American legal lore would have it that our adversarial (or "accusatorial") criminal justice system is far superior to the "inquisitorial" model of continental Europe-as an engine of truth, as a shield for civil liberties against state power, as an embodiment of the paramount importance of avoiding wrongful conviction of the innocent.

Many of us are taught (erroneously) that, in Europe, defendants are presumed guilty, can be forced to confess, and can be convicted without anything like proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

And something about that word "inquisitorial"-conjuring images of some medieval Grand Inquisitor torturing confessions out of accused heretics-conditions American lawyers (and justices) to recoil from any thought of modifying our adversarial tradition by taking even a tiny step toward the procedures used by the rest of the civilized world.

Evidence is accumulating, however, that our adversarial system has degenerated into a parody of itself-which in many cases seems almost calculated to subvert the search for truth. And there’s much to be said for the European approach, including that of England, where the criminal process has evolved in far less adversarial directions than our own since 1776.

A good case can be made that the procedures used in Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, France, England, and elsewhere do a better job than our own not only in terms of finding the truth and convicting the guilty, but also in terms of protecting innocent defendants-supposedly our forte. Comparative analysis also reinforces the view that some of our vaunted procedural protections not only help the guilty, but also have perverse secondary effects mat hurt the innocent.

"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding 12 men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read." -Mark Twain

Some good could yet come of the O.J. Simpson trial, though many lawyers and judges are bent on preventing it.

That something is the kind of fundamental reform of our dysfunctional criminal justice system that could be fueled by public outrage at the Simpson trial and acquittal-not to mention the trials of the Menendez brothers, Lorena Bobbitt, the Rodney King cops, and Reginald Denny’s assailants.

Such reform won’t come easily, both because the public may seize upon illusory cures like non unanimous jury verdicts and because the prospect of any reform at all spurs knee-jerk opposition from many lawyers by threatening to unsettle roles in which they have grown prosperous and comfortable.

"What people should understand," such lawyers are wont to say, "is that the Simpson case was entirely atypical, skewed by the ability of a wealthy defendant to pull out all the stops, and by the inability of a wishy-washy judge to move things along. In most cases, the system works well."

It’s true that this was an atypical case. It’s not true that the system usually works well. The problems are simply stated: Our criminal justice system convicts the innocent too often, acquits the guilty (especially the wealthy guilty) far too often, punishes many nonviolent criminals too harshly, rewards tactics aimed at distorting the facts and obfuscating the truth, is choking on waste and inefficiency, and is held by much of the public in justifiable disrepute.

What do FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General Janet Reno, former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark, and just about every big-city police chief in the nation have in common?

Hint: Ruby Ridge, Waco, a police helicopter’s fatal firebombing of a Philadelphia row house, detectives Mark Fuhrman and Philip Vannatter, and "testilying."

The common thread is that those who are supposedly running our law enforcement organizations are, in fact, more often run by them. They are prisoners of the lies frequently told by people ranging from cops on the beat to high-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also feel pressure to secure their own standing with their troops, and to bolster morale, by pretending that police lying, brutality, racism, and corruption are less widespread than they are.

Examples:

• Freeh’s promising start in 1993 has been derailed by his blindness to an apparent FBI cover-up of high-level responsibility for the fatal fiasco at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992. Freeh initially decided not to dismiss any of those who helped craft illegal, shoot-on-sight rules of engagement and to limit discipline of his close friend, Larry Potts, to a wrist-slap censure. In a March 7 letter to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, Freeh wrote:

[F]or you to increase the proposed discipline [of Potts] inevitably sends the wrong message to both the public and the employees of the FBI…. It will also lead to the implication that the FBI and the [Justice] Department dispute the credibility of the employees involved [including] Mr. Potts… [I]t is likely to do profound damage to the relationship between the Department and the FBI [and] be perceived by the rank and file of the FBI as an unjustified attack.

Freeh also warned that Gorelick’s proposal to give Potts a 30-day suspension would cause "damage to my personal credibility."

You may have heard the one about why some medical labs have started using lawyers instead of white rats in their experiments.

Three reasons: There are more lawyers than rats; lab technicians sometimes get attached to rats; and there are some things a rat just won’t do.

Like most lawyer jokes (and Polish jokes, and so on), this one depends on unfair stereotyping. But the punch line also rings a little bit true-truer, at least, than it would if the class being stereotyped were, say, bankers, or doctors, or corporate fat cats, or journalists, or even used-car salesmen.

It rings true in a way that helps explain why lawyers in this country-unlike those in Germany, or France, or Italy, or perhaps even England-have been so roundly vilified as a class, for so long, by so many people.

See, e.g., Will Rogers ("I have always noticed that any time a man can’t come in and settle with you without bringing his lawyer, why, look out for him."); H. L. Mencken ("[T]heir professional aim and function [is] not to get at the truth, but simply to carry on combats between ancient rules."); Carl Sandberg ("Why is there always a secret singing/ When a lawyer cashes in?/ Why does a hearse horse snicker/ Hauling a lawyer away?"); Ambrose Bierce ("Lawyer: One skilled in circumvention of the law…. Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission."); Mark Twain ("What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I….against a lawyer?"); Benjamin Franklin ("God works wonders now and then/ Behold! a Lawyer, an honest Man!").

Some leaders of the bar have suggested that lawyers are unfairly vilified because they often defend unpopular people or causes. That may be part of the explanation, but not the biggest part.

Some of us used to think it was pretty clear that lying to Congress is a crime. After all, even Ronald Reagan conceded the point. And the Supreme Court has so held.

But it’s apparently not clear enough, and restorative work by Congress and the incoming Clinton administration is needed. As evidenced by President George Bush’s smarmy apologia for executive-branch lying in his Christmas Eve pardons of six Iran-Contra defendants, any consensus that such conduct warrants prosecution has been shaken by the bitterly partisan inter-branch warfare of recent years.

The six-year-long conservative crusade to trivialize and misrepresent the lying-to-Congress prosecutions of the Iran-Contra defendants and to demonize Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh has obscured what is ultimately at stake here: the rights of the American people, through their elected representatives, to demand and receive an honest accounting of what their government is doing.

At first, apologists for the Iran-Contra liars concentrated on distorting the facts by suggesting, preposterously, that they had not lied to Congress at all. Now President Bush, in styling the convicted and accused liars whom he pardoned as patriotic victims of "the criminalization of policy differences," seems implicitly to espouse something like a privilege for executive-branch "combatants" in the "political arena" to deflect congressional inquiries by lying.

It has become a kind of covert conservative credo that executive-branch lying to Congress (not to mention the press) is not really a crime. Conservative commentator Terry Eastland comes close to saying so directly, in a thoughtful article contending that it is "unjust … to apply the criminal law to individuals who in the course of representing the executive branch especially over highly disputed policies are said to have lied to Congress."