Justice Has Departed America
Paul Craig Roberts
Twenty-six years ago in 2000 Prima Publishing published a book I wrote with my colleague, Lawrence M. Stratton. We had wanted to title the book, “How the Law Was Lost,” but we only managed to get our title on one chapter. The publisher thought that sales required a less intellectual sounding title and came up with The Tyranny of Good Intentions. I didn’t like the title, because it blamed on good intentions all the wrongs that were due to self-serving prosecutors, judges, police, and defense attorneys. Larry and I wanted to get our book published, and we decided against fighting with the publisher, who of course has to be concerned about sales and money.
The book received good reviews: Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman, Massachusetts ACLU chairman Harvey Silverglate. But it failed to reform the totally corrupt American “justice system.” A Federal Appeals Court Judge in the 9th Circuit cited the book in a ruling, as did a federal district court judge, but that was about it.
Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, acquired Prima Publishing, and in 2008 brought out a paperback edition. I think the book is still in print and sells a few copies each year. The last I heard, if memory serves, is that the book sold some 22,000 copies.
Years ago, again if memory serves, Lewis Lapham the brilliant former editor of Harper’s, a substantial person of letters, told me that if the book had sold 20,000 copies in the first year, it would be regarded as a best-seller in the serious works class, which speaks a lot to the insouciance of the American population.
I always wondered about the “serious class” as the book is written in everyday language that anyone can understand. No need for a law degree to read our book, and the stories of injustice are gripping. But, obviously, Americans did not read the book. Consequently, they remain in total ignorance of the many dangers they, their innocence be damned, face of incarceration every day. “This would never happen to me,” but it does to many every week.
Recently, having reread the British murder mysteries from the first half of the 20th century to the point of memorization, and also all of Louis L’Amour’s novels of the Western frontier, I visited the public library and checked out half a dozen of John Grisham’s novels about the criminal justice system. I had read several of them years ago, and they had made an impression.
My belief is that a law student can learn more from one of Grisham’s novels about how the “justice system” actually operates, its disappointments, the total unconcern with justice, than the student can learn from his law professors, who are mainly interested in producing an activist committed to use law to overthrow existing society.
If you are a reader who gets involved with a novel’s characters, Grisham can be very intense. On occasion I have had to set aside one of Grisham’s novels and read something else for awhile.
Grisham himself was a lawyer before turning novelist. Thus, he knows the system from the inside. It is not a pretty system. Justice is the least of its concerns.
Judges permit prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence, to pay jailhouse snitches with early release for false testimony with which to convict an innocent person, with intentionally misleading jurors who are seldom up to the demands of the situation, and to use the corrupt American media to convict the defendant in the eyes of the public, as in the case of Derek Chauvin, so that even a jury that knows the defendant is innocent is afraid to say so.
According to the Department of Justice 97% of felonies never go to trial. The reason is that neither the defendant nor his attorney can possibly trust the system. The first thing a defendant hears from his lawyer is that if he goes to trial the prosecutor will multiply the charges, and no jury will believe that a defendant with dozens or scores of charges isn’t guilty of at least one of them. A conviction at a jury trial always brings a more severe sentence than a negotiated plea.
If the defendant’s lawyer negotiates a plea bargain, often to a charge that is not in the original indictment, the defendant by self-incriminating himself, thereby saving judge and prosecutor from a time-consuming trial, will be thanked with a lesser sentence. Plea bargains keep a judge’s court docket from backing up due to time-consuming trials. Plea bargains permit prosecutors to boost their all-important conviction rate far above what is possible with time-consuming trials. Although the defendant might actually have committed a crime, his plea bargain crime may be a construct that never happened in order to provide the lesser sentence. In other words, the defendant goes to prison for a crime that did not happen instead of for one that did. This is why I say that most people in prison are wrongfully convicted.
The only people who care about the wrongfully convicted are rare and underfunded Innocence Projects, whose attorneys work for peanuts to undo wrongful convictions.
The rich white liberal foundations lavish money on men-hating feminists and the likes of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The law and order conservatives see the problem as liberal judges who refuse to punish criminals. The constituency for justice is tiny.
To wind this down, here are a few quotes that actually describe the justice system from Grisham’s novel, The Guardians, which is about an innocence project that works to free wrongly convicted persons.
“His career as a snitch began with the trial of Quincey Miller. He was eighteen when he testified, and a month after the trial his drug charges were reduced and he walked. The deal worked so beautifully that he did it again and again. Every jail has a druggie facing more time and eager to avoid it. With the proper coaching from cops and prosecutors, a snitch can be quite effective with his perjury. Jurors simply cannot believe that a witness, any witness, will take the oath, swear to tell the truth, and tell them an outlandish story of pure fiction.” Jurors are so stupid that they do not realize that a lie that convicts an innocent person is a ticket out of jail for the liar.
As for the racket of “expert witnesses,” Grisham reports that payment for a one-week seminar suffices to produce a certificate declaring a person to be an expert witness who hires out to convict or exonerate a defendant on his “expert” standing.
“Most appellate judges, state and federal, despise these [innocent] cases because they drag on for years. And once they decide that a defendant is guilty, they rarely change their minds, regardless of new evidence.”
In the United States of America today, there is not one public or private institution that is trustworthy. The lack of institutions with integrity means that there is no foundation for American society.