It's a terrible thing to be charged with a crime. Any crime. It's embarrassing, humiliating. It can cost you your job, your friends, your family. It can cost you your freedom and even your life.
DON'T BE NAIVE
If you have the misfortune to be charged with a crime, don't be naive, don't be stupid. Don't believe that it's all just a bad dream from which you will eventually awake.
Don't expect that the system will help you, protect you, take care of you. The system may "take care of you" alright -- but not necessarily in the way that you hope. It may take care of you by disposing of you with factory-like efficiency: just as it does the 90% of the people who it routinely convicts each year. That's right. If you are charged with a crime, the chances are about nine out of ten that you will be convicted -- of something!
UNDERSTAND
In the past few years, the criminal justice system has been turned upside down. In my view, our thousand year old tradition, dating back to medieval England, and the Magna Charta, is fading fast.
I believe that the principles our founding fathers fought for, and embodied in our Constitution, are being sacrificed everyday on our streets and in our courthouses in the interest of the "war on crime".
If you have any doubts, just read the Bill of Rights and then read your daily newspaper! Compare the concerns of our forefathers for the individual, for personal rights, for personal liberty, for protection of the individual accused of a crime from the power of the state, and from the tyranny of the majority, with the concerns of today's politicians and the public.
The criminal justice system of the 1950s and 1960s, which, at least, paid lip-service to the principle that it was, ultimately, better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be convicted, seems long gone.
