Reasons for Distrust of the Justice System Today
Over the past years, the public trust in the legal justice system continues to decrease as the public raise concerns in the inequalities portrayed by the lawyers’ judges, and police officer given the rise in police profiling has made people question the legitimacy of the system that is meant to defend the rights of the people. While the American rule of law is mandated to treat every person equally, following these disparities, the American criminal justice system has become scrutinized regarding race, gender and social class concerning the administration of justice (Bigley, 2020).
With a particular focus on me, I also have a share of distrust in the justice system today. Firstly, racial discrimination has been the leading cause of my distrust in the justice system. Racial minorities have suffered and continue to suffer biased system whereby, the marginalized minorities, for essence the black ethnicity, are tried by an all-white jury in all-white courtrooms, whereby sentencing was discriminatory, with harder sanctions imposed to African Americans as compared to their white counterparts (Robinson, 2018). Additionally, the police are actively involved in propagating racial violence; this overt discrimination continuously increases the evidence of the reality of unfairness in the justice system based on racial prejudice.
Secondly, the poverty rate, whereby the low-income earning category in the populace is more likely to receive sentences despite their innocence. This is because most of these people could not afford lawyers only dependent on the public defendants. In contrast, the other the financially privileged comfortably afforded the services of high profile lawyers and were likely to win a case as compared to the minority defended by the public defendant (Bigley, 2020). Additionally, in cases where payment of fines cash bails are involved post bail, many of those who cannot post bail is likely to plead guilty. Those with money can get away with almost any crime following how corrupt and tainted the criminal justice systems escalating the rate of distrust in the justice system. Lastly, another crucial cause of distrust is gender disparity, whereby male convicts are likely to receive a harsher sentence compared to the females for the same magnitude of the crime.
References
Bigley, J., & Weniger, M. (2020). Trust in the Justice System as an Institution. International Journal of Contemporary Research and Review, 11(06), 21816-21816.
Robinson, P. H., & Robinson, S. M. (2018). Shadow Vigilantes: How Distrust in the Justice System Breeds a New Kind of Lawlessness. Prometheus Books.
