When the Guardians Become the Risk: Structural Incentives, Judicial Silence, and the Erosion of Defendant Rights in California

In theory, the American criminal justice system is designed to function as an adversarial safeguard: prosecutors advocate for the state, defense counsel protects the accused, and judges—bound by law and oath—serve as neutral arbiters tasked with enforcing constitutional limits. In practice, however, this balance depends on one fragile assumption: that officers of the court will faithfully police one another. When that assumption collapses, the system offers surprisingly few internal remedies. The result is a judicial environment where constitutional rights may be acknowledged in principle yet subordinated in practice, particularly when the alleged violators are attorneys, judges, or court-adjacent professionals themselves.

The experience reflected in People v. Michael Taylor illustrates a problem far larger than any single defendant. It demonstrates how, when procedural violations originate inside the courtroom rather than outside it, the judiciary has little structural incentive to intervene decisively. Courts are well-equipped to punish defendants for noncompliance; they are far less equipped—and often disinclined—to meaningfully discipline themselves. This imbalance creates a legal gray zone in which errors, omissions, and unauthorized actions by court officers can persist without timely correction, even when they carry profound consequences for liberty, due process, and equal protection.

One of the most underexamined dynamics in criminal proceedings is the judiciary’s reliance on factual arguments over legal ones when constitutional issues arise. Defense attorneys may raise objections rooted in procedure, statutory authority, or constitutional limitation, only to see courts pivot the discussion toward surface-level factual framing: what happened, who said what, what paperwork exists. This shift matters. Legal arguments—especially constitutional ones—require judges to confront boundaries on their own power. Factual arguments, by contrast, allow courts to resolve disputes without addressing whether the process itself was lawful. Over time, this practice quietly transforms judges from triers of law into managers of narrative consistency.

In People v. Michael Taylor, as in many criminal cases involving competency evaluations, diversion programs, or pretrial procedural determinations, the distinction between lawful authority and administrative convenience becomes blurred. When actions occur without clear court authorization, without documented consent, or in tension with existing orders, the legal question is not whether the outcome seems reasonable, but whether the process complied with governing law. Yet courts often treat these questions as secondary—particularly when acknowledging them would require revisiting prior rulings, invalidating downstream proceedings, or exposing the state to liability.

This reluctance is not accidental. Courts operate within a political and economic reality that rewards throughput, finality, and procedural closure. Criminal justice is, inescapably, a business. Caseload statistics, clearance rates, and trial volume are routinely cited to justify judicial staffing levels and budget allocations. From this perspective, cases that continue moving forward—even amid unresolved constitutional concerns—serve an institutional function. They demonstrate productivity. They support funding requests. They reinforce the appearance of a system in motion.

By contrast, cases that halt due to rights violations, judicial error, or attorney misconduct pose a different kind of cost. They require acknowledgment of failure. They invite appellate scrutiny. They risk precedent that constrains future discretion. When the violation originates with defense counsel or another officer of the court, the incentive to quietly absorb the issue—rather than confront it—becomes even stronger. The judiciary is not structured to aggressively self-investigate in the middle of active criminal proceedings, and defendants have no independent enforcement mechanism to compel that scrutiny in real time.

This structural gap is most visible when defense counsel is compromised, ineffective, or operating outside authorized bounds. The adversarial system presumes zealous advocacy; when that advocacy fails, the judge is often the only remaining safeguard. Yet judges are rarely incentivized to assume that role proactively. Doing so risks blurring the line between neutrality and intervention, and may require acknowledging that earlier rulings were made on incomplete or improper foundations. The easier path is to proceed as if the system’s internal checks are functioning, even when the record suggests otherwise.

The constitutional implications of this dynamic are profound. The Supremacy Clause establishes the U.S. Constitution as the highest law of the land, superior to statutes, rules of court, and administrative practices. Yet in day-to-day criminal proceedings, defendants often experience the opposite hierarchy. Statutory procedures are treated as determinative, even when their application conflicts with constitutional protections. Court rules are enforced rigidly against defendants, while deviations by court officers are reframed as harmless, technical, or correctable after the fact. This inversion quietly erodes constitutional supremacy, not through open defiance, but through selective enforcement.

Importantly, this is not a claim that judges or attorneys act with uniform malice or conscious corruption. Systems do not require bad actors to produce unjust outcomes; they require only misaligned incentives. When accountability mechanisms are externalized—shifted to appellate courts, disciplinary bodies, or civil litigation—the trial court becomes a place where rights are theoretically preserved but practically deferred. For many defendants, those deferred remedies arrive too late to matter. Liberty lost cannot be retroactively restored in any meaningful sense.

The broader lesson of People v. Michael Taylor is not confined to one courtroom or one county. It raises a fundamental question about the structure of criminal adjudication: who protects defendants’ rights when the alleged violation comes from within the system itself? If defense counsel fails, if court orders are disregarded, if procedural safeguards are bypassed, and if judges decline to intervene, the defendant is left navigating a process that presumes fairness without ensuring it. In such circumstances, the promise of due process becomes aspirational rather than operational.

For a system that prides itself on constitutional fidelity, this gap should be alarming. A judiciary that lacks internal incentives to correct its own procedural failures risks transforming constitutional rights into symbolic gestures—recognized in doctrine, but inconsistently enforced in practice. Until meaningful checks exist within the course of criminal proceedings themselves, defendants will continue to bear the cost of institutional silence, and the Constitution will remain, for many, a document invoked after the damage is done rather than a shield actively upheld when it matters most.