Alan Dershowitz's stark warning: Justice system becoming infected by critical race theory

Alan Dershowitz, the famed law scholar and appellate lawyer, has a stark warning for judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers: America's justice system is being corrupted by identity politics and critical race theory.

In an interview with Just the News, Dershowitz deplored the growing trend in recent criminal cases toward political agendas supplanting the neutral consideration of evidence and law that has been the lifeblood of U.S. jurisprudence for more than two centuries.

"It's becoming much more responsive, unfortunately, to critical race theory, basically, everything's about race," Dershowitz told the John Solomon Reports podcast in an interview aired this week. "Everything's about race or politics.

"The justice system has stopped being about is this particular person innocent or guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based on the evidence and based on the law. People today are rooting, cheering for verdicts. They want verdicts to reflect their narrative. They want verdicts to prove their way of looking at the world. Trials and justice have ceased to be about individual justice. They're about identity politics."

Dershowitz said the aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy in Minneapolis created a tipping point where racial activists and woke ideologues have forced discussions ranging from education to business to be centered solely on race.

"I'm 83 years old, and I will never live to see or return to the days when we follow Martin Luther King's quest dream," Dershowitz lamented. "He dreamt of the time when his children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the quality of their character. That's not going to happen.

"The killings in the past couple of years, particularly the George Floyd, changed the concept of race in America. Everything now is about about race. And we can't get around it."

Beyond the judicial system, Dershowitz said he is troubled that race ideology is also predetermining decisions like hiring such that "the qualification for jobs has more to do with your attitudes toward race and identity politics than toward the issue on the merits."

"Recently, a school in California posted a job for a theoretical physicist, and hardly mentioned anything about physics," he recounted. "But it talked about where do you stand on diversity? Where do you stand on everything relating to race?

"If Albert Einstein had applied to the job, he wouldn't have gotten it, because he probably wouldn't have answered the question. He was a liberal leftist, personally. But he was also an anti-McCarthyite. So he probably wouldn't have answered the questions, and he would have been fired or not hired."

Dershowitz is one of the legal world's most respected voices, spending decades as a Harvard University law professor and litigating some of the most important appellate issues in the last half century. But he said his unwillingness to bend from his principles and embrace identity politics in law or alter his support for Israel has caused him to be ostracized in circles where he once was hailed.

He cited an example of a Jewish synagogue that invited him for a decade to speak each year, only now to ban him.

"You can't make up your own mind about any issue," he lamented. "If you're going to be a woke person on the left, you have to be 100% on board on every issue. You have to be anti-Israel. You have to be basically anti-white. And you have to be completely on board with all the woke stuff, some good, some very bad, and some intolerable."