Sudden Insight

I came to the realization the other day that I am completely for the death penalty in principle but I would have great difficulty ever administering it in our current legal system. I belive that no one should ever be convicted of a crime and punished unless there is no doubt that he is guilty. The people or person deciding should be certain that he and no one else commited the crime. Yet we not only send people who are innocent to jail, we also execute them. Obviously, something is fundamentally wrong with our system. I believe what is wrong is that the courts have passed the point of information saturation and reached a point of information irrelevance and disinformation. Technology has advanced so far that we are able to collect thousands of pieces of data, but sadly the ability of the decision makers to parse the data has not kept stride. Courts often call in experts but usually in the form of expert witnesses. These witnesses have been called because they will support one side of the case. In the end judges and jurors are left to choose not based on evidence but on credibilty or from the preponderance of data presented by one side which is really a function of resources. That is to say, the side with the most money wins.
The adversarial system of law is broken. It is engineered to produce justice from competion. Two sides compete and it is hoped that justice will prevail. Justice cannot prevail unless the competitors are competing to ensure justice. Lawyers now compete only to win. This leaves judges and jurors to sort out the mess wiht fewer resources than the lawyers. What is needed is limits for expenditure by either side in civil and criminal preceedings and no limits on what can be spent by judges to illuminate the case using impartial expertise. Power needs to be taken from the combatants and given to the referee. Bingo! Justice is served.