Moderation is too rarely a stance to gain impassioned support in policy debates, and even less so when the subject is the state of American criminal justice. The disproportionate number of young African-American men behind bars at any given time (approximately 11 percent of those between ages 20 and 34) frequently elicits sweeping condemnation of both the justice system and the police departments that enforce the law. On the other side of the coin, the project of constitutional criminal procedural reform, inaugurated by Earl Warren’s Supreme Court in the 1960s and extended in the decades since, frequently sparks outrage for its tendency to allow the guiltiest of defendants to escape punishment through the exclusion of incriminating evidence on procedural grounds. (A recent example is Giles v. California from 2008, which found that a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to confront his accuser was violated by the introduction of his girlfriend’s past account of physical abuse at his hands because she was unavailable to testify in person at his trial—for her murder.)

The sheer stakes of criminal justice debates—weighing, as they do, the threat of criminal violence against victims with the threat of state violence against defendants—naturally alienate the most invested sides from one another, particularly along racial lines, and in a uniquely virulent manner.