There was a time in my life when I regularly exercised a very reckless lack of judgment. During that time, I decided that the most satisfying future I could pursue would be in the world of law. Since I was transferring schools anyway—more reckless judgment—I jumped at the opportunity to change majors as well. Armed with a stubborn persistence and what I interpreted to be omniscience, I set off to change the world through the fisheye lens of the criminal justice system.
As it turns out, cynical people like me don’t really find much reception in the justice system. (I know. I was surprised, too.) But as I took my first steps into the world of justice, I found it difficult to be any other way. How was it that the United States of America, arguably at the helm of the greatest justice system in the world, could still see so much corruption, so much frivolity? How were men and women dodging murder verdicts based on trial technicalities while I couldn’t even get out of a speeding ticket? Something had gone unquestionably awry.
Yet much of the corruption is subtler than it seems. Indeed, while some legislation has evolved into ludicrous formality, there is no doubt that it once had roots in the protection of human rights.
Take, for example, the Constitutional right to due process. Any person tried on American soil is entitled to a trial and cannot be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” But entitlement should not be the same thing as requirement and due process of law should not mean fruitless formalities, both things that the State of Arkansas ought to consider in the case of Abdul Hakim Muhammad. Muhammad is accused of killing one military private and injuring another in a shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas last June. Once in custody, Muhammad said that he wanted to plead guilty, citing religious reasons for his actions. Arkansas, however, does not allow a suspect to plead guilty to a capital crime. Informed of this, Muhammad thought he was being led astray and most recently wrote a letter to the judge, bypassing his attorneys, stating that he is guilty, he wants no trial, and he stands by his actions as an act of jihad. So far, Muhammad must still plead not guilty and be tried for his crimes.
The overarching theme of what’s going on here is that the justice system—driven by an increasingly corrupt world of politics—is focusing less on discovering truth and serving justice and more focused on the political and social ramifications of its actions; in other words, the system is now riddled with laws which function more as clauses to cover the State than they do as statutes to protect human rights.
Forcing Muhammad through a trial brings up a number of major concerns, not least of which is that he could very well be found not guilty. The logical man would say that doesn’t seem possible, but the justice system no longer operates on logic but on politics and in this case, politics says that there may be technicalities in the time leading up to trial where a jury legally cannot convict Muhammad. These technicalities once acted as protection against human rights, but they have been corrupted largely by idealist defense attorneys who treat legal proceedings like a philosophy class where semantics hold more sway than truth. To people such as these, criminal justice is comparable to a high school debate team and the result is that some criminals who deserve to be punished are walking the streets which American people otherwise believe to be safe.
Admittedly, though, if Muhammad goes to trial, he likely will be found guilty, which brings up a different concern: tax dollars. If it isn’t already bad enough that the people of any state have to foot the housing bill for convicted felons, it is downright unthinkable to require the people to pay for a trial for a man who is happy to confess, entirely apart from duress, and accept the penalty. The cost of a pointless trial on top of the cost of even a single year of holding a convicted felon in a maximum security prison or death row tops out at hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the risk of sounding callous, why spend more than we have to?
The root of the answer probably comes from a deep history of coerced confessions and botched trials. With DNA evidence rescuing hundreds if not thousands of people from life and death sentences, cost considerations carry less weight as mitigating factors when the possibility of an innocent man paying for a crime he didn’t commit remains. But to go so far as to prohibit a guilty plea can only be relevant when there remains a very distinct question of truth, such as when a man confesses but then maintains his innocence later on, as in as the tragic case of Amanda Knox. But while Knox’s confession may have been coerced and was certainly retracted, Muhammad has all but boasted of his guilt, and he’s continued to do so for seven months. Under such circumstances, it seems that Arkansas’ law needs a bit of tweaking.
The law, however, is unlikely to be tweaked, because whether it’s wasting resources or truly saving innocent lives, it covers the government’s back, which seems more the more likely interest for the State in the first place. Rejecting a guilty plea in a capital case proclaims that Arkansas will not see any man martyred, whether for religious reasons or otherwise. Rejecting a guilty plea from a self-professed Muslim extremist tells the world that America gives even radical religious zealots a fair shot. There’s no religious bigotry here, no animal bloodletting. Just good, clean, criminal justice protocol.
The truth is that the protocol is not clean and it has very little to do with justice. States are endlessly embattled in a similar struggle when it comes to the death penalty, as the states which still execute inmates seek to prove to opponents that there is somehow a method of taking another man’s life which doesn’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Granted, that while the Constitution remains as interpretable as the Bible, there are certain words and phrases in the Bill of Rights that simply don’t leave much room for evaluation. Killing a man by its very nature is cruel and unusual. Waiving your right to a trial is, by its very nature, due process of law, as long as the accused has been given the right in the first place. Muhammad obviously was and if he’d rather not be tried, if he’d rather simply confess and go to the gallows, then it should not be the burden of the people to see his way through the system simply so the State of Arkansas can boast a clean conscience.
The criminal justice system was designed to discover truth. Instead, it has become a place of political struggle where too many lawyers care too much about the game, too many judges care too much about appointments, and too many governors and legislators are more interested in appearing compassionate when the system they work for is still based in punishment, not rehabilitation. If Americans want to be the nice guys then we should do away with prison altogether and find a way to help offenders become functioning members of society, not force unwanted trials on criminal suspects, burdening already-strained American citizens in the process. Those who make their beds with determination to lie in them should be allowed to do so. The criminal justice system has plenty of other problems to deal with.