Re:What does an innocent man have to do to go free? Plead gu...
by simonh on Friday September 08, 2017 @11:33AM
(#15200980)
Having a flawed legal system is what you call a first world problem. For comparison in China prosecutors have so much power that the conviction rate is a tiny almost immeasurable sliver of a fraction below 100%. Conversely with weak rule of law you get lynchings, vendettas and retributive violence. Incarcerating innocent people is terrible and I appreciate the sentiment that it's better that 10 guilty people go free than one innocent is incarcerated, but not that no guilty people are ever brought to justice.
Anarchic theories are premised on the idea that everyone would act as individuals and treat each other equally, but that's not what happens. People naturally form alliances, tribes, religious groups or out and out criminal gangs.
The prosecutorial assumption of infallibility is just one symptom of a wider malaise. IMHO what America needs to appreciate, as a nation, is that it's nothing special. It's just big and therefore powerful, but it really doesn't have any special moral status or exceptional ethical immunity. You see the ideological belief that it does throughout American History from Manifest Destiny to America First, both the isolationist movement of the 40s and today.
America is a great nation, yes. It's a bastion of democracy, true. But it's a very long way from moral infallibility. There's the perception that e.g. Europe is a corrupt den of elites, born from America's struggle for independence from and conflicts with European Monarchies such as England and Spain, but it's ludicrously out of date. The American allergy against Communism is a symptom of this. At it's root communism and socialism is about individual freedom and a caring society, but communism got infected with totalitarianism early on. Individual communists have often been as shocked and appalled by Soviet excesses as anyone else. George Orwell, who wrote Animal Farm and 1984 as critiques of Stalinism was himself as communist, but the distinction between Communists like Orwell and ones like Trotsky is lost on American ideological anti-communism. You really can have a fair and caring society, and real meaningful individual freedoms. They're not absolute, utterly opposed principles and in fact they need each other. You can't have guarantees of real individual freedom without a society that cares about making that guarantee and takes actual steps to protect it. Even Ayn Rand accepted welfare support when she needed it. You can't have a well functioning system of state care and support for individuals without individual freedoms to hold that system to account and drive change when it's needed.
What makes change in the justice system so hard, as in other areas, is this assumption of ideological purity in the American system, mainly by American Republicans I have to say. As a British lifelong Conservative voter I find this hard to cope with but in the post-Reagan era I find very little common ground between myself and mainstream Republicanism these days. It's a bit bewildering realy.
Anarchic theories are premised on the idea that everyone would act as individuals and treat each other equally, but that's not what happens. People naturally form alliances, tribes, religious groups or out and out criminal gangs.
The prosecutorial assumption of infallibility is just one symptom of a wider malaise. IMHO what America needs to appreciate, as a nation, is that it's nothing special. It's just big and therefore powerful, but it really doesn't have any special moral status or exceptional ethical immunity. You see the ideological belief that it does throughout American History from Manifest Destiny to America First, both the isolationist movement of the 40s and today.
America is a great nation, yes. It's a bastion of democracy, true. But it's a very long way from moral infallibility. There's the perception that e.g. Europe is a corrupt den of elites, born from America's struggle for independence from and conflicts with European Monarchies such as England and Spain, but it's ludicrously out of date. The American allergy against Communism is a symptom of this. At it's root communism and socialism is about individual freedom and a caring society, but communism got infected with totalitarianism early on. Individual communists have often been as shocked and appalled by Soviet excesses as anyone else. George Orwell, who wrote Animal Farm and 1984 as critiques of Stalinism was himself as communist, but the distinction between Communists like Orwell and ones like Trotsky is lost on American ideological anti-communism. You really can have a fair and caring society, and real meaningful individual freedoms. They're not absolute, utterly opposed principles and in fact they need each other. You can't have guarantees of real individual freedom without a society that cares about making that guarantee and takes actual steps to protect it. Even Ayn Rand accepted welfare support when she needed it. You can't have a well functioning system of state care and support for individuals without individual freedoms to hold that system to account and drive change when it's needed.
What makes change in the justice system so hard, as in other areas, is this assumption of ideological purity in the American system, mainly by American Republicans I have to say. As a British lifelong Conservative voter I find this hard to cope with but in the post-Reagan era I find very little common ground between myself and mainstream Republicanism these days. It's a bit bewildering realy.