{"id":21124,"date":"2013-07-16T00:01:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T05:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21124"},"modified":"2013-07-15T12:22:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T17:22:05","slug":"qotd-american-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/07\/16\/qotd-american-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: American justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The defining characteristic of English law is its distribution of power between prosecutor, judge, and jury. This delicate balance has been utterly corrupted in the United States to the point where today at the federal level there is a conviction rate of over 90 percent \u2014 which would impress Mubarak and the House of Saud, if not quite, yet, Kim Jong Un. American prosecutors have an unhealthy and disreputable addiction to what I called, at the conclusion of the trial of my old boss Conrad Black six years ago, \u201ccountless counts.\u201d In Conrad\u2019s case, he was charged originally with 17 crimes, three of which were dropped by the opening of the trial and another halfway through, leaving 13 for the jury, nine of which they found the defendant not guilty of, bringing it down to four, one of which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional and the remaining three of which they vacated, only to have two of them reinstated by the lower appeals court. In other words, the prosecution lost 88 percent of the case, but the 12 percent they won was enough to destroy Conrad Black\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Multiple charges tend, through sheer weight of numbers, to favor a result in which the jury convict on some and acquit on others and then tell themselves that they\u2019ve reached a \u201cmoderate\u201d \u201ccompromise\u201d as befits the reasonable persons they assuredly are. It is, of course, not reasonable. Indeed, the notion of a \u201ccompromise\u201d between conviction and acquittal is a dagger at the heart of justice. It\u2019s the repugnant \u201cplea bargain\u201d in reverse, but this time to bargain with the jury: Okay, we threw the book at him and it went nowhere, so why don\u2019t we all agree to settle? In Sanford, the state\u2019s second closing \u201cargument\u201d to the strange, shrunken semi-jury of strikingly unrepresentative peers \u2014 facts, shmacts, who really knows? vote with your hearts \u2014 brilliantly dispenses with the need for a \u201ccase\u201d at all. <\/p>\n

Mark Steyn, “A Dagger at the Heart of Justice”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2013-07-15<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The defining characteristic of English law is its distribution of power between prosecutor, judge, and jury. This delicate balance has been utterly corrupted in the United States to the point where today at the federal level there is a conviction rate of over 90 percent \u2014 which would impress Mubarak and the House of Saud, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,41,13],"tags":[267,529],"class_list":["post-21124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-justice","tag-lawyers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5uI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21125,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21124\/revisions\/21125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}