Justice Without Trial
The author and professor of criminal justice, Jerome Skolnick, argues in his book entitled Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, that the first line of defense in the protection of personal safety and property any democratic society is that of effective law enforcement. However, the police form not a human line of protective and retributive justice, as they ideally should, but instead have created and fucntion as a subculture with little respect for other institutions of justice in the nation, such as trial by jury and presumptions of innocence. Instead, Skolnick states that even in allegedly democratic America, justice takes place without a trial, in the eyes of the prejudices of a policeman when they see a supposed perpetrator in the night. The presumption of guilt in the heart of the policeman, rather than the objectivity of a judge becomes the most compelling determinant of how justice is reckoned, even in a rights-based society, as a result.
Skolnick wrote in 1966 that despite the appearance in the instutitionsal fabric of American society, of a disinterested justice ethic, the systemic focus upon clearance rates in the then-current American policy model of criminal justice encouaged police to merely create an appearnce of doing their job. Police, Skolnick argued when he first wrote the article that became the text under discussion, that the police were pursuing convictions rather than seeking truth at any price. Police were willing to see the innocent convicted,...
Athough not specifically about race, because one of the later goals of the civil rights movement, specifically in urban areas, was to highlight the racial bias in the educational institutions and actual process of law enforcement, Skolnick's philosophy about an unjust police subculture, intent upon convicting even innocent suspects must have been highly resonant.
Some of the most famous images of the civil rights movement depicted white officers in the American South inflicting violence with bully clubs and hoses upon nonviolent demonstrators. But in Northern and urban areas as well, during an era of skyrocketing crime rates and increased polarization between poor and rich, during a relatively affluent period of American history, excesses of overenthusiastic policemen desiring to meet their clearance rate quotas were more vigorously wielded against blacks. Blacks reacted violently against the police as a result, creating racial tensions and increasing the gap of culture and philosophy between law enforcement personnel and the people whom they…
