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A few years ago I was engineering a lifeguard tower in a South San Jose park. They wanted to install a water closet so the lifeguard would not have to be away from his post too long. We were told it still had to be wheelchair accessible, even though you would have to carry a wheelchair up, so no john. -- Walter E. Wallis, Palo Alto, Calif.
You quote the researchers (May 1, letter May 10):
The implication, says Dee Wood Harper, one of the researchers and a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University in New Orleans, is that "if this mindless software can determine who is going to die and who is not going to die, then there's some arbitrariness here in the [United States justice] system."
They have it backwards. The fact that "mindless software" can accurately predict outcomes is evidence that those outcomes are *not* arbitrary, but closely follow the kind of simple rules that can be programmed into a computer.
Whether this is a good thing, or not, is still a valid question. -- Kent Budge, Los Alamos, N.M.
Thanks for reprinting Stuart Taylor's letter to the Washington Monthly, which was very informative. I believe the heart of our litigation problem in this country is the belief in the magical powers of the jury. You had a quote from a plaintiff lawyer stating that while a jury seldom understands the medical issues in a malpractice case, it can accurately judge credibility. The Taylor letter cites research indicating that claims against doctors "are unfounded in as many as 80 percent of the cases" (I believe that number to be too low.) It doesn't seem obvious to me that by taking the oath of a juror someone suddenly acquires outstanding skill at judging credibility.
Whether the tort system costs a lot of money (as you and I think) or a rather small amount (Senator Kennedy's position) is an interesting question, but it is not the test we would apply to, say, capital cases. If 80% of persons hauled into court as criminal defendants on capital charges were wrongly accused, the risk to any one of us of being wrongly charged (or, after further errors, wrongly put to death) might still be trivially low, but we would still consider the system intolerable. I do not want a large sector of the civil-law system to have an 80% mistake rate, especially when that mistake rate includes false charges against people who devote their lives to treating the ill. "Your ineptness caused this child's disablement!".
Thanks again for overlawyered.com. -- Bill Nuesslein, White Plains, N.Y.
Regarding Johnnie Cochran's life and career (Mar. 30): My job at the time allowed me to watch most of the fiasco that was the OJ trial. Although Cochran did an adequate job defending OJ, and a very good job arguing the case at the end, the real credit for the verdict goes to the two main prosecutors. Through their bungling and murky case presentation, they made a not guilty verdict possible. Much abuse has been heaped on the head of the jury, but in my mind, the verdict was justified due to the ineptitude of the prosecution.
I also found it most interesting to watch the court proceedings and then watch the news coverage of the same. Sometimes it felt like we were watching different trials. Nothing points up the ineptitude of the press more that watching them report on something about which you are familiar.
The OJ trial was fun to watch, but I'm sure glad I don't have to do it ever again. -- Les Weil, Rio Rico, Ariz.