Thread by @ConLawWarrior

It's vitally important to have a well-functioning criminal justice system. But ours is not well-functioning, and it merits neither your confidence nor your support. Here's why:

1. Overcriminalization. As discussed in prior posts, our govt has utterly trivialized the concept of crime. Virtually all of us have committed criminal offenses, most of which do zero harm to society, should never have been enacted, and are enforced selectively and unjustly.

2. Mass adjudication. Among the most important rights in the Constitution, the criminal jury trial has been almost completely displaced by plea bargaining, which has become so coercive that it amounts to a point-and-convict form of "adjudication."
cato.org/commentary/pri…

3. Near-zero accountability for law enforcement. Between absolute immunity for prosecutors and qualified immunity for police, it's extremely difficult to hold rights-violating LEOs accountable for their misconduct. But these were not democratically enacted policies. Instead...

They were invented out of whole cloth by SCOTUS on the basis of a risibly naive faith in the efficacy of other accountability mechanisms. The truth, as explained in this piece, is that good cops don't need immunity and neither do good prosecutors.
thehill.com/opinion/crimin…

4. Racial disparities. There are so many other pathologies in our system that it's hard to know which one to end this thread with. But for me, it's racial disparities. The system is rife with them and almost completely indifferent. Shameful. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…

In sum, our criminal justice system merits neither your trust nor your respect, and we should all be outraged by a great deal of what it purports to do in our names.