Related-
Citing flawed forensics, Va. governor pardons man who spent years in prison in deadly arson.
Possibly hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned, even executed based on now-debunked arson 'science'. Only a handful have been officially exonerated.

On the other hand, it's good to see that the system, while far from perfect, changes to accommodate new understanding.

What ever happened to:
"It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished.... when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever" That was John Adams expanding on Blackstone's formulation—"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

Because it's not in the interest of the judges and prosecutors. They bank their careers on how many 'bad guys' they put away. When they're finally exonerated decades later, those judges and prosecutors have long since retired so there are no consequences for their negligence.

Prisons are a private for profit entity.

See the judge getting paid to send juveniles to prison, literally to meet a quota.

I'm not dismissing that at all. The very concept of "presumed innocent" is revolutionary and a tremendous human achievement. But humans are, and always will be fallible. The law and its execution (ahem) will also never be perfect. Yes, that stinks, but it's pretty damned great that the folks who set it up understood that law and government are not perfect and they built in mechanisms for future improvement. The Preamble to the Constitution lays it out, that we can only work toward perfection, making incremental improvements. We take it for granted these days, but as far as human history goes, it's another revolutionary idea. It could be better and faster, but Hell, it's still fantastic that it works at all.

Yes but the changes are for the most part localized and scatter-shot, often resisted by elected and appointed politicians and prosecutors.

Yes, as I said, it's far from perfect. Like the scientific method, it moves ahead in short bursts and sometimes stumbles backward, but the underlying design of the system is such that in the long run, things improve.

It's like the legalization of same sex marriage; it was a local, scatter-shot progress, resisted by elected and appointed politicians and prosecutors, but eventually, it became national law.

I think I'll wait a while before watching this. Maybe next summer.

All in all, it's one of the more honest and least corrupt in the world.
This statement on its own may be true, but it's also an inappropriate, unfair comparison. If you compare the US criminal justice system to the developed world, you get a different picture- with vast numbers of people detained and incarcerated for little to no reason other than economic (i.e. unable to pay petty fines), assets seized with zero due-process, endemic and institutional racial profiling (often with lethal results), and of course the largest per-capita incarceration rate in the entire world. And we're virtually the only developed nation that maintains an inherently unjust and barbaric death penalty. And despite the proliferation of video documentation, still very little real accountability on the part of law enforcement. The actual fact is that for a wealthy, developed country that at least aspires to democratic ideals, our criminal justice system is in a pretty sorry state.

Well, there is certainly no excuse for the treatment of drug users in the possession of small quantities. It is outrageous that there are still thousands in jail on long sentences for simple possession, sometimes only of marijuana. But that's the US legal system and laws, not the police. They simply enforce. The main part of the original post was about the police. And binge watching maybe.

It's important to remember that the police act simply as the front lines of the criminal justice system as a whole, at the behest of political leaders enforcing political agendas. Sure it's not the cops' fault that we have mass incarceration because of petty drug crimes, but it is the cops who are using drug laws to carry out aggressive asset seizures with no due process and it's the cops harassing and shooting unarmed citizens based mainly on their skin color. It's also the cops under pressure from ambitious prosecutors trying to be 'tough on crime', who can't be bothered with mere technicalities like guilt or innocence.

We have police to protect the Establishment and maintain the status quo.

I guess the police kind of maintain an economic status quo by mostly policing the poorer classes, but I think this would be the case no matter what. Seems like folks are complacent/content enough that the Establishment doesn't really need police protection.

When the LA riots happened, the police protected upper class neighborhoods.

Are upper class neighborhoods the same thing as "the Establishment"?

Somewhere someone said "Well if we didn't have that, think of all the blacks that could vote."

They also massively profit from the drug hysteria.

The U.S. must be the only country in the world where a police officer isn't allowed to search someone's belongings without their consent, and then may totally ignore that restriction by claiming he smelled marihuana.

Hello mary. You tried to warn us about Muslims! You tried to warn us, but we didn't listen...

No. I warned about religious governments in general, specifically nasty are Muslim governments following brutal and moronic Sharia law. And I warned about extremists. I don't give a rat's ass what individual people believe as long as it doesn't include forcing their superstitions on others on pain of imprisonment or death.