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3 CHAPTER 1 “A Good Murder” A good murder, a genuine murder, a fine murder, as fine as you could hope to see, we haven’t had one like it for a long time. —Georg Büchner, Woyzeck (1836) I. A sense of fairness and an outrage over injustice are emotions expressed strongly and clearly by young children in all cultures. People are profoundly interested in crimes because the law and legal punishments are supposed to address that fundamental human craving for justice. A legal system is set up to define prohibited behavior and punish criminals because we want to live in a society which is ruled by law and not by a mob, or so we say. Courts, which hand down decisions in individual cases, are embedded in this system of law because we do not trust individuals alone or groups to judge fairly. As individuals we do not want to take that responsibility. We ask that far-reaching judgments of others and the imposition of consequences be made according to universal principles which are objective, if not quantifiable . The criminal justice system is supposed to be unclouded by personal idiosyncrasies, class bias, and racial prejudice. And it is supposed to work with reasonable efficiency and economy. In short, because it is a system of law it is supposed to be just, for all of us. That is why we have created it, to judge us impersonally. And consequently we should all be willing to submit to its judgments. Of course we know it is imperfect, any institution managed by human beings is imperfect, but fairness is the standard. Behind all of the documents, the billions of words retrievable MURDER AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 4 at a keystroke, is the idea that justice is the bedrock of our constitutional system: due process of law means among other things fundamental fairness. Yet at the present time in America few would argue that the criminal justice system is effective. In our society, capital murder cases have become the most visible and dramatic example of the failure of the criminal justice system. Some would say segments of the criminal justice system are corrupt. Others would maintain the criminal justice system is dominated by the political and economic interests of the ruling class, as well as being racist, inefficient, and the opposite of cost-effective. According to this view, some individual civil servants are overworked and underpaid, but they are outnumbered by the incompetent and the cynical, and overwhelmed by the bureaucratic morass. If there is any truth to these allegations, why do we tolerate this situation? If our society can send a spaceship to Mars and snake a missile through a doorway from hundreds of miles away, why can’t we institutionalize a criminal justice system which is efficient and fair? Or perhaps the problem is one of image. If the public’s impression of a criminal justice system in a state of collapse is a distortion put forward by demagogues or the media, why do we allow this false characterization to persist? This leads to another question: can we assess the operation of the criminal justice system on the basis of what we read in the newspapers and see on the television? The live broadcast of urban violence in Los Angeles, coming after the Hill-Thomas hearings, blurred any remnants of the bright line which existed between the news and dramatizations of public events for a television audience . Both were cultural watersheds, bringing home a truth which is not entirely new: there is little distinction between reenactments or dramatizations and the reporting of actual events. Both appear on the same screen. Both are subject to immediate replay, commentary, and speculation. And, as can also be seen in the reporting of sports events, a striking disjunction exists between the highly sophisticated technology of visual presentation and expression and the relatively archaic and simple-minded conceptual framework for commentary and reporting. Those who complain the theater is dead have not been to an urban criminal trial recently. The criminal courts are the popular theater of our day. The public is strongly attached to the stock characters who are regularly featured on the stage of our criminal courts. Lawyers, judges, and defendants on their way to jail all play to the crowd and expect to be watched by an audience far larger than the jurors selected to find the facts of the case, although the mood is rarely one of merriment. [3.146.105.194...

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