Patterico is an ex-patriot Texan who works as a prosecutor in Los Angeles. You can tell a lot about what's wrong with the criminal justice system in the United States by reading his blog and getting some insight into the way prosecutors tend to think.

Recently he argues that it's a good thing to convict someone of murder if you can just prove that they had knowledge that someone else planned a burglary. Read the whole blog post, he really says that.

I didn't even know that it was illegal to plan a burglary, much less it was equivalent to murder to know someone who planned a burglary. But to a typical prosecutor in the United States such logical analysis is just part of a days work.