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As Alan Dershowitz explained last week: “A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty. That’s because only one person is on trial in a criminal case, and if that one person is acquitted, then by definition there can be no justice for the victim in that trial.” If all that sounds cold, lawyerly, and inhuman, that’s because the justice system is designed to be all those things. Juries are not driven solely by the bottomless outrage of Nancy Grace. That’s what makes them juries. There is nothing much to like about the slick reality show that was the Anthony trial. But that the jury understood the difference between what their guts told them and what the law demanded of them may be called its sole success.
One thought on “Links for 2011-07-14”
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“”A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.”
Huh? What about whether the accused really did what is alleged? That’s one of the purposes of the trial. And yet the key purpose of the trial should be, justice for the victim (not, “keeping order” or “protecting society’s rules” etc.) But the victim only receives justice if the accused is really guilty.
That also reminds me, I don’t like that practice of using “guilty” or “innocent” as literally meaning what the justice system decided. Instead, those words ought to mean what is actually the case, and then we say “was judged to be” X in like vein to “the theory of T says that X” and we know that might not be the case.