On paper at least we have a great justice system. A fair and impartial trial by a jury of your peers, a judge, defense attorney (provided free if you can't afford one) and a prosecutor whom are all three are officers of the court and dedicated to serving the principal of justice.
In reality our system has turned into a sorry piece of trash, and our judges are the best of the bunch, which often is not saying much.
When you get away from the high profile cases you will often find that:
Prosecutors are more interested a future political office than serving justice. So their primary concern is their win/loss recored and being "tough on crime", not if someone is really guilty or innocent. They often use the theory of the "best evidence" in their case presentation, discarding any evidence from it that doesn't fit in with the fairytale they are presenting.
And should new evidence be found later that proves your innocences, or at least presents a reasonable doubt of your guilt you best hope it is soon after your conviction.
Other wise guess what. Mr Prosecutor is not going to go to the appeals courts and say.."yes, it sure does look like you are innocent".
He is in fact going to go their and argue..."To late, the time to present new evidence has expired. You had your fair and impartial trial, you were found guilty by a jury of your peers, at this point guilt or innocence is irrelevant."
And in all to many cases the Appeals Courts have agreed with this argument based on precedence.
Defense Attorneys all to often aren't interested in guilty or innocent, but in a speedy resolution of the case as to make more money with the next case. So they are interested in pleading out cases to a lesser offense. Once Defendants realize that the right to a speedy trial is a pipe dream and in fact when dealing with the poorer portion of our population spend possible two years setting in a county jail before trial often agree to plea out especially with a deal that lets them out of prison before they would even go to trial.
By the way, they count this as a "win" and will cite to their next client how they had someone "facing 20 years and they got them off for only 5 years instead".
And Public Defenders. These people are in fact over worked, under paid, working with minimum support staff trying to defend someone against the Prosecution which has an unlimited budget paid by you the tax payer.
And they are often the bottom of the scale when it comes to lawyers, on the bottom rung of being on the way to a different career for numerous various reasons.
If you are lucky enough to get a good one it is still an up hill battle, even if you are in fact innocent.
Try as they might they don't have the time to give your case the time it deserves. They have to fight to get funds for testing of evidence to prove your innocence, to get police detectives assigned to your case specifically to try and prove your innocence, or to hire private detectives to interview witnesses on your behalf.
And this stacks on top of budgets for the Public Defenders office being under funded or cut on an ongoing basis. This situation will only worsen in our current economic situation. Which politician is going to risk demanding more funds for this and face being labeled as "soft on crime" when they can vote for something such as road improvements instead.
As far as that jury of your peers, those who are there after doing everything they can to get out of jury duty and failing. If you are lucky and they are not busy tweeting, surfing the Internet, or sleeping, a couple of them might actually pay attention. But don't count on it. And by the way, don't count on jury members sleeping as being an justification for an appeal.
As long as we have a judicial system where the rules are different state by state, and the prosecutors are only interested in their personal score card instead of justice, where potential jurors are in fact eliminated based on the race of the defendant, etc, instead of a national system of trials where the rules are the same our system will only get worse as our society and those citizens who it is composed of become more disposable.
Its very easy for some to sit back and yell "hang them high" ignoring what our system has become, and what DNA evidence is proving time and time again. We are sending innocent people to prison and death row.
It is easy to be judgmental about something you read about.
But, when the time comes that it is your Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, other relative, or best friend that is caught up in the system....remember where you stood in the past on this issue, don't be surprised or shocked by what the system is really like.
Just stand up in court and yell..."Hang them High". Stick to your beliefs about those "criminals".
