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