So thank goodness at least one person got it right. It's funny how much people trash defense attorneys for wanting to get their client off at any cost and regardless of guilt; prosecutors live and die by their conviction percentage. They often won't prosecute people they KNOW are guilty simply because they don't think they can win a conviction; the conviction percentage is SACRED, far more so than justice. The flip side of that coin is that if cops give them a solid case against a plausible suspect they have little interest in creating unwelcome reasonable doubt by investigating other possible culprits. Even if that means sending an innocent man to death row while an anonymous murderer roams free to strike again.

Reference to the O.J. trial is interesting, because it's always staggered me how people missed the real lessons of that case. First and foremost is how badly the police and prosecutors butchered an open and shut case; between investigators proven racism, contamination of otherwise irrefutable DNA evidence and insistence O.J. try on a glove they only found on their second pass through the crime scene, they practically manufactured reasonable doubt. The cops and prosecutors destroyed a wealth of opportunities to convict a man who almost certainly murdered two people, which is pathetic and a little disturbing. Take away reasonable doubt and we're left with a preponderance of evidence--exactly what convicted him in the CIVIL trial, where the standard of proof is very different than when a mans freedom, let alone his life, is at stake.

Which brings us back to the justice systems very foundation, and the bigger lesson of the O.J. trials, so it is only right following the celebration of Americas independence to review John Adams' defence at the trial of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre:

How often have we heard precisely this sentiment from convicted criminals? The concept that "if you do the time, do the crime", that an innocent man treated as a criminal might as well BECOME one? That's why it's better to free the guilty than condemn the innocent: Because a legal system that treats the innocent as guilty creates public contempt, not just for the system, but for the moral virtues it openly mocks. So if this woman actually murdered her own infant child and the prosecution managed, despite every weapon in its arsenal and the meager legal defense she could afford, to drop the ball, I truly lament that ineptness, but am truly grateful the jury refused to convict her without proof just because they "knew" she was guilty. What the peanut gallery "knows" (or thinks it does) despite no access to the evidence the REAL jury saw is as irrelevant as it is ignorant.