THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The argument is that the more lawyers we pay for, the more justice we get. There is not the slightest trace of evidence for this. But we don't ask for any. Lawyers have degrees and judges have credentials. Since we worship those degrees and credentials, and are happy to pay for them, we assume that they are of some use.

Thinking that credentials are necessarily related to justice is exactly like the medical bleeding that went on for almost two thousand years. It is more than useless, it is destructive, but we pay for the degrees and experience and credentials without asking for any proof that they provide justice. Again, we have never asked for any such evidence. And, as I keep pointing out, in the real world, the public gets absolutely no more than the public demands.

So people pay through the nose for legal credentials, and then they say, "There is no justice." They are exactly right. There are credentials, not justice, because all they demand is credentials, and not justice.

Justice is not synonymous with acquittals. It is true that a fortune spent on appeals and legal technicalities will provide more acquittals. But there is no evidence that a complicated legal procedure acquits more INNOCENT people than a system without the experts would. As in the Miranda case, where the person acquitted was a confessed and known murderer, these technicalities do demonstrably free a lot of guilty and dangerous people, and they lead to the use of precedents to free more guilty and dangerous people.

So, the argument goes, since the system frees lots and lots of guilty people, it must be fairer to innocent people. But technicalities are seldom if ever used to bring in more proof of what is true. It is used to suppress evidence and hide the law from reality. All that legal "expertise" is intended to help the guilty. There is no evidence that, in the end, it helps the innocent more than it hurts them. As always when we don't ask for any evidence except credentials, we get the OPPOSITE of what we are paying for.

I believe that many innocent people have been executed, but that is not the question. The question is, would more lawyers and more appeals and more technicalities have saved INNOCENT people? We know it saves GUILTY people, and prevents the conviction of lots more guilty people.

We have thousands of examples of that. But we do not have, nor do we ask for, a shred of evidence that all those dollars for experts saves INNOCENT people.

For legal "expertise" to help the innocent, it is not enough to say that innocent people get convicted. There is another condition that is absolutely never mentioned. Those who make the case that legal "expertise" is worth anything at all must show that legal technicalities would have SAVED the INNOCENT person.

We do have plenty of proof that legal expertise KILLS lots of innocent people every day. The only cases we know about for sure are those where the Expert Opinions we pay for and live under freed GUILTY people to kill innocent ones.

As I said, this blind faith in experts gives us the OPPOSITE of what we pay for. To fully understand this, we must discuss a fact which liberals and the pope, in their desperation to look good by attacking the death penalty, never mention

This fact is that not all the innocent people on earth are on Death Row.

By blindly allowing "legal expertise" to be worth money and respect, we all agree that innocent people killed by repeat felons released by legal experts are not real people. Only an innocent person on Death Row is really innocent.

A ball park figure: I would guess that for every innocent person executed on Death Row, several hundred innocent people are killed on the streets by a repeat felon who is let go or not arrested because of "legal expertise." And we worship this expertise and we pay for this expertise.

A sane public would never agree with this. Practically everybody in America agrees with this. So we spend untold sums of money on the possibility that, to repeat, TWO conditions are met: 1) innocent people are executed, and 2) - please don't forget this one - that the efforts of all those expensive legal technicians would have freed the INNOCENT ones.

All respectable conservatives agree with the present system. No respectable conservative ever asks if those appeals save more INNOCENT people than they KILL. Just as no respectable conservative will ever ask any liberal to define the word "racist," no respectable conservative will ever demand that "legal expertise" somehow correlate with JUSTICE. As with bleeding, we are paying for expertise, and killing people by doing it.

The simple fact that never got asked through the centuries was whether bleeding actually did any GOOD. In plain English, were those medical "experts" providing us with MEDICINE, or were they just showing us their degrees and their "medical experience." Until we demanded medicine, not degrees or experience, millions of people, including the Father of Our Country, died under the "experts'" knives.

As long as we demand only degrees and Judicial Opinions, with no evidence they provide us with the slightest bit --- and I mean the SLIGHTEST bit - of JUSTICE, we will die like dogs on the street.

Why?

Because we asked for it.