My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing the system.
You have to take what you see in the news in context of the reality of the people who work within the system every day. It is a system, after all, and systems involve balancing competing interests, but the tech media rarely tackles the complexities of that process.
People who clerk have a skewed view of the judicial system compared to someone who has been convicted.
No they don't, just a different one. Read a lot of appeals and it's obvious that a lot of the arguments are completely, utterly bogus. There are technicalities that are unfair to people who are appealing, like having appeals rejected for failure to timely file when the appellant didn't have access to admissible evidence in time to file, and so forth. Those are the kind of cases that tend to work their way up through en banc review and onto the SC eventually.
But a lot of other appeals are so ridiculous as to be desperate or amount to judicial trolling. The fact is that some prisoners have nothing better to do than file appeals to make the time go by faster.
I'd argue it's a much less biased view that incorporates more and better information.
I do not know where you got the idea that our criminal justice system is serving its purpose. It may be great at putting criminals in prison, but it is meant to protect innocent.
The bulk of nearly any judge's case load is criminal appeals from run of the mill criminals. They might be pro se, they might have a public defender, they might have a cheap local lawyer, but they're not deep pocketed by any means. Indeed, clerks see a skewed picture of things, but one that is if anything skewed towards seeing fewer actually guilty people, not more, for the obvious reason that actually innocent people are more likely to file an appeal than actually guilty ones.
> I do not know where you got the idea that our criminal justice system is serving its purpose. It may be great at putting criminals in prison, but it is meant to protect innocent.
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the law-abiding public by putting criminals in prison. That is its sole reason for existing. An important constraint in doing so is protecting the innocent, but that's not its purpose. If it were, then you could design the perfect justice system simply by never putting any people in prison. But the world has bad people, lots of them, and that's not a tenable option.
You design a justice system the same way you design any system. You pick a false-positive rate you can live with, then design the rest of the system to maximize throughput while still hitting that false-positive target. It's the only sane way to design something that works as opposed to a non-working platonic ideal.
Good. Better criminals abuse the system than the system abuse people.
> My friends who have clerked for judges talk about how frustrating it is to deal with appeal after appeal from people who are clearly guilty and just abusing the system.
I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.
That's a trope. In reality, the justice system is about striking a balance between the need to preserve order and security and the need to protect peoples' rights. That's why the Constitution uses "balance-y" words like "reasonable" when talking about 4th amendment rights.
> I don't trust your friends view of clearly guilty, sounds like bias to me.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but most people the police catch are "clearly guilty." Even my PD friends acknowledge that most of their clients are "clearly guilty" (they see their jobs as more watching out for the ones that aren't and making sure the ones that are get at least a proportionate punishment). The media likes to cover edge cases, but for every one of those, there are a dozens of people who rob a liquor store and leave video evidence of themselves doing it.
It is interesting to note that even most of the cases that are central to defining 4th amendment rights, ones where judges have come down in favor of the defendant, are nonetheless ones where the defendant did actually commit the crime he was accused of committing. Ernesto Miranda was convicted the second time around, for rape, even with his confession excluded, served time, and was ultimately killed in a bar fight.
"No person shall be...compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
Nothing in there about being "reasonable" or about being "clearly guilty." The 5th amendment makes exactly one exception, which applies only to the military, only during a time of war or danger to the public, and has nothing to do with self-incriminating.
Second, even in the absence of wiggle words, there is the issue of how broadly to interpret the protection. Read literally, the text only prohibits "compelling" a person "to be a witness against himself" (i.e. a compelled confession admissible into evidence). Extending the protection more broadly than that is an act of judicial balancing.
Laws change, and there are often subtleties to a law that make rash statements made by some PD friend with likely no more than a GED about "clear guilt" absurd. Even the simplest of laws aren't clear when looked at in detail.
This is why we have advocates with specific knowledge in these areas, and why judges hear briefs explaining the nuances of law, as it applies to a case. There just is no such thing as "clearly guilty"
Nobody is acting as judge and jury. PD's are charged with zealously representing their clients just like any other lawyer, and the ones I know are extremely committed to their jobs (many turned down six figure jobs in private practice to work for state government salaries and defend poor people). They fight hard for their clients, even the "clearly guilty" ones. But that doesn't mean they're not allowed to make observations about the nature of the world.
> Laws change, and there are often subtleties to a law
We're not talking about subtleties here. We're talking about people who rob a liquor store, have people see them do it, have video evidence of them doing it... That's the bread and butter of the criminal justice system.
When you see edge cases in the news and rant about how broken the system is for not taking even more measures to protect the innocent, remember that the vast majority of people who go through the justice system really did do the crimes they're accused of committing, and that factual state of affairs influences how the system is structured. If a lot more of the people who come up before judges each day were innocent in fact, the system would be structured differently.
PD here means "public defender": a lawyer. Did you perhaps think it meant "police dept"?
The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities. As you've illustrated with Miranda, even with the improperly-obtained evidence suppressed, he was still convicted. The government doesn't need to violate people's rights to keep criminals off the streets. And perhaps there would be fewer of those pesky appeals if the state did things right the first time.
Of course most 4th amendment decisions concern guilty people - the remedy for 4th amendment violations is suppression, so you never hear about the innocent people who are harassed by police with illegal searches - no evidence is found so there's no case with evidence to suppress! (Civil action is an uphill battle even for those who are able to bring it.)
It's not a matter of protecting the rights of guilty people or not, but determining how much to protect them. Every procedural protection has a cost. If a procedural protection might be invoked by a person who has a 10% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's worth the cost. If it's more likely to be invoked by a person who has a 1% chance of being innocent, then maybe it's not. Looking only at media reports gives you a distorted picture of what those probabilities are.
> The trope here is the suggestion that criminals are getting off on technicalities.
I didn't say they were getting off on technicalities. I said they were trying to get off on technicalities.
"Better to let a 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to jail" makes for good rhetoric, but even such flowery language implies a point at which its better to let 1 innocent man go to jail than let a certain number of guilty men go free.
BTW 99% is a very low accuracy. If we accepted that for aircraft, 13 would crash weekly.
I'm sorry to break it to you, no they aren't; and I was a cop. Most cops don't give a rats ass if you're guilty or not, only if they get a bust, they're chasing numbers generally handed down unofficially through their supervisors and they have targets to hit. They care only that can bust you, not that they should or not and quite often ignore anything that might prevent them from getting a bust.
All cops; no, but a majority in my experience. I became a programmer because I couldn't stand being around them or socializing with them because they really are mostly dumb fucking pigs who don't give a shit about your rights.
[1]: By the way, if you get called for jury duty do not try to get out of it! It's an incredibly interesting and rewarding experience, not to mention the whole thing where it's your duty as a citizen.