William Baude, one of the sharpest legal minds I know, has written an intelligent if somewhat dispiriting take on the wider implications of the Troy Davis case, which I strongly recommend:
The principle that courts should seek justice sits alongside a principle of judicial finality—at some point, legal disputes must be settled. In nearly every case, whether civil or criminal, the losing side must eventually accept the authority of the court. In criminal cases, there is a safeguard: the executive’s power to pardon, one last chance for a case that has slipped through the cracks. An unending right to keep challenging that decision would make the legal system pointless.
Moreover, judges cannot decide the limits of their own power. They hear cases that the legislature has decided are within their purview. This legislative role is part of the balance of powers: Judges exercise great authority within their jurisdiction. Their rulings can bind very important people who disagree with them, including the president. Because judicial power is so great, it must also be circumscribed. By expanding their role in “actual innocence” cases beyond what the legislature had given them, judges would be straining against judicial finality and against the principle that courts must not define the scope of their own power. It is intolerably dangerous to give judges the unreviewable power to decide how powerful they are.
Such an assertion of authority would be costly in other ways. Indeed, the tradition of judicial finality is one of the chief justifications for the courts’ ability to invalidate unconstitutional laws through judicial review. That finality is what forces other branches to obey the courts’ judgments, right or wrong.
This concern with concepts such as finality, jurisdiction, and the balance of powers may sound technical, lawyerly, and highly abstract. But so is the criminal justice system. Crimes are messy and the facts are often disputed, but the law must provide simple answers: innocence or guilt, freedom or imprisonment, life or death. It does that through a system of rules animated by abstract principles. Indeed, the reason so much power is given to judges is because they are presumed to be expert at technical, lawyerly questions.
This is not to deny the potential for injustice. But we should not look to the courts for a solution. Legislatures create the procedures used to challenge criminal convictions. If our current ones are inadequate, lawmakers can create more generous rules for presenting new evidence of innocence. Indeed, in many states they have done exactly that in creating new procedures to accommodate DNA testing. Similar procedures could be created for other forms of new evidence.
The mistake is in thinking that judges are the only ones who can or should fix this injustice. If we care so much that actual innocence claims get into court, we should be lobbying the democratically elected branches, which have the power to create new procedures. If we are unwilling to demand better systems for assessing innocence from them, we should not be surprised that the courts are reluctant to invent one. [Emphasis added]
While we focus on the human tragedy at the heart of this case, it is important not to forget that a larger set of procedural abuses — including, for example, a pattern of corruption and collusion at government-controlled crime labs, which Radley Balko has identified – leads to tragedies of this kind on a distressingly regular basis. The real failure, you won’t be shocked to discover, is with our elected legislators.