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Paper Title

-- By CeciliaWang - 22 Feb 2010

The Question that Sparked this Paper

An interviewer posed to me this hypothetical: "How will you handle your work in a case you believe is wrongfully prosecuted? For example, a domestic violence victim who struck back at her abuser." I cannot recall my answer as well as I can the question, though I remember declaring my faith in the integrity of my assistant district attorneys, in the high standard of evidence and persuasion held by the criminal justice system, and the right of all to representation. The question bothered me because soon after leaving I substituted a more likely, and less sympathetic, hypothetical involving a kid getting charged with a litany of offenses on a relatively minor incident, facing several years or life for stealing a slice of pizza.

My Previous Conceptions of the Criminal Justice System

The Superhero Ideal

High standard for conviction

Reasonnable Doubt

Barriers to evidence collection

Difficult to convict

To be fair, the New York and Los Angeles Times newspapers probably publish a many stories about successful convictions as about acquittals and successful appeals. Injustice is always more memorable than justice. I believe that is because we inherently believe in justice, so when justice is done - a murderer is put away, a heinous criminal punished and victims vindicated – we take the result for granted as the due course of nature. The incidents of injustice are the ones that deeply jar our preferred view of the world and take us farther from what we want the world to be. The convictions are reported without a shadow of a doubt; the evidence is always overwhelming.

Lessons from Criminal Law

Three Strikes in California

Variety of charges each incident can attract

Blame Politics

Fear is easier to sell than fairness

Fear is justified

Few are those who have not suffered an unpunished crime nor fear of law enforcement's failure to capture neighborhood criminals. My family’s car windows have been smashed while parked during daylight hours in downtown Santa Monica. I know of students who have been mugged and worse by standard-description teenagers who have never been charged for those particular crimes, and I know of a group of youths who were caught but released because the victim just did not want to deal with the process and the fear of retaliation. She would have participated if they would have been sentenced to more than a couple months maximum. Charges would have been pressed had NY Penal Law called for minimum of two years for taking her wallet – locked up until graduation.

Fear is present

Neighborhood Burglaries. TV news makes crime seem closer.

Shall not discuss influence of race and racism

Belief that wrongful convictions are abnormalities.

Law students becoming law enforcers, integrity and sense of justice

Many will face the same pressures of competition and prestige

"Those young ADAs, they think they are God"

Law school is a disempowering experience

The attraction of power

The corporate law default allows deeply in debt, relatively poor law students to choose money as a substitute for power (and power over lowly staff members). Success as defined in the law school is dangerous. The Duke lacrosse players were lucky they had defense attorneys who had the time to fight for them.

Quotas in the work place/high conviction rates

Law school encourages pursuit of status symbols. What drives law students towards the pursuit of the best law firms, what drives them towards the pursuit of the most prestigious prosecutors’ offices to practice in, will push lawyers towards the pursuit of whatever status symbols prosecutors have among themselves: highest conviction rates, the highest sentences achieved for each grade and kind of felony.

Focus on sidewalk drug dealers

State mandatory sentencing and charge-enhancing laws

Vagueness of Penal Codes

Every newly created crime, through creatively broadening the reach of statutes, is a restriction to our original rights.

Give credit where it's due: striving after difficult and important cases

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