Steve Zeidman, Due Process and the Failure of the Criminal Court, 42 Fordham Urban L. J. (2015). SSRN.
To anyone remotely familiar with the workings of Criminal Courts, the notion of a thorough due process system is quite foreign. More than half of the cases that enter the court end at the accused’s initial appearance before a judge. At that moment, none of the parties involved – prosecutor, defense attorney or judge – have done any kind of fact or legal investigation, and precious little is known about the charges or the accused. Cases are resolved in a matter of minutes in what has been described over and over again as assembly line justice. Rather than providing the accused with an opportunity to argue his or her case, the process has been described, derisively but accurately, as meet ‘em, greet ‘em, and plead ‘em.