I don’t know if I agree with this. My experience working for a federal judge made me much more confident in the criminal justice system. In the media we only see the situations where the justice system got something wrong—which is inevitable in a country of 330 million people. Looking behind the scenes made me understand that for every case where there is a conviction on shaky evidence, there are dozens of cases where a conviction or guilty plea is supported by a mountain of electronic evidence.
For example, my wife handled a murder trial where the government prosecutors not only had closed circuit video of the defendant shooting the victim, but of him getting in his car and driving home through town back to his house. They just cut from one closed circuit camera to the next and the next showing the entire journey.
Did your wife's case actually go to trial, or was it also plea-bargained? If the former, why would the defendant not take the plea in such clear-cut case?
For example, my wife handled a murder trial where the government prosecutors not only had closed circuit video of the defendant shooting the victim, but of him getting in his car and driving home through town back to his house. They just cut from one closed circuit camera to the next and the next showing the entire journey.