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In the Summer of 2020, you would have thought that criminal justice and police reform were the most important issues in America. There was even a bipartisan effort in the US Senate to try to find common legislative ground. Oh what a difference a year makes.

Today everything else is more important From Facebook to Kyrsten Sinemas wardrobe choices, from Squid Game to infrastructure. Perhaps this is a clue as to why crime control has historically trumped the rights of defendants, and why it has been so hard to legally and legislatively limit the power of law enforcement.

The dean of UC Berkeleys School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky author of Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights joins us on this weeks WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about the legal framework behind criminal justice and police reform, and in addition, to remind us why presidents cannot be above the law.

Chemerinsky details the long history of the courts in virtually ignoring the rights of defendants. Often counter to the Fourth Amendment and to the Constitution itself, it is very rare for the courts, either federal or state, to champion defendants rights.

Chemerinsky explains why it was only the Warren Court, in the early- to mid-60s, that ever made any real effort to protect those rights. For most of our history, things like the right to remain silent (the Miranda warning) and the right of a suspect to have a lawyer and to be protected from illegal search, were not the norm.

However, even after the Warren Court, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, he argues, courts and legislatures have still acted on behalf of criminal control and yet none of it has made us more secure.

Chemerinsky reminds us that, even with our longtime emphasis on crime control over criminal rights, we have only 5 percent of the worlds population and 25 percent of the worlds prisoners.

He chastises his own legal community for ignoring the problem for too long and says that it is only through legislation, on both the state and federal level, that some of these issues can be rectified. Relying on the courts, he says, to protect criminal rights or to hold police accountable has been a fools errand.

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What the Hell Happened to Police and Criminal Justice Reform? - WhoWhatWhy