Myth#2 Justice for All

In first thinking about this topic, I thought of the well-known affect of rich people avoiding serving jail time compared to poor people.  Prison is filled for the most part with poor people and a much large portion of African American and Hispanics than in the general population.  Justice is not blind to money.

I was listening to NPR and they were talking about 10 million people go into and out of our jails and prisons each year.  It turns out that there are thousands of clerical errors.  Some prisoners get out early, a lot stay longer than their sentence.  Of course, the poor often have no advocates either from family or lawyers so they can essentially get lost forever in the system.  They forgot one man in solitary confinement for two years.  Oops, he was released without charges.

And then there are the mentally impaired.  Our mental hospitals are over flowing so justice turns a blind eye and many mental patients are boarded in our jails and prisons simply because there is no where else to put them, unless you want them to be homeless. Often without a trial, or even after a trial, innocent mentally impaired people are sent to jail because the judge knows the mental hospitals are over-booked.  We simply as Americans can't be bothered.

So the above refers to the unequal enforcement of laws.  But, even a bigger category of injustice comes from laws that are inherently injustice.  For example, if you are a gay person in those country and your mate just died, or you just tried to use your partner's insurance or to collect your partner's pension you can't believe our laws are just.  If you got sentenced to prison for smoking pot by a judge that has three martini's at lunch, you can't feel our laws are just or even rational.

Then there is the IRS where we are all guilty until proven innocent.  There is nothing just about how the process with the IRS works where you have no rights, when there is no day in court.  Just pay up or face big fines and interest rates.  The best you can hope for is to beg your IRS representative for some leniency and then hope you are one of the few lucky ones that gets a break.  Not.

Many of our drug laws mimic the IRS in the person being guilty unless proven innocent.  If you are a contractor paying your workers in cash, better not be caught with $10K on your person. You are assumed to be a drug dealer and your cash is taken.  No trial.  There is another law about having too many CD in your possession at one time.  It is assumed you are making illegal copies and your CD's are taken and you are fined.

Lately, Expert Witnesses have been coming forward and saying their new methods prove in some cases that their testimony was wrong decades ago.  One prisoner tried to get released based on the expert witness recanting his previous opinion that sentenced the prisoner in the first place.  The judge said their needs to be some finality of judgment, otherwise trials would have to be redone too often (see NPR a few days ago).   I bet he feels the world is just after being in jail for 20 some odd years with no hope of getting out even though it is quite clear he probably didn't do it.

And of course, there are those 165 inmates at Guantanamo Bay that our military said they made a mistake on.  They were not terrorists.  If we had due process of law in the first year instead of a decade later, perhaps these people could go home.  Now their homeland countries say they don't want them and we try hard not to let them starve themselves to death on hunger strikes.   Justice for these people is just too much trouble.  Can you believe they would rather die than live in prison for the rest of their lives?

Justice it turns out is just too much trouble, just too expensive to extend to all.  What a foolish concept.