Alan Dershowitz - Rules of the Justice Game

 

Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer and legal scholar known for his scholarship of U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law, and a noted advocate of civil liberties. He taught at Harvard Law School from 1964 through 2013. Professor Dershowitz made some concerning observations in The Rules of the Justice Game (1982):

* It is easier to convict guilty defendants by violating the Constitution than by complying with it, and in some cases it is impossible to convict guilty defendants without violating the Constitution.

* Almost all police lie about whether they violated the Constitution in order to convict guilty defendants.

* Many prosecutors implicitly encourage police to lie about whether they violated the Constitution in order to convict guilty defendants.

* Most trial judges pretend to believe police officers who they know are lying.

This is a true epidemic in the criminal justice system called “testilying” and it has been around a long time. The problem, Dershowitz explained, is that police officers know that they can lie in court without any consequence.

Police officers and other government agents must be held accountable when the lie in court, knowingly enter false statements into official records, and violate our Constitutional rights in their quest to gain a criminal conviction.