Close but no Cigar Justice

Yglesias pointed out a serious problem with out law enforcement system here:

"I'll observe that in both the criminal justice and counterterrorism fields, there seems to be a tendency among policymakers to treat punishing the innocent as a kind of close second-best to punishing the guilty. And, of course, in bureaucratic terms it is -- a conviction is a conviction and a clearance is a clearance, whether or not you've got the right guy. In crime control terms, though, it's a terrible error to be wasting resources (prison space, prosecutors' and judges' time) on punishing people who aren't criminals. It's also a terrible injustice, of course, but it's not a tradeoff between justice and effective crime control -- punishing the innocent is counterproductive, just like torturing innocent people and wasting your time chasing down their "leads.""

Which was further evidenced in this week's exchange on the hill when William Murphy, assistant director of the FBI was questioned by two congressmen:

"Lundgren and Delahunt said they were also troubled by reports that in order to protect the identity of its informants, the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal trials, resulting in innocent people going to prison.

"This is worth repeating. The FBI has determined that in some cases, it's better to let innocent people be assaulted, murdered, or wrongly sent to prison than to halt a drug investigation involving one of its confidential informants.

"Could Murphy assure the U.S. Congress, Delahunt and Lundgren asked, that the FBI has since instituted policies to ensure that kind of thing never happens again?

"Murphy hemmed and hawed, but ultimately said that he could not make any such assurance. That in itself should have been huge news."

It sounds like it should have been, but it won't be. Why? Because both what Murphy says and Yglesias' deduction shows the inherent flaws in the system, which can't be rectified with reform but rather deconstruction. Basically we judge the justice system by convictions and by cells filled in prisons--not whether justice is being served. Until that changes "close but no cigar" will be good enough, and a few innocent by-standers will be acceptable collateral damage. It just proves to me that what my father told me when I was a child was correct: stay away from police and the entire justice system no matter how innocent I am, because once you're brought into close contact with them your life becomes nothing but a roll of the dice.