By James M. Doyle, a lawyer with Carney & Bassil and former head of the Public Defender Division of the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, a statewide public defender agency. Doyle is the author of a recent ACS Issue Brief, "From Error Toward Quality: A Federal Role in Support of Criminal Process."
Why not a comprehensive, blue ribbon, top-to-bottom review of the American criminal justice system?
The fact is, no one can think of an objection, and legislation submitted by Sen. Jim Webb and Rep. William Delahunt that would create a National Criminal Justice Commission to conduct that review has support from all points on the criminal justice spectrum and co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. The odds favor eventual passage, and that's an excellent development. Any review that takes a grown-up look at the American criminal justice system as a system rather than as an archipelago of isolated (and often adversarial) agencies and functions is a step in the right direction. (For more on this, watch video of an ACS panel on an integrative approach to justice.) Blue ribbon commissions draw talented members who deploy broad credibility in support of their recommendations.
But if the only thing this top-to-bottom review leaves behind is another report -- even if it's a great report with terrific recommendations -- it will not realize its full potential. The Commission's report can be the beginning of a process, not the end of one. It can reveal something for the best people in criminal justice to do between today and the inevitable next National Commission.
So far, criminal justice is missing the infrastructure for an enduring, bottom-to-top feedback loop, one that persistently communicates the experiences and insights of the victims, cops, lawyers, judges, and probation and corrections officials at the sharp end of the system both to fellow practitioners in scattered jurisdictions and to remote policy-makers: the legislators, and funders whose decisions shape (and often deform) the practitioners' working lives.
In a recently released issue brief, "From Error Toward Quality: A Federal Role in Support of Criminal Process," I propose that the criminal justice system develop a mechanism, as medicine and aviation have, to create this loop by identifying "sentinel events"-- wrongful convictions, wrongful releases, and near misses in both categories -- that help us avoid future errors and to analyze and share their lessons. Supporting the ongoing practice of dispassionate, fine-grained, all-stakeholders review of these mistakes could provide a revolutionary new approach to creating a reliable system.
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