Understanding The Legal System

The following is an excerpt from a January 16, 1996, article in the Illinois State Bar Association Bar News written by Chicago attorney William R. Quinlan, a former Cook County judge and Appellate Court justice. Mr. Quinlan was appointed as the bar association's judicial liaison to news media.

Today, more than a few prominent individuals are calling for a major overhaul of our entire judicial system. The shock and dismay of some recent sensational verdicts reflects the public's basic misunderstanding of our system of justice.

While the ultimate goal of our system is to fairly determine innocence or guilt, as strange as it might sound to the public, we further this goal by ensuring a fair system as a whole, not by attempting to ensure the correct result in each individual case.

Thus, our system allows the exclusion of even the most probative evidence when necessary to ensure fairness of the system itself, even where such exclusion may mean that the "correct" result is not obtained.

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized many years ago that the guarantee of the 14th Amendment is not that a just result shall have been obtained, but that the result, whatever it be, shall be reached in a fair way.

Procedural due process, the court has noted, has to do with the manner of the trial; it dictates that in the conduct of judicial inquiry, certain fundamental rules of fairness must be observed; it forbids disregard of the rules; and it is not satisfied, although the result is just, if the hearing is unfair.

Of course, our system is not the only one imaginable. We could have a system where judges simply rule on the equities of each dispute on a case-by-case basis. We believe, however, that the risk of arbitrariness and bias in such a system is too great. Consequently, our system seeks justice through uniformity and fairness of process.

"Due process," then, promises both the accused and the government in a criminal trial, and the litigants in a civil trial, a fair opportunity to be heard, but does not guarantee a correct result. Due process guarantees a "fair" result because if the process is fair, the result itself is fair.

Hence, in our society, the process creates justice. When we speak of "due process" as a right guaranteed under our Constitution, we do not guarantee that one will receive what one might consider, in a moral sense, the proper result; but what we do guarantee is that throughout our country, one will be given a fair opportunity to have one's position heard in a dispute involving life, liberty or property.

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