Another death row exoneration in North Carolina

To borrow a line, the same people so convinced the government can't properly fix a pothole are the same people so convinced that the cops are right and the death penalty is always perfect justice.

Weird disconnect if you ask me.

 

Yes, the prosecutor who should be prosecuted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/opinion/the-innocent-on-death-row.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

But this is my favorite part of today's NY Times editorial:

And to Dick's point, Britt's trials seem to have been lawyering contests...

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-06-29/news/mn-373_1_death-penalty

 

If I were king for a day, the first thing I'd get rid of would be the peer jury system. Archaic. Obsolete. Ineffective.

The second thing I'd get rid of would be the adversarial system of law.

Blow the whole fucking thing up.

 

Law school professors far and wide just shuddered and don't know why.

 

This is a long, long, long, long read, but it's a very exhaustive look at how racism and white flight helped create balkanized St. Louis, and how all those little towns have plundered their citizens and anyone else unlikely enough to come through.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/

In one part, he talks about a 10-mile stretch of highway that runs through SIXTEEN municipalities. People talk about how they get a ticket, say, for a headlight out in one of them, and then get popped again and again along the way as they go through town to town.

 

OK, so you'd get rid of them. With what would you replace them?

 

Probably professional juries of some sort - not different than the judicial panels that decide appeals, except now the panel would be in a fact-finding role, as well.

And I'd replace the adversarial system with the inquisitorial system, which France, for example, uses. There, the judge does the fact-finding and investigating, rather than relying on the truth to come out via the adversarial process.

 

Didn't know anything about the ins and outs of other systems, and even after reading this* about the Dutch system (which is, as I understand it, very close to a pure inquisitorial system) I still know very little. Nevertheless, I'm not so sure that your confidence in the other approaches is all that well-placed.

*http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1133&context=uclr

 

Do I think it's perfect?

No.

Do I prefer it over the shitshow we have now, in which 12 random Joe Six-Packs watch two lawyers try to out-maneuver one another?

Yes. Yes, I do.

I have zero faith in the adversarial jury system to get it right. None. Zip. Zilch. It has not. It does not. It's a relic from a different time, and we have somehow convinced ourselves to have faith in process, even though the process is fucked.

 

If we're going to keep our current system, however, then some of the evidentiary standards need to change, and change drastically. Judges have long washed their hands of decisions like keeping coerced confessions, or confessions to jailhouse informants, out of evidence. They think that the process of cross-examination solves the problem. It doesn't.

I would go so far as to, first, not permit juries to hear about confessions. Not one word. Nor confessions to third-parites. In other words, no more hearsay exception for a statement against interest.

 

Do you think the two NC guys would have been more or less likely to have been convicted in an inquisitorial system? I think they get convicted either way.

 

I do not think they would have been convicted, no.

Obviously, it depends on the inquisitor, but at least you theoretically have someone doing the fact-finding who is neutral and not incentivized to hide information or obscure or misrepresent facts.

And, also, holy shit, get rid of elected judges.