SUPREME COURT interrogations of attorneys appearing before it are notoriously difficult, as they should be, and so Attorney General Martha Coakley’s challenging experience and loss there last year are not so surprising (“Coakley had tough time in court,’’ Metro, Oct. 23). What is surprising, and disappointing, is the cause for which she argued before the court. Long an admirer of Coakley’s career as a prosecutor, I am heartened that she did not prevail.
It’s difficult to imagine a credible justification for denying criminal defendants’ rights to challenge any type of state’s evidence against them, and not least evidence from government crime labs. Over the past 15 years a number of crime labs have been found to have engaged in practices ranging from shoddy handling of evidence to fabricating it and giving false testimony. That the mantle of “science’’ should inoculate the government against defendants’ challenges to laboratory evidence is an idea that condemns law to the service of efficiency at the expense of basic rights and fundamental fairness.
Unfortunately, efficiency will continue to trump justice in criminal cases. The right to challenge the state’s laboratory evidence will be exercised only by those with the material means to do so. This excludes most criminal defendants, who are poor and are represented by overworked and underpaid public defenders without the resources to credibly challenge evidence such as DNA results.
With the efficiency of criminal cases already too well protected by economic inequalities, our political leaders need to be about the business of protecting the fragile justice that should animate our legal proceedings.
Peter Cleary Yeager
Framingham
The writer is a professor of sociology at Boston University who teaches courses on criminology, law, and criminal justice.
