Law in Contemporary Society

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CeciliaWangFirstPaper 8 - 16 Apr 2010 - Main.CeciliaWang
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

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The Question that Sparked this Paper

An interviewer posed to me this hypothetical: "How will you handle your work in a case you believe is wrongfully prosecuted? For example, a domestic violence victim who struck back at her abuser."

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I cannot recall my answer as well as the question, though I remember declaring my faith in the integrity of my assistant district attorneys, in the high standard of evidence and persuasion held by the criminal justice system, and the right of all to representation, knowing that the interviewer herself as good as admitted that sometimes they try to make felons and prisoners of people who do not deserve to be treated so harshly. A more likely, and less sympathetic, hypothetical would describe a kid charged with a litany of offenses amounting to years in prison for relatively minor incident.
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I cannot recall my answer as well as the question, though I remember declaring my faith in the integrity of my assistant district attorneys, in the high standard of evidence and persuasion held by the criminal justice system, and the right of all to representation, knowing that the interviewer herself as good as admitted that sometimes they try to make felons and prisoners of people who do not deserve to be treated so harshly.

Edit: My response was not a lie. Such an insignificant amounts of my time have been occupied with any substantial thoughts, because of the comfort of idleness, because it is so easy to forget, my default reaction was that if a person of authority decrees something must be done, there must be a morally justified, socially beneficial reason. A little bit of reflection would show that's not true. In the first two parts of this paper I tried to present the reasons for my instinctive trust in authority, and in the final part, I became distracted by the concept of how dangerous status seeking can be when pursued unscrupulously by young God-playing ADAs.

 

The Superhero Ideal

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  that every acquittal is an injustice?

"Those young ADAs, they think they are God"

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An attorney at the Legal Aid Society made that accusation when he introduced interns to the organization's work. I think his point was that even for their clients who both did and intended the acts for which they stood trial, those seemingly indefensible clients, the Society's lawyer's still had to protect even those clients from overzealous prosecution.
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An attorney at the Legal Aid Society made that accusation when he introduced interns to the organization's work.
 
It's not an accusation. It's an observation. I know exactly what he
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What to do?

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Prosecutors are already supervised; they are in many ways constrained. What to do about this freedom they in the exercise of their power over the indigent, over people who for various reasons walked into the criminal justice web? Unlike superheroes, the Harvey Dents of real life are prone to mistake, prone to malice, prone to ignorantly causing injustice while in the pursuit of apparent professional success. It is a power only they can control and refrain from abusing.
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"Prosecutors are already supervised; they are in many ways constrained." Edit: That's what I believed must be; but then, if plagiarized and even fabricated news stories can slip through the five levels of editing at a major publication, how I seriously believe that there is sufficient oversight and sufficiently principled supervision of young lawyers who were initially attracted to such positions for the independence and power?

What to do about this freedom they in the exercise of their power over the indigent, over people who for various reasons walked into the criminal justice web? Unlike superheroes, the Harvey Dents of real life are prone to mistake, prone to malice, prone to ignorantly causing injustice while in the pursuit of apparent professional success. It is a power only they can control and refrain from abusing.

 
This "power to charge and prosecute and to win" is the power to damage or destroy many

Revision 8r8 - 16 Apr 2010 - 16:05:50 - CeciliaWang
Revision 7r7 - 02 Mar 2010 - 04:03:34 - CeciliaWang
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