Criminal Law: Procedure Above All

I've been re-watching the 3rd season of The Practice, which is available on Hulu. I watched this show originally back when it aired in the late 90s and early 2000s. I find myself wondering how much shows like this have influenced the way I feel about the criminal “justice” system even though they are all just fantasy written for the sake of drama.

For example, in the 3rd season episode “Infected”, Rider Strong (the guy from Boy Meets World plays a kid who lies in court to get his father acquitted on a murder charge.

After that, prosecutor Helen Gamble goes completely off the rails and charges Strong's character with felony murder and promises to get him life in prison.

My hair is cutting off the circulation to my brain.

I think we, the viewers, are supposed to sympathize with Gamble. She wants to punish evil doers, and she has clearly had some kind of mental break-down after the nun-killer got off “on a technicality”. While speaking to the judge on sentencing, she gets confused and starts raving as though the defendant is the nun-killer. The woman can't even keep track of who she is trying to railroad.

By the way, they call elements of due process “technicalities” when they correctly free a man because the police abused their power and because the State cannot make its burden to imprison and torture him. They call due process just and proper when they sentence a man to 20 years for lying because his lie corrupted “the process”.

That latter thing is exactly what happens in this episode. Gamble makes a deal with Rider Strong. She dops the felony murder charge and he pleads guilty of perjury. At sentencing, Gamble makes a ridiculous argument about how she and the judge “work for the room” and they have to uphold the process of the law. Then the judge, citing the importance of criminal procedure, hands down a sentence of 20 years in prison for perjury.

I'm locking you away so you can't continue to hurt people by, like, saying words.

A quick Google search shows that in real life people have been sentenced to 20 years in prison for perjury, but 5-10 years is more common.

Which leads me to my point. Shows like The Practice leave me feeling like the main purpose of the criminal justice system is to ruin people's lives—to ruin people's futures because of mistakes they made in the past. Unfortunately, while The Practice is undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect, everything I know about criminal law in the real world leads me to believe that this is true. Life ruiners—that is what judges and prosecutors are.

Sometimes they ruin someone's life just because they can't get the guy they really want, so they settle for anyone nearby.

The judge in this episode says that he's giving 20 years because of the court's need to “ensure the integrity of this criminal justice process”. The process has no integrity, and never did, if the judges and prosecutors are more concerned with the process than with the actual facts and circumstances at hand.