
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994                    TAG: 9406110145 
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON                     PAGE: 06    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Beth Barber 
DATELINE: 940612                                 LENGTH: Medium

JUSTICE'S WRONGS

{LEAD} Get mad with a prosecutor these days and you'll have to stand in line. A defendant and his attorney swear that you have - no doubt as usual - convicted the innocent. Lose a case and the family of the victim swears you're incompetent. Either way, a public already frightened by the rise in violent crime begins to wonder if it ought to worry as much about its public officials as about the criminals they prosecute. Especially when attention given the wronging of innocents makes it seem like the norm.

It isn't. Most defendants are guilty and, with lawyers or without, plead so. Most of the innocent but accused are sorted out early in the criminal-justice process - by prosecutors.

{REST} The innocent on trial, the innocent convicted are the exception. But exceptions are what make news - and all too easily skew perspective. That's why I was glad to see Virginia Beach's commonwealth's attorney, Bob Humphreys, respond the other day to broad generalizations from specific instances: ``Prosecutors are not recklessly convicting innocent people,'' he said. ``I'm proud of being a prosecutor and I'm tired of having my office denigrated by people who represent criminals.''

Given the variables and vagaries of witnesses and evidence, jurors and judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, innocents will be prosecuted. A few will be convicted. It's a terrible injustice the system strains to avoid yet must occasionally set right.

But it does not necessarily impugn prosectors. It does not necessarily - probably does not - signify prosecutors so venal, dumb, political or appeasing of a fed-up public that they deliberately disregard rights or misevaluate eyewitnesses. And it doesn't necessarily support a couple of other implications in recent criticisms of local prosecutions: that the accused have too few protections, and defending them is a calling superior to prosecuting them.

In fact, the protections offered the accused, plus the vagaries and variables, also mean that just as some innocents are convicted, more should-be felons go free. That's justice? No. It is, like the unjust conviction, a consequence of a justice system which society has decided should err, if it must, more often on the side of the individual.

Does that make individuals' defenders and prosecutors' critics more dispassionate, disinterested, apolitical, selfless or wise than prosecutors? No. The justice system exists to protect not just individuals, guilty or innocent, but also the safety of the law-abiding majority. Maybe we can't do enough to right the wrong done a man unjustly convicted. He is nonetheless ahead of the last and next victims of a rapist or murderer who goes free. The soul-searching, the critiques, the scrutiny should be just as intense for the one as the other.

by CNB