If you catch a public defender in a candid moment, you’ll get a lot of stories like this. What makes the criminal justice system so difficult is that the overwhelming majority of the people that it targets are guilty of what they’re accused of, and scumbags on top of that. When you face that day in and day out, it’s difficult to make yourself keep your eyes open for the innocent ones.
I remember an ACLU email in my inbox about the Juwan Wickware case: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/only-america-1.... It was trying to drum up outrage about a young man who attacked a pizza delivery driver as part of a coordinated robbery. One of the members of Wickware’s party ended up killing the driver in front of his wife and kids (who were in the car). When I dug up details about the case, I thought “you’d think they’d have picked a more sympathetic case to make their point.” But the fact is that those are few and far between.
I remember reading about how the TSA was very unsuccessful in catching errors, because they faced a large number of true negatives day in and day out. The alarms barely ever went off, and when they did, it was usually a false positive. The natural human tendency in that situation is to optimize / reduce energy expenditure by letting your guard down and paying less attention.
In security, "covert tests" that replicate rare events (like attempting to sneak a gun through a checkpoint) more frequently, seem to increase the chances of success in detecting real threats [0]. If only we could do the same for our legal system.
Except imagine the situation if you faced true positives every day. Working in a court made me do a 180 on my views of the criminal system. We would see the pre-sentence reports, and most of these guys had been engaged in criminal activity since late adolescence. I remember one case where a guy committed crimes in a tri-state area. He ultimately wouldn’t even be prosecuted for most of them after the feds got him.
I remember an ACLU email in my inbox about the Juwan Wickware case: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/only-america-1.... It was trying to drum up outrage about a young man who attacked a pizza delivery driver as part of a coordinated robbery. One of the members of Wickware’s party ended up killing the driver in front of his wife and kids (who were in the car). When I dug up details about the case, I thought “you’d think they’d have picked a more sympathetic case to make their point.” But the fact is that those are few and far between.