Progressives say racism is everywhere in the criminal-justice system, but they don’t provide many specifics.
That’s fine. I’m a lawyer from New York City. I’ve not only lived in and around this world for decades, I have affection for lots of its denizens. Most of them are proud of being on the left. I don’t agree with them politically, but the routine handling of criminal cases is not political. It is clinical: professionals doing the best they can.
And that’s just the point: They do the best they can. That is the antithesis of racism.
These professionals strive to do justice for individual defendants. The concrete experience of routine cases in the justice system is fairness to a fault. The enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal conduct’s harsh reality. They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or reduction of jail time.
They will tell you there is endemic racism in the system. If pressed on the matter, though, they would not be able to describe for you any racist things that they themselves have actually done, nor any racist things done by colleagues. Nor can the earnest lawyers who represent the purported victims of racism point you to stacks on stacks of motions they’ve filed claiming the police arrested their felonious clients because of skin color. The crimes, it turns out, are not only supported by abundant proof; they have victims, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The lawyers are at a loss to point to cases in which they’ve shown that prosecutors charged their clients due to racial animus rather than evidence. They can’t cite cases where clients were sabotaged by the racism of the presiding judge. In a system that was pervasively racist, such cases would abound. Not in this one, though.
That’s fine. I’m a lawyer from New York City. I’ve not only lived in and around this world for decades, I have affection for lots of its denizens. Most of them are proud of being on the left. I don’t agree with them politically, but the routine handling of criminal cases is not political. It is clinical: professionals doing the best they can.
And that’s just the point: They do the best they can. That is the antithesis of racism.
These professionals strive to do justice for individual defendants. The concrete experience of routine cases in the justice system is fairness to a fault. The enforcement authorities, defense counsel, and the court frequently bend over backwards to plead cases out to softer versions of the criminal conduct’s harsh reality. They do so precisely to rationalize the avoidance or reduction of jail time.
They will tell you there is endemic racism in the system. If pressed on the matter, though, they would not be able to describe for you any racist things that they themselves have actually done, nor any racist things done by colleagues. Nor can the earnest lawyers who represent the purported victims of racism point you to stacks on stacks of motions they’ve filed claiming the police arrested their felonious clients because of skin color. The crimes, it turns out, are not only supported by abundant proof; they have victims, who are disproportionately black and Latino. The lawyers are at a loss to point to cases in which they’ve shown that prosecutors charged their clients due to racial animus rather than evidence. They can’t cite cases where clients were sabotaged by the racism of the presiding judge. In a system that was pervasively racist, such cases would abound. Not in this one, though.
