Most people would agree that our legal system is a morass of confusion, mumbo jumbo, and outright crap. I certainly won't argue the point. What I will do is point out just a few things that we need to do to improve things.
First and foremost, all laws should be re-written. Every single one of them. Eliminate all "legalese," allowing anyone with average intelligence to understand them. If our laws are incomprehensible to the majority of people, two things effectively occur. One is that people feel intimidated by the laws and therefore don't put forth much effort to understanding them. (Not that they should be required to put forth a lot of effort… that's my point.) The second is that it imparts an air of distrust to lawyers. The lawyers have a grasp of what is, to many, unable to be grasped. People are naturally suspicious of anyone who can do that, for it makes them feel inferior. (This isn't the only reason lawyers are generally despised, but it's one of them.)
Another thing that needs to be done during the legal re-write is to eliminate loopholes and laws that are just bonehead stupid. Loopholes are created because our laws are too specific. The more general the law, the better. Within reason, of course. As for the stupid laws, we've all heard examples of them. You're not allowed to tie your alligator to parking meters on Saturdays in such-and-such a town, for example. These types of laws are examples of lawmaking gone wrong, where someone at one time got a bee in their bonnet over an issue and had a law made. It still goes on today, but because our legal system is so convoluted, hardly anyone notices.
By the time this re-write is done, after it is put into comprehensible language and made less specific, after the stupid laws are thrown out and loopholes eliminated, our entire legal doctrine should be able to be compiled into one book. One book that a person of average intelligence can read and understand, and a person of average strength can lift.
Three other things occur to me about the legal process that have many people indignant. One is the appeals process, another is the jury selection process, and the third is the legal process, or system, itself.
As for the appeals process, I may not be a sports fan, but I think the baseball rule should apply. Three strikes and you're out. After the first trial, two appeals are permitted, but no further. If justice hasn't been served by this point, there's a bigger problem at the heart of it.
Jury selection is a huge problem. First, we start with people pulled seemingly at random from the general population. I don't know about you, but I know a lot of people personally that I'd never want sitting on any jury in which I was on trial. On top of this, you have both the prosecution and the defense attorneys essentially picking and choosing which jurors they want and don't want. And it doesn't take much to get them eliminated. The lawyer doesn't like your face? You're gone. You have some expertise in a field in which a witness will be testifying? Bye-bye. You're white and the person on trial is black? See ya.
The perfect solution to both of these problems is very simple. Eliminate both of them. No jury chosen from the masses, and no elimination process. Instead, we have professional jurors. These would be people specially trained to be objective, clinical, analytical, unprejudiced. They would be the jurors. Neither side could dispute any of them, since they were trained for this job and this job alone.
Anyone who's ever been called for jury duty can appreciate how inconveniencing it can be. The professional juror system would eliminate this inconvenience to millions of people a year. It would save court time, too, by eliminating the jury selection process, which has been known to take a lot of time in some trials. And it would eliminate a lot of worry, knowing that the jury is made up of professionals, not average schmoes who may want to just go the heck home and don't care about the verdict.
You'll recall that I referred to the legal process, or system, itself as being problematic. The problem is that we have a legal system, not a justice system. As illustrated perfectly in the O. J. Simpson trial, we don't have a system overly concerned with justice. It's simply a legal system, in which lawyers don't try a case to see that justice is served. They try cases in an effort to see who can win, right or wrong. Who is the better attorney? It's an adversarial process, not conducive whatsoever to discovery of truth or serving justice. Guilt is secondary. First and foremost comes the battle itself. If justice is somehow served, it certainly isn't because of how our system was designed.
What is the solution for this? Frankly, I'm not sure it can be solved without a complete overhaul of the system itself. A lot of it will have to do with fundamental ideas of what the purpose of our legal system is supposed to be. We should be interested in truth and justice, but are we, really? We seem to be more interested in the trial itself, in the competitive, argumentative battle to "prove" guilt. As we've all seen, it doesn't necessarily work that way.
In science, we start with a hypothesis and engage in experiments that may prove or disprove it. We do not specifically try to prove something or disprove something. We choose experiments which will reveal truth, not support a bias. But our trials aren't like that in the courtroom. It is simply a fight between two sides of the issue. Whoever presents a better argument wins. But that doesn't constitute proof.
We have a long way to go in altering our thinking before we'll be able to tackle this one.
These suggestions certainly won't fix all the problems we have regarding our legal system. But, like a hundred lawyers at the bottom of a lake, it's a good start.