"The prosecution wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions"
About this Quote
Dershowitz is doing what good defense lawyers do in public: reframing “procedure” from a bureaucratic nuisance into the real battleground of credibility. The line is engineered to sound like a plain statement of motive, but it’s also a preemptive strike. By alleging the prosecution “wants to make sure” the process isn’t “truthfully presented,” he turns the state’s default posture (control the narrative, narrow the issues) into something bordering on concealment. It’s courtroom jiu-jitsu: the argument isn’t that the evidence is false, but that the way it was gathered might be tainted enough to make the evidence morally, legally, or politically unusable.
The subtext is old-school adversarial skepticism. In Dershowitz’s framing, “questions” are not distractions; they’re the point. The process - warrants, interrogations, chain of custody, informants, coercion - is where power leaves fingerprints. If a jury sees those fingerprints, the aura of certainty collapses. He’s implicitly reminding listeners that the government’s strongest evidence is often born in its murkiest moments, when expedience beats transparency.
Context matters: this is the rhetoric of the high-profile criminal case, where legal standards are fought as cultural standards. “Truthfully presented” is a loaded phrase because prosecutors see themselves as truth’s agents; he suggests they’re curators. It’s also a subtle defense of “technicalities,” recasting them as democracy’s tripwires. The sentence works because it takes a familiar suspicion - the state prefers clean stories to messy realities - and gives it a lawyerly edge: if the method can’t survive daylight, maybe the verdict shouldn’t either.
The subtext is old-school adversarial skepticism. In Dershowitz’s framing, “questions” are not distractions; they’re the point. The process - warrants, interrogations, chain of custody, informants, coercion - is where power leaves fingerprints. If a jury sees those fingerprints, the aura of certainty collapses. He’s implicitly reminding listeners that the government’s strongest evidence is often born in its murkiest moments, when expedience beats transparency.
Context matters: this is the rhetoric of the high-profile criminal case, where legal standards are fought as cultural standards. “Truthfully presented” is a loaded phrase because prosecutors see themselves as truth’s agents; he suggests they’re curators. It’s also a subtle defense of “technicalities,” recasting them as democracy’s tripwires. The sentence works because it takes a familiar suspicion - the state prefers clean stories to messy realities - and gives it a lawyerly edge: if the method can’t survive daylight, maybe the verdict shouldn’t either.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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