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" So, Scott beat me to a terrifying story in The New York Times Magazine over the weekend, and he correctly points out that you have to be deeply into Native American organic sacramental flora to believe the story that the prosecution is selling, now that DNA evidence fairly well has proven that they convicted the wrong man. All I have to add is that this is exactly how we, as a society, want DA&amp;#039;s to act \u2014 at least, if you judge us by the appeals to which we respond in the political sphere, and in our popular entertainments. Constitutional guarantees are &amp;quot;loopholes&amp;quot; that aid only &amp;quot;the guilty.&amp;quot; The Fourth Amendment protects criminals. Taking the Fifth Amendment means you&amp;#039;re guilty. Nancy Grace has a television show. Even my beloved Law and Order had a number of moments of misbegotten prosecutorial zealotry, although Jack McCoy usually felt really bad about them later, and god punished him by taking Jill Hennessy away from him. We keep voting for tougher, less enforceable drug laws. We try to find a way to tinker with the death penalty to make it conform with our Constitutional guarantees, as though that were possible. Back when the Duke lacrosse case fell apart, and Mike Nifong (justifiably) got disbarred for what he&amp;#039;d done, I remember thinking that Nifong did what we all tacitly want prosecutors to do \u2014 use any means, fair or foul, to win his case. However, in that particular instance, the prosecution wound up facing defendants with more than enough wherewithal to fight back, hard, against the forces trying to railroad them. (And, in doing so, gave obnoxious white preppies a Scottsboro Boys to call their very own.) There are Mike Nifongs everywhere in the system, doing pretty much what he did, to the polite applause of a country that doesn&amp;#039;t believe in the only things that once made it special. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11821/juan-rivera-dna-6602119/>