| Subject: Marquis views the Law upholders as Infallible |
Author:
JD Bishop
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Date Posted: 11/ 9/06 8:27pm
In reply to:
Josh
's message, "Ask the DA" on 08/ 7/06 11:00am
16 July, 2006
Uprooting the Creeping Belief That the Criminal Justice System is Infallible
by TChris
Yesterday, Last Night in Little Rock took issue with Justice Scalia's assertion in Hudson v. Michigan that the exclusionary rule isn't needed to deter police misconduct because "modern police forces are staffed with professionals." Complementing LNiLR's comment on the unprofessional and inexperienced members of the Las Vegas Police Department is David Feige's Boston Globe reminder that the New York Police Department spent nearly 12 years trying to locate evidence that led to the exoneration of Alan Newton. A professional police department might have considering looking in the evidence locker assigned to that case, where it was finally found. If this is "professional" conduct, what does an incompetent police department look like?
Like LNiLR, Feige is baffled by Scalia's vision of unerring law enforcement. Feige calls the Newton exoneration "a poignant rebuke" to Scalia's opinion in a different case, Kansas v. Marsh.
In that death penalty decision, Scalia went far out of his way to attack what he termed the death penalty "abolition lobby." In his analysis, Scalia joined a growing chorus of death penalty proponents who claim that our criminal justice system is nearly perfect in adjudicating guilt and innocence. Indeed, Scalia devoted entire pages of his opinion to excoriating several of his fellow justices for succumbing to what he believes are unfounded fears of fallibility created by the extensive attention garnered by the exonerated.
Justice Scalia seems a fan of Joshua Marquis, "the district attorney of Clatsop County, Ore., and an oft-quoted spokesperson for the prosecutorial lobby," who "asserts that the conviction of the innocent is essentially unheard of in our system of criminal justice." Marquis apparently didn't consult the Innocence Cases archive on TalkLeft, where he would have learned that the criminal justice system screws up -- producing unreliable guilty verdicts and convictions of the innocent -- on a regular basis.
Feige's article provides deadly ammunition against opponents of criminal justice reform who base their arguments on Marquis. It also stands as a warning that Marquis' reasoning is creeping into the conventional wisdom of policy-makers.
As Alan Newton's wasted years clearly demonstrate, imprisoning citizens for crimes they didn't commit is a tragic injustice whether it is freakishly improbable or terrifyingly commonplace. But as long as the opponents of change refuse to acknowledge the scope of the problem, much needed reforms will remain-like the exonerating evidence in Mr. Newton's case-unexamined. The tragedy here isn't merely questionable scholarship, it's the degree to which the prosecutorial lobby has latched on to what appears to be advocacy masquerading as statistical argument. That Justice Scalia has adopted this reasoning wholesale, seemingly without critical analysis, is merely further proof that when it comes to criminal justice reform, it is hardly the zealousness of the abolitionist movement we have to fear.
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