If "we" wrote the laws today no poor or minority person would ever be acquitted. Ever.

[cthulu2016]

As the saying goes, bad cases make bad law.

The paroxysm of outrage with newly discovered thing like burden of proof, reasonable doubt, exclusion of evidence that is more prejudicial than probative, the right to not testify without any suspicion attaching there-by... it is scary.

These things that sometimes allow a person who may be guilty to be acquitted are core, bedrock progressive principles.

And most of our progress in expanding the rights of the accused in both theory and practice springs from correcting a history of arbitrary racial and class prejudice in the criminal law.

In a world where a man facing no legally sufficient evidence of a charged crime is convicted based on hunches about what people "like that" think and do there will never be an acquittal of anybody unpopular.

You may think you know everything about Zimmerman and you may even be right, but it was US who fought to eliminate what your gut tells you from the process. Us. The good guys.

Nobody's gut is worth shit, legally, and when we allow it to come into play we have found that a lot of people's gut tells them that black people are always guilty. And even if not guity of this, then guilty of something.

The system is designed to let some guilty people go free by giving all the close-calls to the defendent. If it never did so then it would convict almost everyone ever charged by a prosecuter with anything.


The Zimmerman case was one of the weakest legal cases you will ever see. If it is an outrage for the world's weakest legal case to result in an acquittal then what is being said is that nobody should ever be acquitted of anything.

These criminal process protections are not something the old-boys network put in place. These are things that WE fought for and sometimes won, generation after generation.

They are, in genral, protections for the weak against the strong.

And if they don't yield a desired result in one case then that is what it is.


A system that tries to not convict the innocent will sometimes acquit the guilty. No way around it.

[NoOneMan]

1. The system is designed to be subjective enough to allow predujuice to excuse some crimes...

and condemn others.

This was a case where the law supported either result and gave the jury every opportunity to excuse the death of a black teenager. Of course, juries do not always exercise that right if they do not approve of who was killed or who did the killing.

This wonderful system puts plenty of innocent people behind bars, and ensures 60% of the prison population is black. So don't tell me about it letting a few guilty people go. It lets "acceptable" people go and makes "acceptable" murders permissible.

Fuck that system

[LittleBlue]

2. Superbly written

I can only assume people are reacting to this verdict based on emotion, and given time, they will come to see that this system is far better than "professional jurors" or other disastrous alternatives.

[GeorgeGist]

3. I note that in your entire OP you never once mention justice.

Maybe that's the difference between lawyers and people. People expect justice.

[cthulu2016]

9. People often expected and got justice, only to

find 25 years later the DNA doesn't match.

What people think is justice is not always correct.

That is why a cold-minded system is better, for this purpose, than an emotional goal. It is designed to not always give us what we want.

We could decide all cases based on public opinion polling and thus always give the people what the people think is justice.
Would anyone really think that a better way to go?

[Democracyinkind]

4. If that is true - how come we have a quarter of the worlds prisoner population.

What you describe - the system as it works - only works for some people, some times. Zimmerman proved to be such a case. To pretend that this is the norm is slightly ridiculous. Even more so when considering that there was enough evidence to convict him and he surely would have been convicted if their respective skin colors had been reversed.

[anomiep]

8. The number of people in prisons is, imho, to a large part due to

The "drug war".

It's also a large cause of the violence we see in our country today.

Collectively, we did not learn the lessons of Prohibition.


(I don't partake myself - but that doesn't mean that I can't see what's going on)

[Igel]

14. We have so many people in prison for a few reasons.

1. We give out longer sentences.

2. We have a lot more crimes. What we send people to jail for in the US would, in many countries, result in a fine or much lesser penalty.

In every system, there is a mechanism to chuck people out of the process. Some remove people upon arrest: bribery, who you know, having the cop just tell you to be a good kid. Some remove people after conviction: probation, rehab, plea bargaining for time served. Some remove people after sentencing: Parole, pardons, case review. While the US has had warnings for the very young, most of the time we've extended mercy late in the process than overlooking crimes at the beginning. Think of it as our Puritan heritage, if you will--don't overlook the sin, but do forgive. We've hardened our hearts, so to speak.

3. We don't have bribes as an implicit mechanism. "Who you know", for all its notoriety, hasn't ever been prominent in most of the country most of the time. Cops used to give warnings. Now we have "broken windows" and demands for zero tolerance. More arrests, less mercy at the beginning.

4. We have fewer rehab programs because somebody would have to pay for them. We also don't think they're punishment enough. Detox resorts, indeed!

5. We have less probation because we have a mobile population in a large country. Russia has less mobility. France has less country. Many countries have closer family ties and a sense of family honor so that you do stay and serve your probation. We simply have no sense of community. Turn a kid over to his family and a day later he's vanished. Or he's told he did nothing wrong, keep it up.

6. We often have a politicized judicial system where people demand that if you're convicted, you serve your time. People demand safety in their community even though the bad guys *live* in the same community and result from that community. That means you go for jail time. It means that you limit parole. It means you reduce pardons. If the population won't be responsible for their behavior, if parents can't raise their kids to be civilized, we need authoritarian parents to protect us from our peers. That might mean drug laws. It might mean white-collar crime laws.

7. People have gotten just plain nasty in their calls for justice and retribution. So we have longer sentences, minimum sentences, all kinds of add-on penalties. We have three-strikes and all kinds of "without possibility of parole". Why? Because the danged judges and juries were being too lenient. Too merciful. So much for empathy, so much for community. We were afraid. Or we wanted to make sure some other group's perps suffered.

I hear calls for justice, and I hear calls of a mob asking for somebody to be killed without much proof. How dare he lay his hand on one of us? Proof? Who needs proof?

[morningfog]

5. I don't blame the jury or the prosecutors.

From what I have read, it was a weak case. I would prefer to see several guilty acquited than innocent convicted.

Having said that, I think the institutional racism played a role in this outcome. Zimmerman wasn't treated as a suspect at the scene or for quite some time. That was due to the skin color of the parties.

I have a problem with a 6 person jury for a 2nd degree murder charge as well.

[NaturalHigh]

6. The six-person jury is pretty odd.

I didn't know we still had such things in civilian life. Just last year, I was on a fairly small-time civil jury, and there were twelve of us.

[anomiep]

13. What do you mean by 'not treated as a suspect'

They secured his gun, they cuffed him, they took him in for questioning. I say that not to claim that they treated him as a suspect, but just to state my understanding of what they did.

What would the police had to have done differently, at the scene, for it to meet your definition of 'treated as a suspect'? (I am asking because I don't know what you mean, not for any kind of disagreement - just to be clear)

[Nye Bevan]

7. I remember "reasonable doubt" and "right not to testify" existing at the time of OJ Simpson's trial.

So I'm pretty sure that these are not "newly discovered" concepts.

[Spazito]

10. Actually, the laws don't have to be 'rewritten' to see this happen...

it is what happens now, the poor and minorities are not treated the same and do not have the same access to high priced lawyers, high priced experts that the rich and, most often white, defendants have. The scales of justice are not balanced, not at all.

[ProSense]

11. Somehow

"A system that tries to not convict the innocent will sometimes acquit the guilty. No way around it. "

...this seems like an extremely weak justification for what happened.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023250427#post14

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023255077

[onenote]

12. I don't regard is as justification. But it is an explanation.