Why not admit it?

What is it about prosecutors that makes that so reluctant to admit error? The Times had the sad story this week of Everton Wagstaffe, a guy locked up for decades for a crime he probably didn’t commit but who could walk out of jail if he would simply express ‘remorse’, i.e. confess for killing a teenage girl in Brooklyn in 1992.

He refuses for the simple reason that he says he did not kill her. So he sits in jail.

Whatever the merits of the Wagstaffe case, we see over and over evidence that the system can handle losing a case but cannot stand being forced to climb down. Even after a convicted individual is unmistakably proven to be innocent, prosecutors stubbornly refuse to concede. They go to any lengths—aided by a perverse system that treats itself as infallible—to extract a ‘partial’ admission of guilt and thereby justify the original railroading.

The usual explanation for this is that no one among the professional criminal class ever admits to guilt either, that all convicts deny they ever hurt a flea. This is the Johnny-hit-me-first defense, that since bad guys operate this way, the criminal justice system is forced for some reason to imitate them. Thus offenders and prosecutors are comfortably wedded to each other as flip sides of the same coin at permanent war. Winning, not truth, is the goal.

One cannot contemplate the long-lost Afghan war without wondering if some parallel psychic process is not at work among our foreign policy establishment. As the inimitable Tom Tomorrow pointed out in his latest cartoon, General Petraeus himself essentially has announced that the war is hopeless. And yet the simple words, We goofed! cannot issue from his or any other lips.

Why not? Do the powerful then lose face? Do they fear having to assign blame? Do they look like pansies to other countries? These are not rhetorical questions but quite genuine ones. I do not understand and invite explanations.