America's Injustice System is Criminal

From CounterPunch:

Before jumping to the conclusion that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated plea.

The criminal justice (sic) system today consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes created by the process of negotiation to close a case.

This takes most of the work out of the system and, thereby, suits police, prosecutors, and judges to a tee. Police do not have to be careful about evidence, because they know that no more than one case out of twenty will ever be tested in the courtroom.

Click here for the rest.

Like the police, whose mission most people think is one of public safety but is actually about making busts, the courts aren't really about truth and justice, which is what most Americans believe. Rather, the court system is about getting convictions. It's a subtle difference in emphasis, but counts for everything in terms of day to day reality. Yes, justice is often done by our court system, but seemingly just as often, injustice is done, too. As long as the system has built-in incentives for the people who run it to ignore and deemphasize critical evidence that would free defendants, we're not really a free nation.

And this is the kind of "democracy" that we would impose on Iraq and Afghanistan? No wonder they're fighting back.

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