Politics and crime, as well as media and crime, have direct effects on how crime is dealt with and how much of it is really reported to the public. The imperfection of man and of his decisions is an inevitability for which society has had to make allowances. Due to this everyday imperfection, humanity, by necessity, has acquired a tolerance for the accidental and imprudent. Thankfully, these indiscretions and lapses of good judgment are typically minor, without long-term or significant consequences. However, when ordinary men and women, subject to bias, prejudice, and all other human failings, are charged with the extraordinary responsibility of issuing an acquittal or condemnation, the slightest error can carry the greatest of consequences. To insure the justness of trial, verdict and sentence, the American justice system is forced to rely upon the judgment of the common man. Unfortunately, this same trial system of justice can turn arbitrary, and can be manipulated to allow guilty citizens the sweet air of freedom while delivering the innocent into the cold hands of death and confinement. Before a suspect is brought into the courtroom, he must undergo the perils of apprehension by the Executive branch’s law enforcement. The power of the Executive branch rests solely on physical force and the threat of harm. Due to this, police officers often substitute intuition for logic, and forcefulness for calm reason. Results of this include racial profiling and unnecessary brutality against minorities. In Ernest Gaines’ “Lesson Upon Dying,” the black Jefferson is an innocent bystander in the murder of a white liquor store owner. The possibility of Jackson being completely uninvolved in the crime is never even explored. This is represented by the opening scene, which has Jefferson on trial, discarding any mention of his apprehension. The police officers are merely referred to merely as “two white men,” and once mentioned the scene turns instantly to the trial. Jefferson’s race brings out the flawed intuition of the Southern policemen, allowing Jackson to be tried and convicted as soon as he is found at the scene of the crime. To accentuate the dominant, aggressive and punitive natures of these police, the only job that they do well is carrying out Jackson’s sentence.  The feeling of excessive defensiveness and anger are expressed by Claude McKay’s in his “If We Must Die,” in which he describes himself and the black community as hunted animals in relationship to the white man’s justice system which is the barking dogs. He feels that he is being actively pursued by law for no reason other than the way that he was born and because of this arbors a deep resentment towards the legal system. To fight this injustice, he calls to his “kinsmen” and beckons of them a violent strike back. The cyclical pattern of indiscriminate violence does little more than to further it.  In “A Lesson,” the court scene is also extremely limited and only reports verbatim the closing arguments of Jackson’s lawyer, which sound more like a guilty plea than an attempt to free the accused. The lack of detail in the courthouse expresses Gaines’ feelings of bias judgment towards blacks in the legal system. Meager are the attempts to acquit the innocent Jefferson. Even if Jefferson’s lawyer wanted to save him (which he really doesn’t) his lack of experience in such cases would dramatically limit his ability to do so. Once the verdict of guilty is reached, no attempt at an appeal is made, although there is an almost automatic writ of certiorari issued in all capital punishment cases. This symbolically represents a lack of concern and procedure from not only the Executive but also the judicial branch as well. Ironically, while both