The media in particular treat all verdicts as gospel, and deliver screaming headlines on the basis of judgments that may or may not be the ultimate truth.
Many many people who have been found guilty by a court turn out to be innocent years later, often after they've been in prison for lengthy periods.
I'm thinking right now of Lucy Letby, the nurse who was convicted of the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven others. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but many commentators have questioned the verdict and want a retrial on the basis of evidence that wasn't produced at the court. So was she guilty or has this been a miscarriage of justice? The arguments continue.
It seems to me that at the end of the day the soundness of the verdict isn't a question of whether it was reached by a judge or a jury. The crucial factor is surely the strength of the evidence presented by each side. If the prosecution evidence is strongest, they win. Ditto the defence evidence.
I've been on a jury twice, and it seemed very clear to me that it's the strength of the evidence that counts. My first case was a black guy accused of assaulting a police officer. We started off thinking he was innocent but after a long deliberation decided he was guilty. Of course I've no idea if he was actually guilty or not. Only he knows the answer to that.
The fact is that supposedly solid "final" verdicts are regularly overturned as "unsafe".
Yeah, it's a bit scary really. It's best to always have an alibi handy, I suppose!
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Ms Scarlet: Either an alibi or a plausible explanation as to how that block of cheese ended up in your pocket.
DeleteThere are so many things that come into play: false testimonies by witnesses, evidence that's been tampered with, or juries who just want to get it over with.
ReplyDeleteBijoux: Exactly, there are so many reasons why a verdict might be shaky.
DeleteThe cases of people who were found guilty and given long prison sentences, but later proven innocent, are indeed alarming. My impression is that such cases are fairly rare, however. At least in the US, almost all such cases I've heard of were either (a) people convicted of sex crimes decades ago when the technology to evaluate the evidence in such cases was far inferior to what we have now, or (b) black people convicted in notoriously racist parts of the country. Such injustices are still horrifying, but the roots of the problem are not terribly obscure.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately there is no perfect system for judging guilt vs innocence, and yet it remains necessary to have some system for punishing the guilty or at least ensuring that they are no longer capable of harming people. As is so often the case in life, we're stuck with making the best of an imperfect system.
Infidel: Interesting that dodgy verdicts generally boil down to those two categories. But as you say, there's no perfect system for judging guilt or innocence. What complicates matters is all those people who plead guilty when they aren't - plea bargaining, wanting to get it all over with, protecting another person etc.
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