Jack quotes Prof. Andrew Ferguson, discussing the Zimmerman verdict: “. . . really the government tried a terrible case. I don’t know why there is not more focus on the prosecutors rather than the jurors.”
But it seems to me that captures the frequent response to most high-profile, controversial acquittals: The jurors were stupid or didn’t know what they were doing. People never (or rarely) fault the state for simply doing a bad job. Think of OJ, think of Casey Anthony–the prosecutors write books and go on TV, but the conversation is never about how badly they did their job or the mistakes they made.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 7, 2013 at 06:19 AM
Comments
The OJ case involved a celebrity that would have been known to the jurors prior to the trial which may not have been the case in relation the Zimmerman trial. Trial by jury, it should always be remembered is an important method of including the community in the legal decision making process. To exclude the community by replacing them with a single decision maker (albeit a highly qualified one) risk isolating the legal system from the community it is supposed to serve.
Posted by: David Coleman | Aug 8, 2013 10:33:15 AM
Re the OJ criminal case: In the first days of the trial, the prosecutors opened the reasonable doubt door so wide that the case should have been dismissed at that point. They may have had a lot of trials but none against such formidable opponents with a client who was unlike any other criminal defendant they had tried to convict.
Posted by: Mike Zimmer | Aug 7, 2013 10:00:34 PM
I have participated tangentially in the discussion on a couple of blog sites making this point. The response was, generally, overheated insistence that any other result was impossible. There is no sense that a different approach to the case would have made any difference at all.
Posted by: AGR | Aug 7, 2013 11:01:04 AM
Please see, by way of redirecting the conversation:
• Butler, Paul (2009) Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. New York: The New Press. • Davis, Angela J. (2007) Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. New York: Oxford University Press. • Freedman, Monroe H. “The Use of Unethical and Unconstitutional Practices and Policies by Prosecutors’ Offices” (February 26, 2012). Washburn Law Journal, 2012; Hofstra University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-06. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2017178 • The Justice Project. “Improving Prosecutorial Accountability: A Policy Review.” (2009) Available online as a PDF doc. via a Google search. This paper has an indispensable list of books and (especially) articles under “suggested reading.” • Kadri, Sadakat (2005) The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson. New York: Random House. • Lawless, Joseph F. (3rd ed., 2003) Prosecutorial Misconduct. Charlottesville, VA: LexisNexis. • Lippke, Richard L. (2011) The Ethics of Plea Bargaining. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. • Medwed, Daniel S. (2012) Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent. New York: New York University Press. • Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer (2001) Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Fix It. New York: Signet. • Stuntz, William J. (2011) The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Aug 7, 2013 9:44:30 AM