A True Justice

Robert Frost author of the road not taken and many other beloved poems once said that “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.” This has been argued to be true of the court system that has been in operation and it is for this reason that a closer look must be taken into the inner workings of the system that we have trusted. In order to do this each must be put onto the Scales of Justice to evaluate the effectiveness of each.

The adversarial system has been employed to find the truth for hundreds of years and until the rise of drug use has been doing a fine job. There are two teams in the adversarial system, the defense and the prosecution. The star of the prosecution is the district attorney and for the defense it is the defendant’s attorney. Each of which know what happens they enter the courtroom to find the Judge sitting like a ruler behind his bench with a jury to the side all prepared to send the convicted to prison. This works fine for most cases, however if the defendant does not have control over a habit. Why then does jury after jury convict them? The proposed reason is because we would rather see a deviant person behind bars than help them reform their lives and make something of themselves. There are those however that sees this as a serious problem, not the action of the defendant but the actions and perceptions of society as a whole.

Although such ideas as treatment instead of incarceration are highly controversial the persons that see society’s perceptions as a problem have begun to change the way justice is seen through the American eye. The Drug Court movement began in 1989 in Dade county Florida and has since spread to nearly all fifty states reaching nearly 1078 courts in operation and 418 still in planning (NDCI). This therapeutic method tries to rectify the adversarial system in all aspects of how the courts deal with people that are addicted to drug use. The Drug Court does this by redefining justice....