The Innocence Deniers

Great article about #BlindInjusticeChapter2BlindDenial

Lara Bazelon writes: In an adversarial legal system, it’s natural to presume that prosecutors and defense attorneys are driven by the same goal: to win. They aren’t. In Berger v. United States, decided in 1935, the Supreme Court famously declared that the prosecution’s ultimate goal “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” A prosecutor, the court wrote, “is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.”

 [And yet] some prosecutors—the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system—refuse to correct life-altering errors.

 

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