Why I Despise the Legal System: Reason No. 1

Once the decision is made to press charges, everything on the prosecution side revolves around "proving" the person guilty, and everything on the defense side revolves around "proving" the accused innocent. This means twisting facts to suit the narrative the prosecutor or defense attorney wants the jury to buy.

Witness Monday's arrest of the doctor and nurses in New Orleans. Now, I don't know what happened in that hospital. I also don't know, under the circumstances, what I would have done. But I know damned well that it's not so simple as, "Well, they just wanted to move things along so they bumped off a bunch of people."

Our justice system reduces the complexity of human motivation and response to simplistic accusation/counter-accusation with no room for the flexibilty required to fairly judge those accused of committing crimes. The adversarial nature of our justice system turns every trial into a game in which "winning" trumps getting at the truth and without the truth, there can be no fair judgement.

I'd like to note that it has not been proven that this doctor and these nurses actually killed anyone. If they did, well, this was a gawdawful situation in which many people had to make choices between gawdawful options. What angers me is that, while a jury will determine whether or not the accused go to prison, chances are none of us will ever know what really happened. Without knowing that we can't judge whether any individual was justified in whatever actions he or she took in the hellish days following the storm.

For an excellent essay about the adversarial nature of our criminal justice system go here.