"Don't start me talking, I'll tell everything I know."
--Sonny Boy Williamson
Why don't you just talk to any practicing lawyer? Corruption in the criminal justice system? Who, us? In Chicago we have judges in prison for fixing murder trials. We have have cops who are actually world-infamous torturers -- you know about Jon Burge, I'd bet. We sent so many innocent men to death row that we turned a Republican governer (himself on trial for corruption) into an abolitionist. And corruption and brutality is the least of it, although if you count having to raise campaign funds for judicial elections as legalized corruption, or the normal practice of appointing, er, I mean electing, loyal party hacks with dim bulbs (none, I am certain, to be found in Cook County), then maybe corruption is a really big problem, criminal and civil.
Chicago may revel in its crookedness, but we probably aren't actually worse than most places. Last I heard Baltimore didn't smell too sweet either -- I grew up in Northern Virginia and heard a thing or two.
And then there's the _civil_ justice system . . . . No systematic abuses? The whole racket is a systematic abuse. Yes, it's sophisticated. Professionally run? Maybe at the federal level. Not at the state level. Among the best functioning systems in the world? Probably true, but look at the competition.
You know I defer to no one in fierce defence of the rule of law and even the relative virtues of the common law and constitutional democracy. But let's not get naive and misty-eyed. Go thou and read some legal realism, Jerome Frank is alwys fun, or Holmes' The Path of the Law. Or talk to practicing lawyers. There's nothing in our legal system to get misty-eyed about, even if it's better than many alternatives.
>
> I do admit, however, that I find some of the horror
> stories about the corruption in the criminal justice
> system circulated on this list and elsewhere highly
> improbable. The system is certainly far from being
> perfect, but it is difficult to deny that it one of
> the most sophisticated, professionally run, and best
> functionning systems in the world, and it is
> unlikely
> that any systematic abuses (as opposed to random
> errors and sporadic corruption) would go
> uncorrected.
> All such horror stories seem to be a part of the
> juvenile contumacy and silly government hating that
> is
> la specialite de la maison of the US political
> discourse, both on the left and the right. For a
> while, it was amusing, then it started to be boring,
> and now it is becoming irritating.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Wojtek
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