Criminiology - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... 18 people had been sentenced to death prior to their DNA exoneration / release, the average sentence length served by exonerated individuals has been 13.6 years and approximately 70% of those who have been exonerated through DNA testing are people of color) point to the fact that our system is still far from being unerring. What Amy Bach found startling was that many of the legal professionals / lawyers involved were not aware of their roles in perpetuating bad conduct, or of how their behaviors were connected to the worst outcomes in courts. She concludes that ordinary injustice happens in a “blind spot” (Bach), when a community of professionals becomes so used to a pattern of errors that they stop seeing their roles in them. As for the question of how to create generations of individuals who stand up for humanity and human rights, she believes that the process should start in law schools across the country where people begin discussing with students about why these injustices continue to exist in America and what we can do about them (Bach). Some law theorists, such as Schlag (186-188), think that the main purpose of normative legal thought is to add semiotics, epistemology or social theory to its crystallized ethical-moral structure about what is right, efficient and good to do, by continuously repeating itself. It constitutes, therefore, an automated routine so deeply internalized and entrenched into our cognitive matrix that it creates our thoughts and keeps our work within the same rhetorical frameworks. Far from being a normative enterprise aiming to improve the political, economic performance of the courts or the legal profession in general, legal advocates do not realize that normative thought is a self-referential economy consisting of rhetorical structures that are manipulated from elsewhere, a bureaucratic tool for the of a certain type of discursive that is compatible with the practice of bureaucracy and “institutional inertia” (Schlag 186). Moreover, the normative appeal of normative thought impedes legal practitioners to recognize the fact that it is based on an unrealistic representation of the field it regulates. Instead of assisting a deeper understanding of current moral and political situations, it re-inscribes its own unbelievable representation of the moral / political scene. Normative thought will continue to be irresponsible until it begins to address its own paradoxical rhetorical structure which is populated by individuals who are the manipulated results of the system’s bureaucratic practices7 (Schlag 188-191) The law’s attitude towards the world is not curious, open to discovery or based on genuine intellectual enterprise because, at the heart of the discipline of law, there is a great deal of violence (Schlag 2060-61). For many legal practitioners, law has become an idolatrous self-serving, self-deceiving mechanism (Campos 284-300), whose violence is hidden deep inside. It is, perhaps, inherent to our current nature to pretend that our reality does not generate disturbing instances where the judicial system is impotent or, simply, inefficient. Disconnected and unwilling to commit to the reconciliation between our beliefs and reality, we have become, legal scholar Bryan ...Download file to see next pagesRead More