Doing Justice summary

Anyone can make a mistake – even experts are wrong sometimes. However, there are ways to reduce the chances of being led astray during the inquiry process.

Commitment to the truth requires an awareness of the human faults that can prevent you from seeing a situation clearly, including biases. This means you must be willing to reconsider the evidence, even if that means admitting to mistakes. This issue came up during the investigation of the March 11, 2004 bombing of four passenger trains in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured 2,000 more.

Asking the right questions can make all the difference in an investigation. This includes the basic ones, such as, “Why are we doing it this way?” If the answer is, “Because we’ve always done it this way,” it’s probably time to reconsider your procedures.

A similar question came up when the author was dealing with insider trading and fraud cases. This time, the question was, “Why aren’t we using wiretaps?” They’d been used for a long time in narcotics and organized crime investigation, but never for insider trading cases. However, these cases hinge on knowing precisely what and when one person communicated non-public information to another. A simple but important question thus transformed the way insider trading cases are investigated.

Criminal investigations have different outcomes, from exonerating a suspect to revealing that the transgression is minor. But if your evidence suggests that someone should be charged with a crime, the second phase of an investigation begins – accusation.

It’s good to ask if there is any other possible explanation or any shadow of a doubt in this accusation. This stage of further deliberation is essential, given the impact an accusation has on the lives of the accused. As the saying goes, you can’t unring a bell, and this is certainly true of charging someone with a crime. Therefore, a prosecutor must deliberate without any predetermined notion of an outcome. This isn’t always easy, especially if there’s pressure on a team to deliver and serve justice.

Aside from high-profile cases and the public clamoring for justice, prosecutors can also feel pressure when there’s a threat to public safety. The author faced this issue in the unusual and disturbing case of Gilberto Valle.

Valle was married to Kathleen Mangan, who contacted the police after she’d found disturbing content on her husband’s computer. She had been looking for evidence that he was cheating on her, but instead found his activity on a website called the Dark Fetish Network, where he discussed plots to kidnap, torture, kill and eat real women Valle knew, including Mangan herself!

Sometimes, justice is also about knowing when to walk away. One important aspect of the rule of law in the US is discretion – law enforcement’s ability to decide whether or not to enforce a law. If the government decided to prosecute every violation to its fullest extent, there wouldn’t be much room for considerations of truth and justice.

And yet, in some cases, the leadership in the US does just that. One example of this is punishing every trespassing immigrant at the Southern border to the full extent of the law. As a result of this policy, children have regularly been separated from their parents, sparking a lot of controversy.

After the inquiry and determining the accusation comes the next stage of the process – judgment. Now it’s time to prepare and present the case to the court. In this phase, it’s important to maintain your commitment to truth and justice, even if this doesn’t support your chances of a win.

In the case of SueAnn, justice meant giving a disenfranchised woman her day in court, regardless of what courtroom strategy may suggest. SueAnn was a little over 30 years old and living in the Bronx when she was robbed, knocked unconscious and likely sexually assaulted by masked attackers. Incidentally, SueAnn is also self-employed as a sex-worker, and the attackers made off with the $11,000 she had stashed in her apartment.

The last thing a prosecutor wants to encounter in court is a surprise. So, they always read up on the judge that’s been assigned the case. Like everyone else, judges have their own personalities, predilections and temperaments. Of course, judges are supposed to be completely impartial, but sometimes they put their thumb on the scales of justice, and it falls upon the lawyer to even those scales when necessary.

Consider Judge T.S. Ellis III, who presided over the 2018 federal criminal trial of Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager of Donald Trump, who was charged with 18 crimes ranging including embezzlement and fraud. Ellis was 78 years old at the time, and even the newspapers reported on how often he spoke up during the questioning, showing his lack of patience.

After a guilty verdict is delivered, it’s time for sentencing. In many cases, this is out of the prosecutor’s hands. They can recommend a certain punishment, but the decision ultimately falls to the judge.

The guidelines suggest punishment should be “sufficient but not greater than necessary.” However, many judges will tell you that deciding what is sufficient is perhaps the most difficult part of their job. In seeking justice, they have to consider what’s fair for the victim, as well as what’s fair for the defendant.

Most prosecutors will likely confess that they’re not experts on the prison system, but this is nonetheless a critical part of the justice system. Any fair and just society should care about how prisoners are treated. A humane society needs to account for every human being within it.

There are considerable problems with the prison system in general. People are stripped of their liberties, given identification numbers and often treated like cattle, herded from one area to the next. When people have to suffer a dehumanizing environment like this, they frequently slip into cruel, inhumane behavior. The prison system also raises the question of whether the inmates or the guards are more affected by these inhumane conditions.

In 2011, the New York Times ran an article about a string of hate crimes following the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of the tragic effects of the September 11 attacks was a surge in hate crimes against people from the Middle East in the US. Mark Anthony Stroman, a 31-year-old white supremacist living in Texas, felt it was his duty to kill some “ragheads,” as he put it.

On September 15, he shot and killed Waqar Hasan in the convenience store he ran. On October 4, he shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an immigrant from India, at a gas station. Stroman was convicted of murder and given the death penalty. However, one of Stroman’s victims didn’t die. Despite taking 38 shotgun pellets to his face, Rais Bhuiyan, an immigrant from Bangladesh, survived after emergency surgery.