We have plenty of protections against unfair trials though. We'll even give fair civil trials to terrorist suspects.
2009 Miscarriages of Justice in the US:
* Alan Beaman, convicted for the stabbing and strangling to death of his ex-girlfriend, was exonerated.
* Timothy Cole was convicted in 1985 for a rape he did not commit, he was posthumously exonerated in early February 2009 after serving 14 years. He died in prison in 1999.
* Thaddeus Jimenez spent more than 16 years in jail before his conviction was tossed.
* Sgt. Brian W. Foster's conviction for rape was overturned.
* Joseph R. Fears, Jr. was convicted in 1984 for two rapes. His sentence was overturned after DNA evidence proved that he didn't commit one of the rapes.
* Paul House was exonerated after spending 22 years on death row for murder.
* Joshua Kezer's 60 years prison sentence for second-degree murder was overturned. Circuit Judge Richard Callahan said: "The criminal justice system failed in the investigative and charging stage, it failed at trial, it failed at post-trial review and it failed during the appellate process."
* Bill Dillon's life sentence for murder was overturned. He was convicted in 1981 based on John Preston's testimony that he and his scent-tracking German-Shepherd connected Dillon to the killer’s bloody t-shirt. However, a 2007 DNA test proved that Dillon's DNA did not match the DNA on the t-shirt. Hundreds of other convictions based on the alleged abilities of the same dog are now in doubt.
* Darryl Burton. Wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 24 years.
Ah! You'll say, but the fact that these were discovered to be miscarriages at all means that our safeguards work. Well, to an extent. But they also work in Italy, although there are far fewer recorded...
Miscarriages of Justice in Italy
* Pietro Valpreda, an anarchist condemned for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, was finally found innocent sixteen years later. He was framed since it was planned to blame the crime on the radical Left, while it was committed by Neo-Fascist groups as the first step of the strategy of tension.
* Enzo Tortora, a popular anchorman on national RAI television, was arrested in 1983 and held in jail for months on trumped up charges by several pentiti of the Camorra and other people already known for perjury. It was soon noted that this was most likely an mis-identification due to confusion with a man bearing the same surname (meaning "turtledove"), but the pentiti kept on accusing Tortora of the gravest offenses related to drug dealing. He was sentenced to ten years in jail in his first trial held in 1985, being spared further incarceration only thanks to the providential intervention of the Radical Party who offered him a candidacy to the European Parliament, a place Tortora won in a landslide as the country became divided between those who held him guilty and those who held him innocent. He was completely acquitted and rehabilitated in 1986; he returned the next year to his work in TV, to a moving comeback in his "Portobello" show, to die in 1988 from cancer and become an icon of injustice and a perpetual reminder of the gravest public blunder of the Italian judiciary system.
* Daniele Barillà, an entrepreneur mistakenly identified as a major drug cartel boss in Milan, spent more than 7 years in jail in 1992-1999, despite growing evidence of his complete innocence and non-involvement in any criminal activity. To this day, the Italian state hasn't awarded him any compensation.
All interesting cases. Now, what makes your system so much more reliable?