"The offender, Miles O'Brien, human, officer of the Federation Starfleet,
has been found guilty of aiding and abetting seditious acts against the state.
The sentence is death.
Let the trial begin."
Chief Archon Makbar, Tribunal (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Let's talk about the Cardassian legal system. (Oh please, CAN we?)
Rather than being a method of determining the guilt or innocence of the accused, a Cardassian trial is used primarily to prove the effectiveness of the state in apprehending and, usually, executing criminals to the public at large.
To that end, verdicts are determined well in advance and that verdict is always guilty, and since the verdict is always guilty the system is never wrong. Lather, rinse, repeat - as you can imagine, this makes extradition to Cardassia a rather tricky political subject. Trials are presided over by a (universally female) judge, called a Chief Archon, and witnessed by three civilians, typically children. All trials are televised for the benefit of the populace.
The accused is granted the council of a Conservator, though the conservator's role is not to uphold his client's innocence so much as to make sure his client's admission of guilt is as emotionally effective as possible, raising the 'courtroom as theater' metaphor to an almost perverted extreme. The accused is also granted a Nestor to advise them as to their rights under Cardassian law, ie none, though the nestor is not allowed to speak at all during the trial itself. It is customary for the family of the accused to attend the trial, usually to give them the opportunity to turn their backs on the guilty.
Witnesses can be called (though asking them for proof of their testimony almost always falls back on the information being unavailable due to issues of 'military security'), again to effectively prove the efficiency of the state, and cross-examinations are extremely rare and usually pointless.
As I'd said, almost all trials end (or begin, if you'd like to see it that way) with a sentence of the death penalty, though that has occasionally been commuted to a life's sentence in a labor camp in exchange for certain political favors.