Ep 377 - Some AI, Dancing Robots and WCF Legal Upheavals, Prisons, Police, Courts and RPS

Episode 377 of RevolutionZ starts with a brief segment that describes some major robot and AI innovations as warm up for more related commentary to come in the future. When AI can imitate any face and voice, what anchors truth? Who decides what justice looks like when evidence itself is in doubt? When robots can dance and do gymnastics while they juggle feathers make and implement plans, nurture children and help the infirm, what can't they do? What do we do?

Then the episode pivots to courts, cops, and cages. Miguel Guevara interviews Robin Zimmerman, a former criminal defense attorney, who lays bare how the adversarial model is fueled by warped incentives to reward convictions and legal theatrics over truth. He traces his break from “organized cruelty” to building justice along with RPS. He describe activism to reorient pay and prestige from wins to effort, and explains how reimagine trials to surface facts, context, and repair. He explores how lie detection tech and deepfakes collide with due process, and why no single blueprint will fix jurisprudence. Instead, he and RPS argue we need context-driven methods, transparent checks and balances, and an ethos that centers dignity.

Next, Peter Cabral provides a ground level view: the gang as survival, prison as a factory of harm, and the strategy that changed everything—nonviolent work stoppages that spread by discipline, solidarity, and visible dignity. He explains how prison strikes reframed demands from modestly better conditions to real participation, living wages, rich education, and preparation for life beyond the walls. He tracks how reforms gained ground via civilian control of policing, demilitarization, restorative justice, and a still bolder proposition to replace prisoner exile with structured, humane communities focused on accountability and growth. Separation for safety remains; degradation does not.

 Who sets incentives? Who verifies claims? Who pays the price when systems fail? Our judicial activists don’t pretend to have every answer. They do insist on a north star: fewer victims, fewer cages, and institutions that measure success by truth, repair, and human dignity. 

Transcript

Setting The Stage: AI’s Surge

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our three hundred and seventy-seventh consecutive episode titled WCF Legal Upheaval and AI Again. And it continues our episode sequence based on chapters from the forthcoming book The Wind Cries Freedom, an oral history of the next American Revolution. But also, as with other recent episodes that draw from that work, this one begins with some brief treatment as well regarding a topic from our time and place. And this time that topic is AI, artificial intelligence. And about it, I want only to warm up a bit for what I hope to provide another time. That hope is spurred by things I have recently seen and heard, read and viewed. A good many people seem to think the key information to convey about AI is every inadequacy they can spot and in particular the expenditures and investments in AI that are so far massively outstripping revenues and profits. I have been seeing quite different things as well. Not that any of that is false, but different things. Roughly what, four months ago, I would watch videos of robots displaying their talents. They would walk, sort of, and even sort of run. They would lift boxes, they would look like clumsy well not even adroit, well robots. And what has happened since? Well now these entities walk, like I am tempted to say an Egyptian for those with memories that go back that far. That is they walk like we do. They run like we do, not clumsy, but instead smooth looking. And they also do gymnastics, but not like we, meaning you and I do, meaning most of us do, which is not at all. More like what gymnasts do. They also pick up boxes, and now they pick up feathers too. So they are smooth and fluid, flexible and so so strong. They can dance. They can dance in groups, in unison, they can dance along with people. And they're still improving. Put an AI inside of that, and what have you got? Back then, a few months, but in AI times generations ago, AIs didn't write as well, they didn't calculate as well as they do now. But now they undertake projects at a command, which can include creating a menu of tasks needed to accomplish the goal requested, conceiving methods to do the tasks, and then doing them. They are intimate with the internet, which earlier was considered a really, really dumb thing to prepare AIs to do to allow them to do. Of course they also create art, video and music. They did all that sort of months ago as well, but now they do it all much better, and they do it for more people. Young people and some older people use them for all manner of things, to create and even to a point that will keep growing, to conceive task lists, and then implement items on the lists. They read for people, they read to people, they converse with people, they answer phones and they make calls, and there are a whole lot of them, not a handful of different ones, not tens of them, not even hundreds of them. That is, there are hundreds of different ones, not hundred of instantations of one. As a quick indication, there are about thirty thousand AI associated companies in the US, and ninety thousand worldwide, and over five hundred of those are valued at over a billion dollars. Nearly eighty percent of businesses worldwide use some form of AI. More than fifty percent of all new articles posted on the internet are estimated to have at least twenty percent AI written content. Teachers complain that students not only use AI to write and summarize reading, students have begun to literally ask, what is the point of my reading anything? I can let AI do it for me in a tiny fraction of the time and summarize it. Told by critics that AIs may miss something, they respond they miss less than I do. I could go on and on, but you might reasonably say so what? AI is proving its value, and so people are increasingly using it. And that is one way to look at what's going on. Here are a few other ways. AI now linked to the internet and thus also to other AIs, and that situation usually increases the danger of AIs enacting changes that hurt humans, perhaps irrevocably, whether they have that purpose or not. AI can find a cure for some disease, can also unleash a new one. What's the obstacle? AIs able to produce video and audio that is indistinguishable from humans and even from specific dead or live humans can establish repositories and themselves create false reports. Indeed, this is already so prevalent and growing so fast in its abundance and its accuracy that soon, if not already, our capacity to know what is true and what isn't is likely to disappear. Arguably even when we have some evidence of our own to assess, much less than when we have to rely on reports from well AIs. Until now, clickbait titles bent the truth and outright lied mercilessly. Ideologically driven content and biased reports about events and options bent our perceptions. If you imputed clickbait titles into being evidence, you were deceived. If you blindly read or otherwise followed ideologically driven media, you were deceived. But now it is not just titles that mislead, not just bias. The whole content of videos, audios, and text often bends perceptions and beliefs in incredible ways. And I do not mean that they inject occasional subtle ideological biases. I mean they pervasively inject flat out full on fabrications. As best I can see, that is already here. It is already preponderant. Yes, it is worse for shorts on YouTube than it is for long works, but the trajectory is what matters. Longer and longer pieces are appearing, not just AI helping responsible communications by taking on some rote tasks, but AIs as source and judge and jury. And then there is also unleashing new diseases that they design, surveilling us, taking jobs, twisting messages, aiming guns. But such intentionally vile uses are not all of it. There are also the debits that arise when AIs are not used to lie and do not attack us, the steady usurpment of what humans do, leaving humans with less to do. Sometimes less of what fulfills us, and even less of what makes us human at all. The whole unfolding dynamic is proceeding at incredible pace, with neither you nor I nor anyone you or I know at the helm, or even a little at the helm. Instead, it is a bunch of CEOs in command. You've heard perhaps the label AGI artificial general intelligence. What does it mean? It means an entity not human, thus artificial, that can do anything humans can do, thus general, and do all of it better and even hugely massively better than any human can do it, thus intelligence. Now why would you want to allot an absolutely humongous amount of wealth and creativity to creating that? You might tell yourself you want to do it to enjoy the fruits thereby generated. But in fact, technobros, technobrothers, techno nerds, and governments in charge want to do it to lord over entities in place of uppity, hungry, potentially rebellious humans. And until they aren't, they are in charge, deciding and enacting, or they are until they are not. Food for thought. But now, to start this episode proper, so to speak, we have our oral history of the next American Revolution interviewer, Miguel Guevara, interviewing two of the book's future revolutionaries. That is, we meet Robin Zimmerman at his home outside Chicago, and along with Peter Cabral, who we met earlier, they report on RPS views and practices regarding the judiciary, prison, police, and the still unresolved issue of how to have justice beyond legality. So to start, Miguel asks, Robin, you were a criminal trial lawyer who handled countless major crime cases, but you ultimately rebelled at the deep injustices baked into the criminal justice system. You became active not only in defending RPS members targeted by the state, but also in shaping RPS conceptions and policies around legal and judicial affairs. You even went on to serve as the first shadow Supreme Court justice. Do you remember how you first became radical? I was in courtrooms daily, dressed in suits and cloaks and procedures. But what I came to see, what became impossible to ignore, was that I wasn't practicing law. I was participating in a system of organized cruelty, a legal machine fueled by vengeance, fear, and social control, not justice. It wasn't a search for truth, it was a game, with rules rigged in favor of the powerful. Human lives were treated like poker chips on a table managed by well dressed agents of the state. I got angry before I got clear. Some days I left court feeling sick from what I'd done, or failed to stop from occurring. You plea bargain away someone's future just to save them from an even longer prison sentence, a sentence your particular judge and prosecutor are eager to impose because it will look good on their resume. The system prods and pokes too many good people into bad roles. That's not justice, that's extortion with paperwork. And what about getting a guilty client off, only to know they were returning to a world with no second chances, where the only school skills they had were the ones prison had taught them, which often mostly meant how to survive and how to harm. Our prisons did not rehabilitate. They hardened, they degraded, they recycled people back into the system like discarded parts of a broken machine. That's when I began to read about law, about history, about power. I saw the hypocrisy laid bare. Steal pills for your sick kid and you go to jail. Manufacture addictive drugs for profit, devastate whole communities, and you get honored in Washington. Yes, one who goes way too far might get a cumupance, and yet even that felt like an exception that proved the widers spread rule. It was Orwellian, Kafka esque, it was real. Eventually it hit me. There's a difference between upholding the law and serving justice. That real realization came like a thunderclap after a prison visit with a client who had no business being behind bars. I walked out furious, I walked out changed. From that moment I knew my allegiance would not be to the courts or the codes, but to the people, to justice, to dignity. That session led me straight to RPS. Miguel S while we are on your personal experience, as I have asked others, can you perhaps recount for us a particularly inspiring or moving experience for you from the period of RPS's rise? Our first legal workers conference, that was pivotal, but what shaped me just as much, maybe even more, were countless moments in the trenches. As a criminal defense attorney, I listened to people who had lived lives full of hardship and brutality, often laced with addiction, anger, and yes, sometimes horrific acts. But beneath that there was always something deeper pain, resilience, love for a relative, a refusal to quit even after society had quit on them. The criminal justice system grinds people down. It tells the poor, the black, the brown, the desperate, you are disposable. And when people fight back or even just try to survive, too often they're labeled criminals. You see enough of that, and you understand the real crime is poverty, the real violence is inequality. And on the other side, prosecutors and judges, often with degrees from elite universities, armed with contempt for the accused and with devotion to their own career ladders. Such figures weren't seeking truth. They were tallying winds, clearing dockets, enforcing a status quo rooted in fear and punishment. Most saw themselves as gatekeepers of order, even as they fed chaos back into the communities they policed. Others soldiered on, I suspect, often very ill at ease. Maybe even some were nauseated by the system they had to enforce. Miguel asks, What about defense attorneys? Many were barely better. Some wanted to help, sure, but most, especially those at the top, get the check, win the case, move on. Don't rock the boat. Even in the adversarial model, both sides were bound by the same corrupt scaffolding. The law claimed to be blind, but in truth it was blindfolded on purpose to ignore suffering, to maintain hierarchy. The whole structure was sick, not because of the people in it, but because of the roles it forced them to play. Good people became tools of a bad system, just like the defendants they judged. That was my turning point. I could not continue as a cog in a machine that devoured people's lives. RPS showed me an alternative, not just in rhetoric, but in structure and values, and most of all in possibility. Miguel asks RPS has recognized that the advocate model in which lawyers work on behalf of clients, regardless of guilt or innocence, makes considerable sense. Can you perhaps summarize that? Yes, because justice should not be reserved for the articulate or the well connected. We can't have a system where the outcome of a trial hinges on whether someone can afford the most aggressive lawyer. If truth is to matter, then we need defenders for everyone, equally trained, equally available. The ideal was there, buried beneath centuries of bias. Defense attorneys should work to secure justice for their clients no matter what. Prosecutors should only pursue charges that they believe are just. But in practice, that metal that model was warped by inequality. Defense attorneys polished tactics to twist facts. Prosecutors sought convictions above all else. And that was just the criminal justice side of things. The civil side was about environmental cases, tenant landlord cases, accident and injury cases, medical malpractice, buying and selling big properties, and so on. It had no prosecutors, only plaintiffs and defendants. On this side are a huge number of folks who go to law school hoping to do environmental law to help fight for a cleaner environment. But other than working for a few big environmental orgs like Sierra Club, most of the environmental law jobs are defending corporations. The plaintiffs in these cases are often the poor getting killed by pollution, say, or who have very little money to offer their attorneys, while the defendants, like the cigarette companies, etc., are able to hire the high priced Ivy League trained lawyers who play golf with the judges. Miguel asks, I want to go back to the ideal you mentioned. RPS has qualms about this approach. Defense attorneys work to secure justice for their clients no matter what. Prosecutors only pursue charges they believe are just. Yes, it incorporates the same kind of fallacy that capitalism sells us. Chase private economic gain and society will thrive, but it doesn't. It never has. Likewise, pursue victory over truth in court, and somehow justice will emerge. That too is a fantasy. Who lies or cheats best, who had the most resources to do it with emerges victorious. And even if the ideal were in some sense sound, the practice is corrupted by incentives. Prosecutors get promoted for putting people away. Defense attorneys get paid more and get more clients to charge later when their clients walk free. Truth becomes an afterthought to victory by any means. That's why RPS took this head on. From the beginning, we rejected income structures that rewarded winning over working. We fought for equitable pay based on effort, duration, and onerousness of one's work, not verdicts. But we also knew that reforming incentives wasn't enough. We needed to rethink trials themselves. We needed new forms of conflict resolution that didn't mimic war games. We're still figuring it out, but at least now we're asking the right questions. Miguel asks, so jurisprudence is still pretty much an open question for RPS, even as it is moving toward victory in society? Yes, because if we're honest, no one has all the answers. The courtroom rituals, the robes, the gavels, they're symbols of authority, not of wisdom. We've inherited a system from empires and monarchs, not from communities rooted in justice. So even as we move forward, we know we're still building. We don't pretend the answers are simple, but we do insist that the goal is clear. A system where justice is not a luxury, not a gamble, not a show, but a right, a human right, and that's a battle worth waging. It's quite hard to conceive an approach to investigating and adjudicating in cases in ways that virtually guarantee truth and just outcomes. My guess is there is probably no one right way. Rather, it may be necessary to have a number of different trial methodologies where selection of which methodology to use in each case depends on the context of the particular case, and as a first step to decide before proceeding with actual adjudication. Though of course, in that case how a method is chosen becomes an issue. I should perhaps add that another factor is the new technology for knowing when someone is lying. That lie detection has become so portable, like in your pocket, and inexpensive, and thus so prevalent introduces considerable new plex complexity to trials and to daily life too. We're getting close to a situation where lying without detection is impossible. And as many commentators have been exploring, that is a big deal in many parts of life, both personal and social, including trials. Of course, on the other hand, deep fakes have opposite implications. Miguel asks, let's leave aside the science and engineering for another book and emphasize the social relations and personal experiences. What are some aspects of judicial innovation that RPS has arrived at supporting and some of the processes at root of that? After the opening RPS convention, we saw something both unexpected and deeply hopeful. Lawyers, yes, even prosecutors, and certainly legal aides, clerks, and trial assistants, began coming together to rethink their roles. But what still happened? Out is this the most promising desires didn't come from the top of the legal pyramid. They came from those below. Families of the incarcerated, over police neighborhoods, the people who bore the weight of legal quote justice on their backs. Those were the real architects of the early changes. The first targets weren't fancy courtrooms or judges' chambers. They were patrols, prisons, punishments, the places where raw state power grinds against vulnerable lives. In the United States, the legal system, especially policing, had long ago detached itself from any meaningful connection to justice. What we saw wasn't a few bad apples, but a systemically rotten structure that relied on violence, particularly against black and brown communities, to maintain social control. And the system wasn't merely broken. It was functioning exactly as designed, to suppress, intimidate, and discard even when that wasn't the desire of its participants. Awareness of this wasn't new, but it reached a fever pitch in the legal chaos that Trump imposed well before RPS was founded. Videos of police executions, media attention on incarceration rates that dwarfed the rest of the world, stories of broken families and destroyed futures. The state did not protect, it punished, it did not nurture, it confined. So early RPS organizing was rooted in demands from below. These included community control of police, new standards for training and accountability, ending militarization, and most of all, a shift in focus from punishment to rehabilitation. That in turn meant changing the roles and incentives, not just for cops, but also for judges, wardens, clerks, and even attorneys. No more rewarding the most conviction or the harshest sentences. The idea was if the system creates harm, then every part of it must be transformed by the values we say we believe in justice, dignity, community. McGill asked, Peter, and this was recorded at his at his home in Miami, a little out of order, but I think I forgot to ask earlier, do you remember your radicalization? A friend of mine got gunned down in a drive by. Another friend joined a gang, ended up on the other end of a gun barrel more than once, and didn't make it out. Me, I got pulled into that world too, when I was still a kid. It wasn't about wanting to do wrong, it was about finding your people, about survival. The gang gave you a crew that had your back, a way to earn when your world had no jobs, no schools, no mercy. So when friends died, I felt it deep, but I didn't change course right away. Then came later, visiting friends behind bars, hearing what they'd been through. I sat in court a few times just to see it for myself. To the practitioners, I am sure it looked sensible and even just. To me, well, it made my skin crawl. Then I got arrested, wrongfully, though that part hardly mattered. Because what changed me wasn't just the injustice of my own case. It was realizing that prison was not rehabilitation, not justice, it was a damn factory, churning out more pain, more broken lives. A place that taught people to hurt, not to heal, a place designed for control and profit, not for dignity. That realization that prison was a disease chewing through lives, that was my turning point. I could stay on that path, make the most of it, play the game like everyone else trapped inside it, or I could turn and walk, and I did. I chose something else. Once I did, it all came fast. I found I had something to give, a voice, a knack for hearing people, a knack for connecting. Organizing, speaking, showing up, I used what I had for something better. I guess I just found a new gang, only this one was building, not breaking. Miguel asks, You were very active in early work around prisons. How do you see these matters? I guess with my own tilt. When I went to prison I was arrested on trumped up charges, and my conviction was overturned only after I served a few years. So I was obviously familiar firsthand with that kind of insanely vile injustice, the incarceration of ignorance, which, I should say, isn't always a matter of trumped up charges, but is often due to bureaucratic pressure, racism, and laws that punish victimless crimes with prison terms. So yeah, I knew it from inside. They locked me up on charges that didn't stick, got them thrown out eventually, but I still serve time. And look, that kind of injustice isn't rare. Most often it's just the cold machinery of the system grinding down on people, especially if you're poor or black or both. Sometimes the crime isn't even a crime at all, just someone living the only way they know how. But the truth was, on entering prison, I didn't have a good idea what to expect. I walked in there blind. Only things I knew about prison came from the big screen and the street. But once you're on the inside, you learn fast. You see guys who shouldn't be there, you see guys doing twenty for something a rich man would even be booked for, and worst of all, you see what the place does to people. It doesn't heal them, doesn't lift them up, it turns them harder, meaner, makes them better at surviving in the cage, and worse at living free outside it. Yes, there are exceptions, but that is most present. Some folks get polished up in the Ivy League's halls, others get hardened in cement cells. Either way, you're learning the ropes of your assigned world. Only difference is one of those worlds is gilded and the others caged. So I saw injustice and horribly harsh mistreatment of the innocent and near innocent, but I also saw an insane and unnecessary transformation of many inmates into what they had not been before, that is, into incorrigible, sadistic lifetime criminals. And that was the worst part. Seeing people break, not because they were born broken, but because prison bent them that way. You saw folks walk in one kind of man and walk out another, harder, angrier, colder. And that transformation, it wasn't fate, it was the system doing what it was built to do. At first you're just keeping your head above water. You find your people, the ones who talk like you, think like you, want more than just to scrape by. And slowly we started sharing ideas, books, letters, stories, and those RPS materials, man, they lit a fire, gave shape to the thing we were already feeling in our bones. After some time we were ready to make some noise. We didn't have much idea what it could achieve, though we knew what we wanted. So we called a one day strike. We learned and after a bit called another, in time, turnout grew enormous. Prison labor is effectively slave labor. You work at command, constantly anticipating violent repression. You get back for your efforts bare subsistence, your every breath is overseen. We didn't know if we'd change anything, but we knew we had to try, so we struck. The whole place went quiet. That silence said everything. It said we weren't machines, said we deserved more, and for the first time we felt our own power. Well our one day strike was for demands about prison relations, and the following week, celebrating our scale, we thought, wait a minute, we work at command. We anticipate repression, we earn subsistence, our every breath is overseen. Why not strike for a living wage? Why not strike to participate in the decisions that affect us? Why not strike to improve our current lives? Why not strike to win changes, to prepare us for outside by developing citizen needed habits? That first taste of resistance, it stuck. We started thinking bigger. What if we didn't just want better treatment, but real say in how we lived, real work, real preparation to be part of something when we got out? We started dreaming with our eyes open. We began to challenge the behavior of our guards and the rules for visiting and for having books and internet access. We demanded our own classes and sought good wages, conditions, and other rights. It wasn't easy talking with inmates whose mindsets were understandably cautious, hostile, and often violent. It wasn't easy diminishing racial hostility. You can't just snap your fingers and bring people together, especially when they've been fed nothing but fear and rage for years. But we talked, we listened, we tried, and slowly all started to come down. So that was the grounds on which we began a more sustained prison work strike, and that strike, as everyone knows, spread quickly from prison to prison, and the support from outside was enormous. Repression, as per our plans, was made ineffective. It wasn't that the guards couldn't brutalize us into temporary submission, they could, and they did, often. But we didn't fight back, and that not only won us tremendous support from outside, but also limited the violence we had to endure. Yeah, they came down hard, but we didn't raise fists. We held our ground, stood silent, and got back up every damn time. And that restraint, that dignity, it moved people, out there and inside too. We would back off, seemingly lose, and within days we'd be back on strike, just as we had been before. I don't know if it had an effect, but the night before the first strike the prison movie had been Cool Hand Luke. That was a big mistake. Like Luke, a prison favorite, we got knocked down, but we got back up over and over, and we took Luke one better. We didn't individually heroically escape our hell only to be repeatedly hauled back. We collectively repeatedly attacked our hell, so in the end there would be no hell to haul anyone back to. Leek was a hero to a lot of us, but where he stood alone, we stood together. He ran, we dug in, and we weren't trying to break out. We were trying to break through for everyone. Miguel asks Robin from his session at a restaurant outside Chicago, how would you sum up the changes in courts and policies so far in the RPS experience? We never pretended to have all the answers. Even today, RPS hasn't arrived at a final vision of what courts or the legal system should look like in a new society. But not having every detail mapped out didn't stop the movement from acting, and acting boldly. Some reforms were immediate and measurable. In places where RPS inspired changes took hold, we saw prison populations drop dramatically. Conditions in prisons transformed, more programs, more restorative justice, fewer cages. Many police departments were put under direct civilian control by the very people who had once lived in fear of them. There were new forms of training, new codes of conduct, new checks on brutality, but the deeper question remained, what should justice look like in a truly humane society? One radical proposal we began exploring, a proposal still evolving, was about the nature of incarceration itself. What if we stopped imagining punishment exile and started imagining it as inclusion? What if, instead of massive supermax prisons, we had rehabilitative communities? Islands, perhaps, not as prisons, but as places where individuals who had harmed others could learn to heal and be healed, to grow within carefully structured communities designed for support and transformation rather than retribution. It's a controversial idea, but ask yourself, what's more dangerous? Building humane spaces for those who've committed harm to find accountability and growth, or maintaining the violent status quo that turns jails into schools for despair. We're not naive. Some people pose a real danger, but far more often people act out of desperation, out of trauma, out of systemic deprivation. We must separate those who are a threat from society, yes, but not to punish them as animals, rather to treat them as human beings in need of something society has never given them, a way forward that does not depend on dominating others. These are not abstract debates. They grow out of uprisings in prisons, protests on the street, grassroots organizing in legal offices and community halls. These conversations and experiments will take years, maybe longer, but they are happening now thanks to RPS and to the people who demanded a justice system worthy of that name. Miguel asks, Robin, I'd like to ask you something personal, if you don't mind. As a criminal trial lawyer, in your younger years, did you ever defend anyone accused of murder in a state where the death penalty was on the table? If so, how did you feel standing in that courtroom, knowing what was at stake? And on the other side, did you ever knowingly get someone off the hook, someone you knew was guilty, and see them walk free? How did that sit with you then? And how does it sit with you now? Yes to both. On the former, I did about fifteen murder trials where the death penalty was on the table. I avoided those cases whenever I could for the reasons you're hinting at. It's one thing to fight for someone's freedom, it's another to carry the weight of knowing that if you lose your client, someone you've come to know, even to care for, will be put to death by the state. Still, I lost three. Two were eventually exonerated when new evidence emerged. One narrowly escaped execution when the death penalty was abolished. He's still in prison, waiting, like so many others, for the broader transformation of the system. I believe he'll see freedom yet. Now winning freedom for someone I knew to be guilty, but of nonviolent or minor offense, that was different. In those cases I felt relief and even satisfaction. The punishments being pursued were absurd, cruel, and out of all proportion to the crime. So helping those folks avoid that harm, that felt right. But there were harder cases, yes, I sometimes want a case where my client was guilty of a violent crime, and once even of murder. That one haunts me. It was wrenching for me and surely for the victim's family. What if he hurt someone again? This is why we must be honest. Fixing this system is no simple task. And yet, in this system, this brutal unequal machine, the only chance of any kind for justice is for defense attorneys to do their jobs always without fail. Even when it means our best effort might let someone go free who should not. The alternative, a lawyer deciding guilt alone or standing down because the system itself is flawed, would not be justice, it would be surrender. If I had to sum it up, the United States claims to live under the rule of law, but laws are just tools. Justice must be the goal, and when laws, however noble in theory, are used to violate justice, then justice must prevail over law. Of course there is more to all this, to the overall legal system. Too much for a conversational interview. For example, a police function ought to be accomplished how? Incarceration should occur where? Miguel asks. Can't cover every issue, can we? After all, this isn't a complete history. It is interviewees like yourself recounting their paths and experiences, and especially the lessons they took. But it is not some kind of comprehensive picture of well everything. On the other hand, one thing I ought to get some answers about is who tells society stories, who conveys facts, who publicly explores possibilities. The new media, no doubt. And that said, that conveyed, that reported. This is Mike Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.