text: I don't think US laws favor the "criminals". It's just that one can never know with 100% certainty who is really guilty and who is really innocent, and that introduces a lot of human error into the process. Here are some problems with the American legal system:\n\n-Many states have different types of jail sentences, ranging from very short jail sentences for pretty serious crimes to very long sentences for relatively "minor" ones (such as the "three strikes" laws in states like Texas and California). These discrepancies mean that you might go to jail for life in Texas because you were caught a third time with a small quantity of an illicit drug but might only spend ten years for murder in one of the more liberal New England states.\n-Often, your legal counsel is nowhere near as important as jury selection. In the OJ case, for example, had the jury been majority white (as opposed to majority black) it is highly likely that OJ would have been convicted. Jury demographics matter a lot. Juries also are relatively poorly educated and have short attention spans. Studies have shown that juries are often more moved by courtroom theatrics and good-looking lawyers and defendants than they are by facts. Good-looking people tend to get more "fair" trials than bad looking people.  And race is also involved (white juries will be more inclined to convict a black man than a white one).\n-The Supreme Court has shifted from a more liberal stance to a more conservative one. For example, while the liberal Court of the 1960s and 1970s gave us "Miranda" rights, the more conservative Rehnquist Court has tended to side with police and law enforcement. Whereas a defendant might once have gotten off the hook if evidence was obtained without a warrant or if a legal "technicality" was breached, nowadays the courts give a lot more leeway to law enforcement (for example, police might come to a person's house with a warrant to search for illegal firearms and arrest a person on the possession of illicit drugs- even if drugs were not specified in the warrant). With the Patriot Act and now wire tapping, the Federal givernment has immensely expanded its ability to search individuals without court warrants.  It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court will weigh in on these measures and whether or not it will deem them un-Constitutional.