What you see is what you get?

It is likely that the problem that Mexico’s criminal justice system is facing today is rooted in high levels of impunity that are often associated with high levels of corruption. An open and transparent system composed of agencies with separate functions that oversee each other can provide at least the basic conditions for fair and just trials and endows the system with a level of legitimacy that the current one would seem to lack.

So argues Juan Enrique Vargas in the University of Pittsburg Law School journal, The Jurist. Vargas is the Director of CEJA, the Centro de Estudios de Justicia en las Americas, in Santiago, Chile.  His argument is that Mexico’s new legal procedures (open trials and oral testimony, as opposed to the reliance on documentation still used by Brazil) will expose legal favoritism to public scrutiny.

I’m not sure that’s completely true — under even the best legal system “the poor and the rich are likewise prosecuted for sleeping under bridges or stealing bread to feed their children” — but the PERCEPTION of favoritism will at least be exposed.  Whether it will lower crime rates (or just the perception that people get away with crimes) is yet to be seen.   However, it should make Mexican nota rotas even more interesting, given the chance of some of the more dramatically inclined criminal class (and their attorneys) to perform before an audience.

By the way, the first oral federal trial is coming up:  an appeal in a rape case.  Given the novelty of open trials, I’m not sure how the Mexican media is going to deal with the sensitivities surrounding sexual assault and similar issues.    If the assault victim has not been named in press reports when a rapist is arrested, she would never be identified. Under the new system, if her name and reputation is at issue, I don’t know how it’s going to be reported.

This will be a test case in more than one way.