Most legal experts believe that Donald Trump received a fair trial when he was convicted of 34 felonies in a New York state court. This doesn’t, however, mean that our criminal justice system treats all defendants equally or fairly. Those who proclaim their support for the rule of law would be ill advised to read too much into the former president’s 34 convictions, or Hunter Biden’s conviction Tuesday on gun charges. Our criminal justice system is broken in many places. Those who truly care about the rule of law must demand that we fix it.
The main problem with the rule of law is that it is inconsistently applied, especially for people of color and the poor. The civil rights movement fueled improvements to some laws and practices like the “separate but equal” doctrine, overturned by the Supreme Court in 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. But today’s conservative-dominated Supreme Court, bolstered by three justices appointed by Trump, is rolling back many of those gains. From the initial behavior of the police to unfair trials to unequal sentencing by judges to the inequitable treatment of the incarcerated, there continue to be too many cases involving unequal application of the law.
Much research points this out, and I have written extensively here about the many problems within the criminal justice system, including a column addressing how the warrior mentality in policing often results in deadly encounters between the police and Black and brown civilians, and a commentary challenging public officials to do something about the thousands of killings by police in the years after the death of George Floyd.