The Imperfection Of Justice

     Justice is imperfect.  We are, after all, only mortal, and that includes police, perpetrators, victims, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juries and legislators.  Sometimes the malefactor gets away with it; sometimes the innocent are punished.

     Perfect justice is like a frictionless surface or an ideal gas: it doesn't exist.  It's an abstraction, useful for addressing general principles.

     A general principle can be more practical; for centuries now, Western legal traditions have emphasized caution and restraint, that it is "better that ten guilty go unpunished than one innocent person suffer."  Bleeding-heart nonsense, you say?  It predates the American Revolution; the Founders and Framers were well aware of it and applied it.

     Quotas of arrests and prosecutions are not compatible with that approach; tell traffic cops they need to write a dozen tickets a day, and they will; tell prosecutors they need to file ten cases a week and they will.  And when the Federal government says they're looking to denaturalize 100 to 200 naturalized U/ S. citizens a month?  They'll do their best.

     If they'd said they were planning on yanking the papers and kicking out naturalized citizens who had committed grievous crimes, nobody'd bat an eye -- in fact, when the initial crackdown on people in this country illegally was framed as going after people who'd committed serious offenses, it wasn't especially contentious.  (When it turned out that any crime at all, or even the most vague suspicion of crime sufficed, then debate became acrimonious).  But setting a quota means A) the lowest-hanging fruit goes first and B) the bar of what constitutes a sufficiently-grave crime will be raised and lowered to match the quota.

     Kick out the truly bad folks?  Fine. Kick out some arbitrary -- and far higher than previous practice -- number of naturalized citizens so you can "make the numbers?"  That's not justice; that's the philosophy of a sweatshop paying workers by the piece.  Except the sweatshop's got a final inspection process before they box up the product and ship it out.