Trials Without Truth
Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Reginald Denny. O. J. Simpson. Colin Ferguson. Louise Woodward: all names that have cast a spotlight on the deficiencies of the American system of criminal justice. Yet, in the wake of each trial that exposes shocking behavior by trial participants or results in counterintuitive rulings—often with perverse results—the American public is reassured by the trial bar that the case is not "typical" and that our trial system remains the best in the world. William T. Pizzi here argues that what the public perceives is in fact exactly what the United States has: a trial system that places far too much emphasis on winning and not nearly enough on truth, one in which the abilities of a lawyer or the composition of a jury may be far more important to the outcome of a case than any evidence.
How has a system on which Americans have lavished enormous amounts of energy, time, and money been allowed to degenerate into one so profoundly flawed?
Acting as an informal tour guide, and bringing to bear his experiences as both insider and outsider, prosecutor and academic, Pizzi here exposes the structural faultlines of our trial system and its paralyzing obsession with procedure, specifically the ways in which lawyers are permitted to dominate trials, the system's preference for weak judges, and the absurdities of plea bargaining. By comparing and contrasting the U.S. system with that of a host of other countries, Trials Without Truth provides a clear-headed, wide-ranging critique of what ails the criminal justice system—and a prescription for how it can be fixed.
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Pizzi believes that the American system of criminal trials is badly in need of repair. The main problem, in his eyes, is that the system is too preoccupied with judicial procedure and too little concerned with the truth. In a cogent, direct argument, Pizzi inveighs against the triumph of the law of unintended consequences over the law of practicality. He carefully articulates the sad state of the criminal trial system, laying blame primarily on Supreme Court decisions relating to criminal procedure. Pizzi argues persuasively that a criminal trial system in which defendants avoid trials at all costs is inherently flawed. Comparing the American system to those of other countries, he shows how our preoccupation with formal rights and procedural regularity blinds us to glaring substantive failures, such as defendants' lack of access to adequate representation and the fact that there is a strong institutional preference for guilty pleas even in cases in which defendants are innocent. He suggests that fact-finders be appointed to determine a defendant's guilt. In this sense, Pizzi echoes his University of Colorado colleague Paul Campos (Jurismania). Pizzi's background as a former federal prosecutor may lead him to downplay the severity of police abuses in this country, yet his argument's ultimate grounding in perspectives gleaned from his research in comparative criminal law makes his book an important work.
