The Best Defense Summary

Professor Dershowitz's article on "The Best Defense" details the faults and realities of the criminal justice system. Dershowitz's enumeration of the thirteen "rules" in the legal system shed a negative light not only on the players in the system, but on the whole criminal justice process. He brings to attention that many defendants are in fact guilty, but their guilt, or lack thereof, is not correlated to whether they serve time or not. His position as a professor and lawyer allows him to criticize the system, without fearing income repercussions for divulging certain unsaid secrets kept among the players in the system and give some insight to outsiders who are usually kept out of the loop on the unfairness of the system. Dershowitz's principle

Prosecutors and cops are also claimed to not want justice, if justice means setting a man free if there is not enough legal evidence to convict him, but rather believe that justice has prevailed when "the government wins its point" (16). What both teams in the adversary system are looking for is not to get justice, but rather to win. Judges are also said to be following their own agendas, by allowing certain illegally obtained information into the court or cheating the system in order to not cause a "traffic jam." Dershowitz elaborates by stating that this desire for wins is why plea bargaining, which he sees as "destructive," is so widespread; it allows for both teams to get a win. I agree with Dershowitz because scorecards are important to not only attorneys, but also clients who need some sort of proof to corroborate the competence and abilities of their lawyer. People seek to win, which is whey defense attorneys seeks technicalities to keep out certain information because they know that such evidence can affect the verdict. A myth we have uncovered in class is that "the search for truth is secondary to the protection of Individual Rights." If justice was the main goal of the criminal justice system, the search for the truth would be a priority and the jury would be asked to reach a verdict of "guilty" or "innocent" and not "guilty" or "not