Crime and Punishment

Amendment VI:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory processes for obtaining witnesses in  his favor; and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

We have all heard the Miranda statute being practiced on TV cop shows, which includes elements from both amendment V and VI, and we think that is sort of what we need to know about our rights vis-a-vis the criminal justice system.  However, criminal justice is complicated, because crime is complicated.  One of the founding principals of our criminal legal system is that defendants are "innocent until proven guilty."  However, as  you may notice that exact phrase is not present in the primary statutes of the constitution dealing with criminal justice.  It must be assumed, and it can be assumed with reasonable certitude by the outline of how one accused of a crime is treated.
The important thing to notice here is that these codes enforce the ability of the accused to defend themselves.  It is also established that the jury system, and jurisdiction are important components of anything like a "fair" trial.
In reality, you can abide by the letter of these laws and still wind up with a horrible miscarriage of justice, because human beings are involved at all levels.  Humans investigate the crimes, humans accuse, humans defend, humans sit on juries, humans are prosecutors and humans are defense attorneys, humans are judges, and humans can always mess up.  Humans can be subject to emotional bias, racism, prejudice of all sorts, they can be offended by the nature of an accusation and the pathos of the victim, they can also be hardened by a victim that seems unsympathetic.  A legal process is designed, in theory, to go after the truth, but often the egos and failures of the human beings involved in it can make it about something else.
The wisdom of V and VI is that they attempt to account for some of these variables.  The massive work of tracking and analyzing case law is what makes attorneys earn their money. The terms of Amendment VI are fodder for lawyers: what is speedy? What is impartial? How to figure out what witnesses to call and when?  What is proper evidence?
Justice ends up being far from blind.  And also far from just, far too often.  The waves of exoneration that have been rolling in as old evidence is re-examined using available DNA testing methods is proof that this system has broken down more often than we would like to imagine.  The incarceration statistics of this nation, and the fact that we still practice capital punishment are signs that we have stalled on the journey towards a just society.
These basic guidelines cannot possibly have envisioned the world in which we live, even in terms of scale.  These basic guidelines could not have imagined the OJ Simpson Trial or the twenty four hour news cycle.  These basic guidelines could not have predicted that, one day, in certain kinds of cases, the victims and the witnesses would need to be protected as well from abuse by the very justice system.
These guidelines were a projection of an era that was already coming to an end.  These guidelines assumed that the justice system was primarily for land holding white men, and women, slaves and people of other races were going to be treated largely as property  They were almost two hundred years ahead of the war on drugs and the civil rights movement.  They were 130 years ahead of women's suffrage.  The were blissfully unaware that the society they knew would be entirely torn apart and reformed by a Civil War and an industrial revolution.  They were also seemingly naive about the fact that the future course of their society would take several steps back intellectually and culturally from where they stood at the high point.
I leave you with this bit of wisdom from Sir Terry Pratchett:

I guess we still have to work at this then.