Miami criminal-defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum writes about The Failures of Our System, which in his view begin with the truth “[t]hat we are a victim of the notion that we are all unsafe.” That causes our system to be based on “a media driven perception of ‘what the public wants'”, which renders lawmakers unable “to separate those who should not be labeled”, which deprives prosecutors and judges of discretion, and so on and so forth until criminal-defense lawyers are held to be the root of the problem.

Brian says of the failures of the system, “more and more I find agreement.” I have to wonder if the agreement Brian finds is that of prosecutors and judges who think that criminal-defense lawyers are the root of the problem. I haven’t discovered that many people on the government teat are willing to admit the falsity of the notion that we are all unsafe. As I’ve written before, prosecutors use fear every day to convince juries to convict. If it weren’t for our irrational fears, many of them (and many cops, and many judges) would be out of a job.