> this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
>truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
Exactly this. The author does a lot of hand-wringing about the loss of the current institutional practices, but never stops to consider that maybe those institutional practices were never as good as they were sold to be anyway.
Justice has never been truly blind, for exactly the reasons you note. In a society that is structurally, historically biased (based on race, wealth, etc.), any institution that pretends that bias doesn't exist will simply allow that bias to be continue. This new generation has seen the flaws in that mentality and has chosen to fix them instead of continuing the problem.
To put it another way: "evil prevails when good men do nothing". The system effectively "does nothing" now by ignoring existing structural bias, and thus allows the existing evils in society - racism, classic, etc. - to affect its outcome. It doesn't matter if the system isn't designed to be "evil", or that the people acting within it don't consider themselves to be evil - The evils in society will persist if they are not actively opposed.
A change in mentality has occurred among the profession (and also as a wider cultural movement) that societal evils need to be actively called out and opposed rather than quietly tolerated. And honestly, I find it hard to disagree.
>truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
Exactly this. The author does a lot of hand-wringing about the loss of the current institutional practices, but never stops to consider that maybe those institutional practices were never as good as they were sold to be anyway.
Justice has never been truly blind, for exactly the reasons you note. In a society that is structurally, historically biased (based on race, wealth, etc.), any institution that pretends that bias doesn't exist will simply allow that bias to be continue. This new generation has seen the flaws in that mentality and has chosen to fix them instead of continuing the problem.
To put it another way: "evil prevails when good men do nothing". The system effectively "does nothing" now by ignoring existing structural bias, and thus allows the existing evils in society - racism, classic, etc. - to affect its outcome. It doesn't matter if the system isn't designed to be "evil", or that the people acting within it don't consider themselves to be evil - The evils in society will persist if they are not actively opposed.
A change in mentality has occurred among the profession (and also as a wider cultural movement) that societal evils need to be actively called out and opposed rather than quietly tolerated. And honestly, I find it hard to disagree.