Courts and Court Officers (a Judicial Issue)
When sufficient evidence has been collected, prosecutors will take defendants to court. It is the job of the court to weigh the evidence and determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, and when guilty, impose a proper sentence. The outcome of a court trial should be justice for all involved, but this is not always the case. There are some changes that we could make to our court procedures to help ensure justice is served.
Some criminal and civil cases can take years to be resolved. Investigations can take months or years, which often leaves guilty individuals and groups free to commit additional crimes. Once an arrest or suit is made, it may be several months before the case comes to trial. After a verdict, there may be months or years of appeals, which may go all the way up to the Supreme Court. Until cases are finally resolved, guilty parties may be free or innocent parties may be locked up or at least otherwise unable to get on with their lives.
There is a say that goes "justice deferred is justice denied". We obviously do not want a rush to judgment, but we also do not want to drag things out too long. Therefore, we do want investigations to take as long as necessary, but we then want trials and appeals to go as fast as possible. To speed up trials, we need to set deadlines on rulings and appeals to ensure judges, and defense and prosecution lawyers do not stretch things out too long.
In the early days of our nation, juries were comprised of whichever landowners happened to be in town on the day of the trial and could be rounded up. Therefore, those juries were primarily made up of wealthy men. The trials tended to be short and dealt with simple matters that could be easily understood by those on the jury.
Today, juries are usually selected from the list of voters or drivers in the given jurisdiction. With many potential jurors able to get out of jury duty, juries are made up of a disproportionate number of individuals who are poor, retired, or not working. With more and more complex laws, and more reliance on scientific evidence, both criminal and civil trials generally take longer and often deal with matters that many on the jury may not already understand. Educating the jurors on these matters takes time and leads to longer trials.
In addition, there is a disturbing trend for defense attorneys and prosecutors to use jury consultants to help pick who they want on the jury. Instead of trying to select individuals who would best be able to examine the evidence and render an appropriate verdict, the jury consultants try to select those individuals who they feel can most easily be swayed to their client’s side.
With today’s more complex trials, I think that it is time for professional juries. These juries would be made up of a small number of paid individuals who have been trained in how to be a juror and have the specialized knowledge needed to understand the legal and scientific evidence that is presented. These professional jurors could possibly be retired legal, business, medical or scientific professionals with the appropriate knowledge and experience, or law students looking to gain some firsthand legal experience.
These professional jurors might specialize in specific types of trials where their expertise is most needed. Since a professional jury would already have a lot of the background knowledge about the law and the scientific evidence, there would be less of a need to go over this in depth during the trial, which means the trials could go faster and the jurors would still be better able to render an informed verdict.
One of the biggest obstacles to justice is the precedent of throwing out evidence on technicalities and on the grounds that a defendant’s rights have been violated. Not only does this deprive the public of justice, but it also sends the wrong message to criminals. (I would hope that we never throw out evidence of innocence.)
If the courts or the police make a mistake or even deliberately violate someone’s rights, it should not invalidate the evidence. As the old saying goes, “two wrongs do not make a right”. The only reason for excluding evidence should be if the evidence has been fabricated or contaminated.
Instead, those individuals who made the mistake or who did something wrong should be appropriately reprimanded or punished, but the evidence should be admitted. If a criminal is allowed to get away with a crime due to excluded evidence, then that criminal and other criminals are only emboldened to continue breaking the law.
When a witness is sworn in, he or she promises to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. Defense attorneys and prosecutors will often ask witnesses carefully worded questions that force them to answer with only the desired portion of the truth. To get the whole truth, witnesses must be allowed to give a complete account of what happened. They need to have the option to expand their answers to give a complete description of events and not be forced to answer just the question. In addition, all witnesses should be asked one final question, which might go something like this: What other information can you give this court that is relevant to this case?
One big obstacle to hearing the whole truth is the fact that the defendant is not required to testify. A defense attorney may give a sanitized version of a defendant’s story during opening or closing remarks, but it is unusual for a defendant to testify unless there is a good chance that it could help his or her case. I would make it a requirement that all defendants must testify. I would think that innocent individuals would want the chance to give their side of the story. The guilty may not want to testify, but the jury needs to hear how the defendant tries to explain things. A defendant’s alibi may be that he or she was home alone in bed at the time, but that needs to be on the record.
Prosecutors should only be putting those individuals on trial where there is sufficient evidence that points to them being guilty of the crime. Defense attorneys are a different matter. It seems that many of them do not want to know or even care whether their clients are innocent or guilty of the crime. They seem to believe that it is their job to get their client off and that is all that matters.
All lawyers are supposed to be officers of court. Their job should be to ensure that justice is done. That means that those who are innocent are found not guilty and those who committed a crime are found guilty and receive an appropriate punishment. Therefore, defense attorneys should be required to truthfully evaluate the evidence and proceed accordingly.
A defense lawyer’s job should be to find the truth, which includes getting all relevant information from their clients. They must run down all the leads, evaluate all the evidence, and present a case that truly reflects all the evidence. They should not make claims or speculate about things for which there is no evidence. When they know that their clients are guilty, they should work to ensure that their clients’ punishments are appropriate and not excessive. Of course, defendants would always have the option to shop around for an attorney who will do a better job for them or who they can convince that they are innocent.
Currently, defendants have the option of getting public defenders or hiring their own lawyers. To balance the prosecution and defense, I would change the way that the public defenders work. First, I would always have a public defender assigned to a defendant. Second, the public defender’s office would have the same amount and quality of staff, resources and budget as the prosecutor’s office has. This means each defendant would have the same number and quality of defense lawyers as the prosecution has. They would also have the same access to investigators, police, and labs. This would give all defendants an equal footing in their defense as prosecutors have in their prosecution.
As soon as a defendant is charged with a crime, they would be assigned the appropriate number of public defenders. Procedures would be set up to allow the defendant the opportunity to challenge who is assigned and to get them replaced as needed. A defendant could also hire their own lawyer, but this lawyer would only be there in an advisory capacity to ensure that the public defenders are doing their jobs and would not have access to certain sensitive information. For instance, these private lawyers would not have access to witness names and addresses, because we do not want any possibility of this information getting to the defendant to be used for witness intimidation.
In our current legal system, juries are required to give a verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty for each count. A Not Guilty verdict is needed both when the jury feels defendants are innocent and when there is a reasonable doubt as to their guilt. In some cases, the jury may have doubts because they did not think there was enough evidence to reach a verdict. In this case, other than having a hung jury, there is no alternative but to render a Not Guilty verdict. When this happens, the defendants are free and cannot be retried. A better alternative would be to give the jury the option of bringing back a verdict of Insufficient Evidence. If new evidence comes in, prosecutors could then have the option to retry these defendants.
Punishment -
How to administer Punishment that will work better to reform criminals.
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