So the weather this past weekend did lend itself to some at-home movie watching. Of course, baseball and football games got in the way of those elaborate plans.
But at least I did get a chance to read about an interesting criminal documentary in the Wall Street Journal The movie is called "Presumed Guilty" and it's about the horrible state of the Mexican criminal justice system. It was just shown at the Toronto Film Festival last month. You can read a description of the movie here. There does not appear to be a release date in this country yet. If I hear something, I'll pass it along.
Does the horrible state of the Mexican justice system make me feel better about our criminal justice system? Sort of. Clearly our system is nowhere near as frightening as the one in Mexico. Of course, it's not quite right to compare the two. We are supposed to be the beacon of freedom and democracy for all of the world to follow and our criminal justice system does leave a lot to be desired.
But there is one thing I can say for how the Mexican system operated in the case featured in the film. The appellate court released the defendant after it watched the video of the criminal trial, which clearly was farcical. As a criminal appeals attorney, sometimes I wished that all it took was to show a video to the panel of judges and say, "This trial was a travesty. It was a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham!" And the court would simply agree and let my client go. And that begs the eternal question: would our criminal justice system be better off if it looked more like a Woody Allen film? Sometimes I wonder . . .
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