nature for everyone from the common man to the highest supreme court judge to be effected by bias, it is just part of what makes us human. But the problem as I see it is that while the court/justice system is intended to “find the truth”, in fact every participant is either directly or indirectly effected by the decision and “finding the truth” really is secondary.

Specifically in the case of the prosecution, they literally have massive incentive to ensure that WHOEVER they are prosecuting goes to prison, period… and the longer the better… for them professionally. For them, once a suspect enters a court room, they must be found guilty at all costs. There is no objective analysis and unbiased reasoning. Prosecutors are scored on “wins” and “losses” (as opposed to finding the truth) which effect their job security, income and ultimately careers. In the above case, the prosecutor (now judge) had every incentive to ensure that Mr. Morton stayed behind bars as long as possible and there was no reason to actually serve justice.

In fact, justice being served (finding him innocent) was/is bad for the prosecutor’s career.

Is this not severely flawed?

Why does it seem so outlandish that, in some cases, evidence is presented where the prosecution simply says… “yep we got the wrong guy, lets go find the right guy”. :smiley:

Yeah I know… and the defense would certainly not play by those rules and in many cases they know all too well of the guilt and have no trouble sleeping at night.

But I say the prosecution - representing the state and nation - has a higher standard to uphold and letting a man rot in prison for 25 years, the last 6 or so of which were mired in red tape and prosecution delays speaks to a problem with the system.

Could the system be improved? Could prosecutors be scored in a different manner that removed the “win at all costs no matter the truth” facet of the equation, or am I (probably) being too naive?

2

Nah, it’s completely perfect. Not a valid criticism to be found.

3

I think it depends on the person somewhat. Some prosecutors and a few judges get caught up in the competition and score-keeping. Usually there are judges there to try to shut that stuff down when a prosecutor is getting crazy, but then there are “hanging judges” too, I suppose.

4

Well of course it is flawed. All systems are flawed. But yes, the DA position has a lot of politics involved and that does affect things. However we do include a lot of things to benefit the defendant like innocent until proven guilty, pleading the fifth, and not allowing biasing information into the proceedings. The better question is, how can we improve the system?

I’d kind of like to see us step away from the guilty/not guilty dichotomy. Have something more like degrees of guilt and bad behavior. Only 100% guilt could lead to conventional punishment. But lesser amounts of potential guilt could still result in something like parole, rehabilitation, therapy, moderated licenses, etc. So we aren’t completely convinced you killed that guy, but we know at least you have been getting into fights and maybe have an unregistered weapon. We can’t send you to jail, but maybe we can say, you need therapy, should do some community service, and can’t have weapons for a certain time period.

5

I tend to agree with you regarding televised jury trials. I personally believe that, to Americans, televised trials are like a sporting event and everyone has an opinion. If my team “loses”, I get upset.

However, isn’t the system a little more complex than just jury trials? For every high profile televised case, there are hundreds of thousands of little plea bargains, appeals, deals brokered by informants to turn on Serious Bad Guys, time off for good behavior, and laws that evolve. Do you think those are flawed too?

I don’t have any personal knowledge regarding whether prosecutors keep score or not. Maybe they don’t keep score by only wins and losses? Maybe they are personally satisfied and respected by their peers if they get a guilty person convicted on a lesser charge, if only to keep bad people off the streets for some amount of time.

The system is not perfect, it takes a long time, and often juries may make questionable judgments. “Fairness” doesn’t always translate to “justice”, but it’s a good principal on which to start. If there were a better system that were to fit our country, we’d likely be using it.

6

Of course it’s flawed. You can’t have two people pursuing two different things and have them fairly arrive at a third thing. The prosecution wants a conviction while the defense wants an acquittal–no one is actually trying for justice.

It’s only because most cases are fairly clear cut that things work as well as they do.

7

I think if you throw out the high profile televised case examples, most to nearly all of the thousands of state and federal prosecutors in the United States are not judged on a “win at all costs” standard. Part of the job of being a prosecutor is using discretion to decide which cases to prosecute and which not to prosecute, and I believe most are “scored” in part at least on how they exercise that judgement.

8

I think it works pretty good overall.

People are going to want “justice”. There is a balance between how many innocent people you are willing to convict to get the guilty ones. This seems to wax and wane.

Most prosecutors don’t actually want to send innocent people to jail. They are human and make mistakes.

Hopefully cases like these will improve post conviction proceedings - especially relating to scientific evidence.

There is already a small but growing trend to blind lineups (where the police officer conducting the photo lineup doesn’t know who the suspect is). As things like this become more common - well things will at least be more based on science and logic…

9

If only our legal system had some kind of neutral figure presiding over trials.

10

It does happen. There are cases where the prosecution decides to drop the charges and let the accused go. Obviously they’re rare but that’s because prosecutions are discretionary - they don’t have to prosecute unless they feel they have a strong case.

11

I think it only seems rare because it doesn’t make the papers. It probably happens thousands of times a week across the country.

12

I won’t claim to have the statistics. But I’d assume in most cases where a prosecution is going to end up dropping the charges, they’d know it in advance and would simply not bother starting the case.

13

The weak point is the jury-many times, people are chosen who are disinterested and frankly, incapable of reasoning to a logical conclusion. The OJ Simpson case was proof of that. The other thing-when judges allow the trial to go off on tangents (OJ Simpson again). In that trial, it was the LAPD that was on trial, not the defendant-basically, the judge allowed the defense to manipulate the trial and divert all attention from the actual crime. The long length of the trial insured that the bored, low intelligence jurors would forget most of the evidence, and rely on the last minutes of the trial.

14

Severely flawed. It’s unlikely that justice is served more than 90% of the time.