Privilege In The Criminal Justice System

While others may seem to not be bothered by the word privilege, there are others in society who believe that this term has divided many. The word privilege has been defined as the advantage that an individual may have over others, and it emerged solely from social inequality. Areas such as race, gender, age, social status, and religion continue to be a major debate in today’s society. One of the main issues that has awakened when it has come to privilege, is that people often abuse or try to use their power in order to avoid a punishment or gain some type of reward. Such cases have been clearly seen in our criminal justice system. Celebrities have the privilege of being wealthy, famous and having the means to hire top notch attorneys. Often …show more content…
In the study of: Are Celebrities Charged with Murder Likely to be Acquitted? (Wong, Goodboy, Murtagh, Hackney, & McCutcheon, 2010) The research references a lawyer name Erik Dubin author of a book where he states that the formula to acquit high-Profile cases is to take full advantage of the first amendment of the constitution. This means having the defense attorney utilize jury-tainting. In this case, it was clear that the stories Spector gave during his interview where nothing but a bunch of lies, but this did not stop his attorneys from successfully spinning a narrative about the incident to the public before Spector was convicted. Such strategy, led officials to released Spector on a 1 million dollar bail. It is interesting to see how the system was persuaded by his public figured; how justice was implemented by being pervasive bias and morally ambiguous. For example, someone of middle class, who has committed a crime, or perhaps found innocent due to lack of evidence, the system will most likely denied bailed or forced them to accept a plea deal to their case instead. This man was not only able to pay for very experienced attorneys, but he was also able to hire a team of export witnesses who testified on the behalf of the blood spatters found on his coat. These experts testified on how they were able …show more content…
Nowadays, celebrities or wealthy offenders can easily rent cells at pay-to-stay facilities where they have all the accommodations they need while doing jail or prison time. Situations like Spector’s case and many other high-profile cases have brought inequality issues in society. While everyone else have to sit in jails while their family tries all means to bail them out, to scrape together enough money to afford representation, we then have the privileged rich who can easily pay bails, be well represented, avoid humiliations of an arrest and perhaps avoid