Justice: has anything changed since 1615?

In Rivka Galchen’s book Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (see book review dated May 22), the reader accompanies the narrator through a true witch hunt. Although it is a novel, the book is based on the actual trial of Katharina Kepler. Her son was Johannes Kepler, whom you may remember from science class as the mathematician/astronomer who developed understanding of planetary motion, telescopes, and was considered the father of modern optics.
 
     In this book, we see “she said” vs “he said” testimony, false accusations under oath, corruption, bribery, exorbitant legal costs, and painstaking slowness in the process of justice.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me. Has anything changed since 1615?

Would anyone even have bothered reading a defense of Katharina, had her son not been a celebrity in his own right? I think about current celebrities and their cases; the way “the rich” can still get bigger, arguably better legal teams than the less-well-off. The way powerful people can seemingly get away with anything, by either flattening those beneath them (fees, reputation), buying their way to freedom, or influencing those in high places. What about all the women, for example, whose lives and reputations were ruined by Weinstein and Nygaard? Where’s the justice for those women? It’s still true, even now, that women who come forward can be chastised, ridiculed, have their personalities and reputations trampled. Even high profile scammers (eg. Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried), while they might or might not be brought to justice, leave ruined lives in their wake; people who lost all their savings, their retirement funds, their homes.
What has changed since 1615?
We’re talking about a time of parchment and quill pens, when much of the population couldn’t read or write. Why, now, do things still take just as long? Why does every legal document have to be 200 pages long? Why can people still come forward and say blatantly incorrect things? Why can some people get away with “paying off” their prosecutors?  I’m not sure.
 
DNA, you’ll say: That’s an advance within the last century. Burden of proof. And I agree with that. But how many cases get tossed due to “mishandling" of such critical evidence?
I feel like, in the 21st century, with instant information at our fingertips, things should be quicker, and more consistent. Yes, there are more people, more cases, but there are also exponentially more lawyers, judges, investigators, police. I feel like we should be moving forward, but all over the world, people are held without cause, without trial, people disappear, people are stopped and arrested and questioned due to their appearance, or their odd habits. We’re lucky in so many ways, here in Canada, but reading about this witch hunt made me worry. Four centuries later.
Do you think there can be true justice?