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BS ‘n’ About…
Legal Reform
The OJ trial was a seminal turning point in the evolution of America from a nation of “we” into a nation of “us” and “them”. All dignity was removed from our legal process as we sat with our popcorn, mesmerized by a trainwreck at the intersection of The Peoples’ Court and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
In the end, it didn’t matter whether he was guilty or not: What mattered is they we knew that, had it been us, they would have locked our asses up and fired up the electric chair. What mattered is that we saw, in living color, live on our TV screens, that there was one system of justice for “them” and another system of justice for “us”.
It wasn’t so much a win for OJ as it was a loss for the rest of us. We saw that it wasn’t ‘justice’ that mattered, it was the minutiae of the legal code, and the legal profession’s ability to manipulate it. We saw that if you could afford a Dream Team, you could filibuster and ‘buy’ your way out of almost anything. We saw that ‘truth and justice for all’, like everything else in America these days, came with a price tag.
What would our Founding Fathers have had to say about the OJ trial? …or Clinton’s partisan impeachment debacle? …or Foley and Craig’s lies? …or of Wall Street’s un-prosecuted excesses? What would our Founding Fathers have had to say about a legal three-ring circus where we, the citizens, can’t represent ourselves on even the most minor of traffic violations?
What can we expect from a quagmire of a legal system where the lawyers have been writing the rules for over two hundred years? Is it any wonder it has become a game only they can win? Is it any wonder that paddling through our quagmire of a legal system requires more lawyers per capita than any other nation on Earth?
Our legal system has become one big loophole, wrapped in a sentencing guideline, tied up with a mandatory minimum. One thing it is not is the legal system of a free and democratic country. How can it be when the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on us in our own homes? How can it be when 98% of federal prisoners were thrown behind bars without benefit of a trial by a jury of their peers? How can it be when our prisons are bursting at the seams with more prisoners per capita than any other nation on Earth?
There are basically two types of crime: The type we pay those in authority to protect us from and the type they can’t. The government can’t protect me from the wrath of an irate husband should I be caught doing the nasty with his wife. But the very definition of government seems to imply secure borders and safe streets. When that government declares a trillion dollar ‘War on Drugs’, using the tax dollars I pay it, is it fair to imprison me for partaking of the drugs that government is unable to keep out of my neighborhood? Institute police state tactics and throw me in jail: Justice in America. Ridiculous
The War on Drugs has been raging for decades, draining our treasury and imprisoning our youth, yet the illegal drugs are, if anything, cheaper and more readily available than they were thirty years ago. If we buy wholeheartedly into the party line, then this means that a handful of South American and Afghani ‘narco-terrorists’ and their ghetto-youth minions are kicking Uncle Sam’s butt.
What’s missing from this equation? The rich white guys in suits who run everything else in America, that’s who: Can you say “Iran-Contra!’ Drugs are the most lucrative commodity in the world. It’s why the ‘ghetto-youth’ at the very bottom of the drug supply food chain can afford to drive BMWs and flash bling by the pound. It’s why we send the Special Forces into Panama when one of the middlemen dares to get uppity.
Make no mistake. Drugs are Big Business: Perhaps the biggest. Are you going to tell me that this multi-trillion dollar trade is going on under the noses, (pun intended!), of the rich white guys without them getting their cut? Ain’t happening. There’s way too much ‘Black Budget’ potential there. How did you think we were financing all this shit we are up to our necks in all over the world?
There are only two conclusions that can be drawn from America’s failed thirty year ‘War on Drugs’. First, it is a war we want to ‘win’ and our government is woefully incompetent. Second, it is a war we don’t want to ‘win’ and our government is woefully complicit.
Which is it? Whichever it is, it is high time, (pun again intended), we quit squandering our national wealth and throwing our kids in prison for partaking in something our government either can’t or is unwilling to curtail. If our government wants us to quit doing drugs, then it needs to start doing its job and keep them off our streets.
Maybe we could re-direct some of the “War on Drugs’ money to figuring out why half our kids are on Ritalin they don’t need, half our adults are on anti-depressants they don’t need, and seemingly everybody is on blood pressure, high cholesterol, hair growth, and erectile dysfunction drugs. “Ask your Doctor!” Maybe the ATF could devote some energy to the ‘A’ and the ‘T’, far and away the two most debilitating drugs in America.
We need to quit being hypocrites. Prohibition didn’t work so we repealed it, but not before it spawned Al Capone and his organized crime brethren. Our current war on morality has left our inner city streets littered with dead bodies and broken lives. The ‘War on Drugs’ needs to end. It is time for congress to fire up a good cigar, pour itself a Jack Daniel’s, admit it ‘inhaled’ when it was in college, and get out of the ‘War on Drugs’ business.
Morality can’t be legislated. Prohibition proved that. All it does is spawn organized crime and throw otherwise good citizens in jail. Prohibition begat the Mafia. The War on Drugs has begat the Crips, the Bloods, the Nortenos, the Surenos, and Oliver North.
A war on morality cannot be won. If we keep trying we are going to have more of us on the inside looking out than the outside looking in. A free and democratic society does not throw its citizens in prison for the personal lifestyle choices they make. In a free and democratic society the government doesn’t declare war on its people and uses imprisonment only as a last resort.
Unfortunately for us, its citizens, America is no longer a free and democratic country. The War on Drugs is just one example of a Washington out of control. Not only have they lost touch with us, the citizens who elected them to represent our interests, they’ve also lost touch with the spirit with which our Founding Fathers put to parchment our most sacred documents. Washington shouldn’t be scouring our Constitution for loopholes to limit our civil liberties, they should be fighting to uphold the very spirit of unprecedented freedom in which it was written.
We, the People want to be safe from the terrorists but not if it means stripping grandma buck-naked at the airport. We, the People want a strong economy, but not one where we are ‘small enough to fail’. We, the People want peace, but we don’t want to be the world’s policeman. We, the People want to see some legislation come out of Washington that is in our best interests for a change.
And, while we are at it, someone needs to tell the Supreme Court that corporations are not citizens. Know how we can tell? We can tell because, if they were, the Justice Department would be throwing them in prison with impunity too! We, the People just want to be a part of the process again. We want to again be respected as partners in this vision we call the United States.
Our Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that separated power into three distinct checks-and-balance branches of government. Unfortunately the partisanship and get-elected-at-any-cost mentality that pervades modern politics these days has blurred that separation to the point where the very freedoms that Constitution was written to protect are now in jeopardy.
Congress tries to do the President’s job by rubber-stamping same-party chief executives and filibustering opposing party ones. Presidents make judicial appointments with politics forefront in their minds, not justice. They ignore congressional legislation by enacting into law ‘signing statements’ that make a mockery of the concepts of separation of power, congress, and the Constitution. Judges take to the bench with dogmas to uphold and party platforms to support. Nobody ever asks what’s best for the people anymore.
Congress is always wagging the dog about judges ‘legislating from the bench’. So they get their base all fired up about being ‘tough on crime’, then pass laws establishing mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines, and three-strike laws. In doing so they are removing judges, not to mention juries, from the process of judging and are, in essence, “judging from the legislature”, are they not? If that isn’t an insult to the spirit of the Constitution, what is?
The results are horrific. The three-strikes law has resulted in taxpayers footing the bill to incarcerate someone for the rest of their life for stealing a few slices of cheese. Mandatory minimums mean no one gets a second chance, nor a jury, and even first time offenders are sent away for lengthy prison sentences, then branded felons for the rest of their lives. The sentencing guidelines result in a macabre dance between judge, defense, and prosecution to come up with an acceptable lie that won’t get any of them appealed by those who look over their shoulders. Justice is indeed blind .
Many of these restrictions that have been forced upon the judiciary have been the attempts of a conservative, Republican congress to bypass the Constitution and impose its will upon a liberal, FDR-appointed federal judiciary. Therein lies another big problem.
Without term limits or mandatory retirement ages, we all too often end up with a judiciary that reflects the past will of the people and nation, not the current one. Few things can be more insulated and isolating that to hold the freedom, if not the very life, of one’s fellow man in your hands. Yet it has been decades since some of these folks walked out here among us mere mortals. Few powers are more absolute and final than that of a judge. It is a wonder that more of them don’t go mad.
When airline pilots and generals are deemed to be too old to be entrusted with the lives of others, we put them out to pasture. Politics and the business world are constantly infused with the competition of new blood. Yet we let our judges serve until the Alzheimer’s becomes too noticeable or they drop dead in the middle of a closing argument.
Which brings us to the Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of who and what we are as a nation and as a people. Regardless of which side of the political fence one resides on, it is safe to say that the 2006 and 2008 elections were a call by We, the People for change. We booted out the Republicans and elected Democrats in droves.
The 2010 and 2012 elections are shaping up to be a reversal of that process, if only because we have no viable third choice. We’ve grown to hate Washington so much that it doesn’t really matter who is there. Undoubtedly, the Republicans will spend the next few years trying to sell this as a return to their particular brand of bullshit, but what it really will be is a re-affirmation that we want change!
Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of health and the archaic way we appoint Supreme Court justices, we are stuck with a particular judicial viewpoint where the legal buck stops for at least the next twenty or thirty years. All of our most liberal judges are old. All of our most conservative judges are young. Twenty or thirty years is a long, long time.
We need to remove politics from the judicial branch of our government before we all end up behind bars. We need to enact laws that result in a regular, orderly turnover in the judiciary that more accurately reflects the current will of the nation and its people. Each presidential term should see to the replacement of the most senior, or even two most senior, Supreme Court justices, and the current Chief Justice should somehow reflect the liberal or conservative mandate as reflected by the last presidential election.
Power in the judicial branch of a free and democratic country needs to reside in the hands of judges and juries, not legislatures and lawyers. We need to remove lawyers and the loopholes they so love from between us, the American people, and those who sit in judgment on us. When a citizen can’t defend himself for even the most minor of traffic violations, the system needs changing.
In police states, politicians enact legislation that enables law enforcement to spy on its citizens, then drag them from their homes and throw them in prison without the benefit of a jury trial. Nazi Germany had that kind of a legal system. So did the Soviet Union. So does Patriot Act America.
The Patriot Act was the death knell of every freedom fought for by our Founding Fathers and the embodiment of everything fought against by our ‘Greatest Generation’. By Patriot Act definition, most of our Founding Fathers would have been labeled terrorists before being sent to Guantanamo Bay for some waterboard therapy. So would Senator Kerry, Walter Cronkite, and most of you who dared to make a stand during the ‘60’s. By definition, so would the Tea Partiers, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself. You better believe the lawyers working for the Justice Department have. As long as the Patriot Act is in force, dissent in America is dead.
A free and democratic country is one whose people fight to protect their neighbors’ beliefs, even when they are in conflict with their own. We were that country as recently as the ‘60’s. A police state is one where we fight to impose our beliefs on our neighbors. We are that country today.
Government is intruding in our lives as never before. They spy on our bank accounts, our phone records, and want to track our every footstep. We aren’t too far away from having a goddamned cellphone implanted under our skin so that everything can be tracked, tabulated, and used against us.
They spy on us in our homes, at our jobs, and in cyberspace. They have us mistrusting our neighbors. They encourage our kids to be good little Hitler Youth and report every spanking. How meekly we go to the slaughter. Doesn’t humanity ever learn?
We are no longer the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’. We’ve become the ‘land of the looking-over-our-shoulder and the home of the soon-to-be-indicted’. Justice should be the same for all of us but it is not. It has become a way for our government to keep its citizens in line. Justice in America isn’t about protecting ‘us’ from ‘them’, it is about protecting ‘them’ from ‘us’. How sad.
OJ’s trial should have looked the same as that of any other citizen of America brought up on similar charges. It didn’t. Shame on us for allowing that to happen. Shame on us for tuning in. We are only one step removed from throwing (fill-in-the-blank) to the lions: Justice in America.
In the ‘30’s Germany too thought it was a democracy. Like them we are one charismatic leader away from blaming our woes on: …the Muslims? …the evangelicals? …the Mexicans? …the unions? …the poor? …the old people? …the Democrats? …the Republicans? …the Jews?
If history has taught us only one thing, it is this: When the Gestapo, er, the DeHoSe gets around to knocking on your neighbor’s door in the middle of the night, it will already be too late for you.
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