By: Chris Leahy
Last week, Professor Rosenbaum introduced the “four-headed monster” – bureaucracy, technology, specialization and professionalism. These four post-Holocaust concepts, he argued, enable moral detachment and allow a wrongdoer to escape self-doubt or guilt. We focused on bureaucracies that compartmentalize tasks and responsibilities, diluting individuals’ roles into non-culpable cogs instead of responsible actors. Such systems, Professor argued, facilitate moral injustice, including genocide.
I was struck by how the concept rang true in the American legal bureaucracy, a compartmentalized arrangement that harbors injustice. The comparison, I would argue, is most evident in the criminal justice system. Unlike some of my classmates who contend that the criminal courts succeed in serving justice, I know that this is pure fallacy. The system stymies moral justice in all the ways we have learned, by repressing story telling, offering only money or jail time, etc. On a more basic level, however, the system is so riddled with corruption and incompetence, any confidence in American justice reveals a profound ignorance.
The bureaucracy enables injustice, encouraging the buck to be passed between not just the judge, jury and executioner, but further. The police departments gather evidence, DA’s piece together cases, juries find a verdict, and judges preside over trials (and then separately decide sentencing). These steps function as a bureaucracy, where the big picture can be lost, and moral responsibility can be the next guy’s problem. Imagine the following series of events. Cops make an arrest based on a snitch’s tip. The case isn’t bulletproof, but Christmas is around the corner and they need the overtime. Even if the defendant is innocent, the DA can always drop the charges. The ADA thinks he can put together a case, and he wants to impress the boss, so he gets to it. He isn’t worried about imprisoning an innocent man because he’s just doing his job; it’s the jury’s decision that counts. The judge sentences on the basis of the guilty verdict, so he’s just assigning a dollar or time value to someone else’s decision. Just like any true bureaucracy, it is difficult to pinpoint the responsible party, and injustice results all too often.
