In a segment of Pro Se, today’s installment of This American Life, radio host Ira Glass spoke with Francisco Calderon, a New York district attorney, about a case he lost¹ to a defendant who represented himself in court. I’m not a regular listener, and based on today’s episode, I won’t become one. The show’s web site describes the segment, Disorder in the Court, this way:

Earlier this year, admitted drug user Jorge Cruz decided to act as his own lawyer in an Albany, New York criminal court. Impossibly, he won. Ira talks to Francisco Calderon, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, about what it feels like to lose to an amateur.

Perhaps I have too much faith in the American legal system. I believe that judges and juries base their decisions on the evidence and on the law. Absent information to the contrary, I assume the jury didn’t find the prosecution’s evidence sufficient to convict Cruz. Glass didn’t mention this possibility, but the facts and rhetoric in Glass’s interview with Calderon suggest it.

The rhetoric (which offended me) matched the website’s subjective description of the segment. “… admitted drug user … Impossibly, he won.” Because Cruz was an admitted drug user, Glass seems to imply, he must have been guilty.

Glass never touched on the question of whether Cruz was guilty, nor on the legal standard of reasonable doubt. Calderon said he never “connected” with the jury, who he thought sympathized with the picture of Cruz as a poor drug addict who couldn’t have afforded the $5,000 worth of drugs he was accused of possessing. The felony-weight cocaine was seized from under a mattress in a hotel room registered to Cruz’s brother. Cruz admitted to using drugs in the room, but he claimed not to know there was a stash in the bed. Cruz’s brother and a third person in the room pleaded guilty to felony drug charges and were sentenced without a trial.

Calderon worried that the more he objected to Cruz in the courtroom (and no doubt he had valid objections to Cruz, who had no legal training to know what sort of questioning was allowed), the more he’d come across as a bully. Glass analogized that juries expected something like a boxing match between well-matched fighters.

A trial isn’t a fistfight between lawyers where the jury decides who landed the best uppercut. Sure, a lawyer who can’t “land a punch” might prevent the jury from understanding the facts, but (television notwithstanding) the defendant is the one on trial, not the lawyers.

If life were as simple as “he’s a drug user, he must be guilty,” we wouldn’t need much of a legal system, nor would we have the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Jorge Cruz availed himself of his constitutional right, and he chose to represent himself. He was acquitted by the jury on the most serious charge, but I’m not convinced his choice to serve as his own attorney was an important factor in the outcome.

Disorder in the Court fits the American narrative that champions the underdog and devalues experience, education, process, and authority. (The irony² isn’t lost on me that this same narrative helps boost the blogger ego.) Yet at the same time, it whispers a contrasting message that authority is always right, and that when it fails, something else is to blame. Taken only a bit further, these are the narratives that give rise to and sustain Joe the Plumber, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin – narratives that are as resolutely American “as apple pie,” but that verge on the truly distasteful and dangerous.

Other segments of Pro Se were also disappointing. In Swak Down, a former student teacher tells how he addressed a violent incident by deciding to “forgo all the rules, and administer frontier justice on the fly,” believing (still) that no other approach would have worked. In Underling Gets an Underling, a former production assistant tells the story of how she handled her frustration about how she was being treated: she placed a phony Craigslist ad for her own production assistant, hired an unwitting fellow, and then treated him as unfairly and dishonestly as she felt her boss was treating her.

This American Life may or may not be representative of American life, but it left a bad taste in my mouth today. It needs a big dash of opprobrium at least.

¹ A contemporary account of the case in the Albany Times Union notes that while Cruz was acquitted of felony cocaine possession, the jury did find him guilty of misdemeanor heroin possession, and he was sentenced to time already served in the Albany County jail.

² I know, I know.