A Justice System That Tries Thousands at Once Does Not Judge, It Condemns -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

In El Salvador, justice has not just been speeded up, it’s been compressed. Within the vast prison complex of CECOT, the state provides an example of efficiency: thousands detained, processed and judged in vast, collective trials. The point is clear, order has returned. But buried behind this spectacle is a far more disturbing truth: When justice becomes a kind of industrial process, it isn’t justice at all. Mass trials are frequently defended as an important answer to exceptional violence. Gang violence demands action, the argument goes. But urgency is the oldest reason to abandon legal principles. Once abandoned, the principles rarely return intact. The bedrock of criminal justice, the belief that individual guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt cannot persist under such largescale processing processes. A courtroom is not a warehouse. But mass trials turn it into just that. When hundreds of defendants are tried side by side, the fiction of individual justice falls apart. Legal representation becomes simply symbolic rather than substantive. The right to contest evidence is reduced to a form of procedural theater. Judges struggling with a combination of heavy caseloads and single proceedings are structurally incapable of assessing every defendant’s part, intent and guilt with the rigors that justice requires. What we got was not adjudication, but categorization. Not judgment, but sorting. This is not a bug in the system; it is the system. Supporters cite falling crime rates and posit that the ends justify the means. But this is a perilous inversion of legal morality. Justice is not only about results. It is defined by whether the process is ethical or not. A system that achieves “results” through the obliteration of due process does not provide justice, it generates compliance. Even more concerning is the quiet resurgence of a principle that modern law has long condemned: collective guilt. In mass trials, association is evidence. Proximity becomes suspicion. Identity becomes liability. The presumption of innocence perhaps the most fundamental defense against state abuse, crumbles into a bureaucratic rallying cry bereft of practical substance. When the guilt is collective, innocence is pointless. This transition isn’t just procedural, it’s philosophical. It redefines the purpose of criminal law from telling the truth to handling any sense of threat. The accused are no longer individuals to be tried, but dangers to be quelled. In such a system the courtroom is no longer a site of accountability, but rather an extension of state power. And power, if not governed by process, hardly ever remains just. History offers a clear warning. Systems that normalize extraordinary measures in the name of security simply grow their reach. Today it is suspected members of gangs. Tomorrow, it might be political dissidents, journalists or anyone with an elastic definition of “threat.” The structure of mass trials is not self-limiting, it is self-reinforcing. What makes this model so dangerous is its legality. There are judges. There are hearings. There are verdicts. But the presence of form doesn’t guarantee the substance of justice. A system may resemble law even as it acts as its negation. That is precisely the risk here. The global community should challenge the temptation to find success solely in criminal incarceration figures or measurable crime declines. Such metrics, while politically attractive, hide a fundamental question: What has been paid for the “order” achieved? If the cost of security is the slow, deliberate dismantling of due process, then what is being protected is not justice but control. Mass trials inflict deep, often unseen, harm: systemic error. Mistakes can be recognized and remedied at the level of their own proceedings. In mass trials, errors are diluted of volume and buried under the scale of convictions. The innocent are not simply falsely convicted, they become indistinguishable in a society that has ceased to recognize individuals as people. This is the final defeat: not just punishing the guilty without justice, but condemning the innocent without acknowledgment. There’s a threshold that distinguishes between law enforcement and legal abandonment. Mass trials cross that line not with overt violence, but with administrative competence. And that is exactly what makes them so dangerous. They do not seem like a failure of the rule of law. They look like its optimization. But a system designed for speed over fairness does not constitute an enhanced system. It is a different system altogether. The conclusion is unavoidable:

A justice system that tries thousands does not judge, it condemns. It substitutes deliberation with speed and truth for presumption, and rights for expediency. It might help clear prisons and silence violence in the short run. But in this process, it deprives justice of its meaning. And when justice is no longer distinguishable from punishment, the rule of law doesn’t just wither, it’s redefined into something far more dangerous.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia