I rarely have much interest in the public lead up to criminal trials. The trial of defendants in the court of public opinion holds no interest for me as the stories are unavoidably one-sided and thus can never resemble anything approaching truth. It’s why we hold trials, and it’s the fundamental principle of courts, trials, enquiries. While they make a decision to resolve a legal question, they are also hunting for truth, and hopefully justice. Decision, truth, and justice, and mainly in that order. They guarantee the first, try for the second, and hope for the third.
In many respects, it’s not unlike the TV shows or movies where they show a single event from multiple people’s perspectives, all of them slightly misleading, or more pointedly, highly subjective, with often a few common elements that they all saw and a list of other ones where they saw different things, missed others, or even had some that directly contradicted each other. » Read the rest
