A friend of mine who is a school principal has on occasion voiced frustration about the increasing imposition of private sector thinking and practice in the public sector, specifically the field of education. He is fond of saying, often with a sigh, that schools are not in the business of manufacturing widgets. Yet, more and more, there is pressure to produce tangible results and improve productivity, regardless of the consequences. As a result, a corporate mentality that has little patience for individuality and craftsmanship—and that values product over process and quantity over quality—becomes the norm. Success is measured by the results on a spreadsheet rather than by the uniqueness and substance of the product or the satisfaction of workers and consumers.

Education is not alone in falling prey to such privatizing, as it were. The justice system has also succumbed. In response to the admittedly inordinate demands and pressures of their jobs, police and prosecutors oftentimes seem to cut corners and opt for expedience over correctness and thoroughness. A shoddy result is apparently better than no result at all. Justice is measured more by rates of arrest and conviction than by the integrity of the process and the fairness of the outcome. When defined in such terms and then stubbornly maintained, it is no longer justice but injustice that is served. That is unacceptable.

From the New York Times:

Accusers Recant, but Hopes Still Fade in Sing Sing

After five young people identified him in court as the murderer, Fernando Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of killing a 16-year-old youth in Greenwich Village. No other evidence — a gun, a fingerprint or a clear motive — tied him to the crime.

He has been jailed ever since, despite the fact that for 14 years, the same five witnesses have insisted their testimony was false.

The five gave sworn statements in 1993 that Mr. Bermudez was not the killer and that their testimony had been manipulated by the police and prosecutors. They did so at the risk of being charged with perjury, and they have stuck with those accounts even as they have approached middle age, taken on steady jobs and raised families.

Nonetheless, the recantations have had little impact. The same judicial system that once relied on the witnesses now no longer believes them.

“What does it take, with the system that we have, to reinvestigate a wrongful conviction?� said Scott Christianson, a supporter of Mr. Bermudez and a former state criminal justice official. “It’s really beyond me.�

The reason is based in the prevailing wisdom of the American justice system, which views recantations as untrustworthy, acts not of conscience, but of sympathy or bribery or coercion. That view is so deeply ingrained that one judge, rejecting one of Mr. Bermudez’s appeals in 1995, said candidly that five recantations were simply too many to believe.

In recent years, though, the reliability of recantations is being re-evaluated, driven in part by the growing number of cases in which DNA evidence has cleared people who had been locked behind bars for years. In several recent cases, DNA evidence has shown not only that people were innocent, but that witnesses who had recanted really were telling the truth.

“Blanket suspicion of recantations is clearly not warranted,� said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law. “We know now that many of the traditional precepts that have been held by the courts are not warranted, and yet the courts continue to cling to them.� [full text]