Due process is the mechanism by which the Constitution restrains government power. And yet, across the American criminal justice system, due process is increasingly treated as negotiable, procedural rather than fundamental, symbolic rather than binding.
The question is no longer whether due process is provided by statute. It does.
The question is whether it exists in practice.
Constitutional systems are not defined solely by power. They are defined by restraint. Authority exists within limits, and those limits matter most when they are inconvenient.
When executive power begins to disregard legal boundaries, when enforcement agencies operate with diminished accountability, and when courts defer rather than constrain, the system does not merely bend. It changes character.
That truth is uncomfortable. It disrupts a story we rely on to stay unaccountable. Calling the system “broken” allows us to believe that harm is incidental, that outcomes are the result of neglect, oversight, or malfunction. It lets us talk about fixes without confronting foundations.
Nearly 40 percent of incarcerated people have a diagnosed mental illness. Another majority have trauma histories so severe they’d meet clinical criteria, if anyone bothered to check
2025 is ending with a justice system altered in ways we have not seen in more than a decade. Some of those changes move us toward fairness, accountability and real public safety. Others drag the nation backward into the failed punishment-first playbook that has never delivered safety, only overcrowded jails, destabilized communities and political theater.
In America, we like to believe that truth always wins. That, if a person is proven innocent, they walk free.
But, in the real world of the U.S. justice system, innocence is not enough.
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