Death Penalty

[Kyuuketsuki]

The most basic is my conviction (sorry) that as long as we have an adversarial legal system justice will always be a happy accident rather than the norm--especially when so many people have the naive idea that the US 5th amendment or its equivalent is there to protect the guilty and that it's OK to talk to the police without a lawyer.:Neither is true.

That's the word I meant, adversarial ... thanks

Yes, truth is not the aim of the British legal system.

The flaws inherent in the system have been graphically illustrated in the number of US death row inmates whose convictions have been found to be unsafe due DNA evidence. IF the system worked as intended,unsafe convictions would be rare.They are not.

Indeed and another thing that gets me is that Police performance is effectively evaluated by number of prosecutions ... logic tells me that it should be every bit as much a victory to suddenly uncover that someone is innocent (I'm envisaging a situation where a lot of investigation into a suspect has happened) yet it seems that is judged as failure.

Your experience on a jury echoes that reported by my mother when she sat on a rape case.

Being a juror is certainly an experience and I was keen to do what I considered my civic duty ... I didn't expect to be so negatively affected by it.

Thanks for the recommendations ... I will check them out later

Kyu