Despite my complaints a few days ago, I do think that the Mercury News is a decent paper by today’s standards, and this morning they reminded me why. They’ve been reviewing 700 appeals of local criminal cases; the results will appear in a five-part series that began with a special section of today’s paper, the main article of which can be found here. (The link may go stale after a week.)
Good stuff; it’s not serving advertisers or power interests, it’s just reporters putting in the time and effort to dig up facts, construct an intelligent narrative around them, and, with a bit of luck, help make the world a better place.
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Although I found the article interesting, it was a bit biased and guilty of the same things it was accusing the courts of. For example, it says that it looked at 700 cases from a specific time period and an additional 200 cases that were brought to their attention. I am assuming the 200 cases were brought to their attention because there was some misconduct. It then reports that 261 cases had problems. How many of those were from the 5 year period? Is it that only 61 cases were from the five year period? I agree that this is an interesting expose and it merits attention but it seemed to be designed to just cause outrage rather than an indepth look at the system.
1/27/2006 @ 5:47 am