Can States Make People Pay Even When Their Convictions Are Overturned?
A decade or so ago, I asked students in an upper-level legal-philosophy seminar to write an essay on the following topic: Can we, as lawyers, live “good lives” (in the philosophical sense) when we earn our daily bread from a system devoted to controlling, confining, punishing, and even killing others with scant regard for their individuality or even their guilt or innocence?
The answer my students uniformly gave was yes. The system, they said, was livable because “we do our best” with limited funds and in the face of intractable social problems. The system sometimes fails, they said, but it strives for justice.
What’s interesting is that most of my students had, by that time in their studies, seen enough to know that answer is often not true. In their daily
