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I think that the fairness of a trial is a sliding scale rather than a boolean quantity. Juries have their own sentiments and are made of humans, not of personifications of the abstract concept of justice.
Say that unfairness is a quality between zero and one. At zero, judges and jury are perfectly impartial. At one, they are willing to disregard conclusive evidence to get the outcome they want -- convict someone of crimes they clearly did not commit, just because they hate them.
There are a lot of examples of trials where the unfairness is significantly more than zero. A black man standing accused of raping a white woman in Texas in 1952. A violent jihadist in NYC in 2003. An open Neo-Nazi accused of tax fraud in SF in 2020.
However, this does not mean that justice is better served by not having them tried, though I concede that there exists some level of unfairness where a guilty verdict is assured, and I would not want to send anyone to such a court (at least if I was not very much convinced of their guilt).
For the ICE shooters, I think the biggest difference from SOP would be that they would not get the cop bonus from prosecutors and juries. This does not automatically mean that they are found guilty.
I imagine that the verdict would be similar as if Pretti had been shot during a funeral procession of the Hell's Angels he was disturbing with other protesters. In the end, it depends on the details more than how sympathetic the defendants are. I could totally see circumstances where a jury would rightfully acquit the Hell's Angels or ICE (e.g. if the other person drew his gun and pointed it towards them). Sadly, from the facts we know of the Pretti shooting, this does not seem to be such a case. From what I have seen in the footage so far, I would even convict normal cops who were out in the streets stopping drug dealers or whatever. To excuse such trigger-happiness, I would have to assume that Minnesota is also a war zone and every day ICE agents get blown up or something.
One of the nice things about a trial is it cuts through all the shades-of-gray stuff and provides a result. There's a verdict, guilty or not guilty. If you say to the unjustly convicted man that his trial was only somewhat unfair, most people will realize you're talking nonsense.
An assured guilty is "[s]ome level of unfairness", sure. A very high level of unfairness.
I do not believe that. A Minneapolis jury will absolutely convict. Both in the Pretti case AND the Good case.
I think your binary justly convicted vs unjustly convicted only covers a minority of cases, generally the ones where there is a dispute of fact -- did he do it or not to the act.
For more cases, there is some sliding quantity differentiating legal conduct from criminal behavior. Having sex with someone who can not consent due to being blackout drunk is illegal, having sex with someone who had half a glass of wine is legal, so there is some grey area in the middle where you are less than 100% guilty but also less than 100% innocent, and a jury might reasonably reach either verdict. Likewise for killing someone while going over the speed limit.
That does not mean that it is unfair. If the jury would also convict if Pretti had shot first, injuring an ICE officer, then I would grant you that there is no justice to be found from them.
As it is, the shooters -- particularly in the Pretti case -- are not clearly innocent. "We heard a gunshot and then we put ten rounds into some nearby person we thought was armed" is a pretty big fuckup. Even normal cops might go to jail for that if it was caught from multiple cameras. Regular citizens or gang members will definitely go to jail for it. The case against the Good shooter is weaker, but also something where I would not call it a miscarriage of justice if it a guilty verdict was delivered for a similar case in resulting from a neighborhood argument.
"A jury will absolutely convict [for particular cases]" is not an argument that a trial is unfair. Few people were surprised when Charles Manson was found guilty of murder -- the known facts would have made any other outcome unlikely. The test is if they would also have convicted him of unlikely charges like invading Poland, shooting Lincoln, or using witchcraft to cause stillbirths. If jury would have been willing to convict him of these, then I would concede that he did not get a fair trial.
That isn't a fair summary of the Pretti case -- and it's a summary that could be used (unfairly) for the Rittenhouse case as well, which you may note ended in acquittal. The cops who shot Pretti may well be guilty, but I don't believe the outcome in a Minneapolis case would depend on their guilt.
So a woman is intermittently blocking the road with the car, two random guys object to this, she drives right at one of them, he shoots as he is struck, he should be found guilty? No, if those two guys weren't ICE agents, there'd be little question of the validity of their self-defense cse.
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