Punishing the Innocent and Our Criminal Justice System

I agree with just about every word of Matt Yglesias' post on innocence and the death penalty. We shouldn't execute anyone, including those guilty of the worst offenses known to man, and we shouldn't even be imprisoning innocent people. But I think there's a line in that post that hints at something much bigger and deeply interesting, and disgusting:

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that underfunding public defender officers is somehow “tough on crime” as if railroading innocent people is a close substitute for punishing guilty ones.

Think about that for a minute, because I think it's true. A lot of people in this country, and especially those on the right, do seem to think that railroading innocent people is a close substitute for punishing guilty ones. This manifests itself in all sorts of ways beyond underfunding the legal aid system, as well as the rest of the justice system: law & order conservatives oppose efforts to empower the defense side of our adversarial system, despite the fact that the premise of the adversarial system is that two teams roughly equal in strength and each dedicated to proving their side right will ultimately discover the truth by seeing which team wins. (In practice we make prosecutors' offices stronger than the defense usually is, but also try to make it less committed to winning and more committed to truth, but still.) Reducing the power of the defense to make its case gets you lots of innocent people convicted. And I claim that conservatives who, let's say, don't care much about the horror of punishing the innocent per se should still want to avoid convicting lots of innocent people. Furthermore, I claim that the fact that they don't tells you a lot about their underlying view of what the criminal justice system is and what it does and what it should do, none of it pretty.

Troy Davis

So, the main thing to say is that it's horrible, a tragedy, an atrocity, one of the worst miscarriages of justice I've ever heard of, and kind of disgusts me with the entire American criminal justice system. I'm also proud to live in two states that don't have the death penalty, and even prouder to have contributed to making that so in New Jersey. Last night was one of my least favorite experiences ever.*

(I wrote this part yesterday, Thursday, but then stalled because of lots of work to do and I'm only getting around to finishing this tonight. I'm not changing the time frame, though.)

But I want to do a little more than just say that. I think there is one very specific lesson to draw from the whole Troy Davis thing, and I think it would be nice if we were to draw it as a nation.