🔹The system gradually improved over the past 240 years.
🔹There is still much to be improved.
🔹There are good judges and bad judges.
🔹Juries generally try to do what's right.
🔹We have democratic processes in place for changing laws.
Nihilism . . .
. . .is destructive.
Change is brought about by people with ideals.
Cynics and nihilists do not bring positive change.
They discourage people and hamper change.
My view: Don't be a nihilist or cynic. It's ugly and destructive.
People are still assuring me that a single bad apple, a single bad jury, a single injustice means the entire system "sucks" and is "broken."
One bad judge and the whole system sucks.
They're telling me it has always been broken. It was born flawed.
Y'all see the problem?
One person told me she was on a jury once, she didn't like the outcome, therefore it all sucks and she'll never serve again.
Democratic institutions are run by human beings. We can never have perfection.
All we can do is strive to improve them.
Perfection is an ideal that we can never reach.
All we can do, as individuals, is try to leave the world a little better than we found it. Each generation must try to make improvements.
Purity tests don't work in a democracy, which requires give and take.
"The outcome wasn't what I wanted, therefore it all sucks, therefore, I'm just going to complain and spread doomsday nihilism" also destroys democracy.
My son is in an AP Government class.
The textbook opens by saying democracy requires citizen involvement.
Corrupt has two meanings. (1) to use power dishonestly for personal gain and (2) impurity.
Remember when Trump promised to 'drain the swamp' and said the entire government was corrupt?
He meant definition (2). The government contained impure elements.
Purity tests in a democracy don't work. Democracy requires compromise and give and take. It's hard work.
Putin said democracy is "messy."
People who want or demand purity and perfection will never be happy in a democracy.
People have different responses to imperfection.
Many lawyers who become public defenders do so because they see injustice and want to make the system better by making sure that indigents have good representation.
They see imperfection and say, "What can I do, even its small, to help?"
In my second video, I said reactionaries see history as a downward slope.
Until now I haven't thought about the nihilists. They see a straight line.
People are imperfect. Systems are imperfect. They've always been imperfect. They will always be imperfect.
The nihilist, therefore, sees no point.
The nihilist doesn't try to bring about improvements because what's the point?
There will always be a bad apple.
When people used to tell me "the criminal justice system sucks," the only thing I could think to say (as someone who dedicated 12+ years to representing indigents on appeal) was, "What have you done to improve the system."
It's the expectation that other people should have already done the work, mixed with hopelessness because a system run by mortals will never achieve perfection.
If you have multiple parties in a constitutional democracy with a president, the president can come to power with 33% of the vote— or less if the vote is split multiple ways.
Do you really want that?
A majority requires a big tent, which means compromising.
One consideration is the probability that the defendant will be convicted and face jail time because otherwise, you run the risk of ruining an innocent person's life.
(A jailed person probably loses his or her job. What if there are kids to support, etc.)
The goal of the GOP is to dismantle the federal government and return to that time (before 1920; for others, before 1860) when white men could basically do what they wanted.
On the frontier, they could grab land!
Before modern rape laws, they could grab women!
2/
Before the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies (the "deep state") they could cheat!
🔹They could fix prices and manipulate markets!
🔹They could sell rotten goods and it was the buyer's fault for not inspecting better!
🔹They could pollute rivers!
Mr. Gideon was a poor man accused of theft. He represented himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer. He was convicted. He appealed to the Supreme Court on a handwritten letter from prison. The Court heard his case and held that poor people get court-appointed lawyers . . .
. . . he had a new trial with a local lawyer who understood how the false accusation happened. The lawyer did some investigating, presented facts that Gideon has been unable to obtain, and Gideon was acquitted.
Our current criminal justice system took form after the Civil War, when the reactionaries and White Supremacists found a way around the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction. 1/
The solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in jail, and put them in chain gangs. At the time, there were no limits on what police could do.
So they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.
Along came Charles Hamilton and his protégé Thurgood Marshall.
2/
As a result of literally decades of work (and one of the few times we had a liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren), we got rulings that the Fourth Amendment outlaws things like beating confessions out of people.