"Like Fetching Water with a Bucket Full of Holes": High-Profile Cases and Perceptions of System Failure.

High-profile trials are often held up as emblematic of social justice causes, but this often obscures rather than clarifies justice issues for the public. Trial outcomes may be seen as proxies of much deeper, structural problems, though media coverage routinely focuses on singular, criminal justice outcomes. This study uses a press analysis of two high-profile cases to investigate how these dynamics restrict our cultural understandings of justice outside the context of formal criminal justice responses.