Who Can Really Say?

When These Things Happen

From the NYT, NYC cops have been, more or less, caught lying in prosecutions of protestors at last summer's GOP convention. I think they ought to be taken out and shot fired, but James Joyner is more forgiving of the practice.

The pervasiveness of the practice is impossible to quantify but there's no doubt that it happens frequently. In most of the few criminal trials I've sat in on, I've seen police officers give eyewitness accounts that were so improbable as to be laughable. Mostly, I'm sure, this stems from sloppy decisions or poor observations made in the heat of the moment that required buttressing in order to assure conviction. My guess is that most of the lying is coached by prosecutors. Neither the cops nor the prosecutors really think they're doing anything wrong, since they're sure they've got the right guy. Mostly, they do. But the practice turns the criminal justice system on its head. And, aside from citizen skepticism, there's not a hell of a lot we can do about it.

Yes there is. We can fire the cops who do it, and prosecute them. I think I've finally found the moment where I want to give Ethel Merman's great lines from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:

Now what kind of an attitude is that, these things happen? They only happen because this whole country is just full of people, who when these things happen, they just say these things happen, and that's why they happen! We gotta have control of what happens to us.

It's a bad practice. It shouldn't be coutenanced with subtle explanations that avoid the heart of the matter.

Posted by Peter at April 12, 2005 10:12 PM