Rising Hegemon
Can we just let justice not be a sideshow again?*
Yeah, I know and you had long ago built the gibbet.
*Yes, I know, until the next zoo.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
But we'd already decided upon a hanging?
Apparently the unending drumbeat of everyone demanding guilt, especially those with a press badge, has run up against a unanimous jury. Bloodlust goes unrequited...for now.
Can we just let justice not be a sideshow again?*
Yeah, I know and you had long ago built the gibbet.
*Yes, I know, until the next zoo.
Can we just let justice not be a sideshow again?*
Yeah, I know and you had long ago built the gibbet.
*Yes, I know, until the next zoo.
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7 comments:
Didn't that woman learn anything from her "runaway bride" coverage ? I am blissfully ignorant of this entire case, except for the accusation.
Because the herd had been led to believe the mom was guilty, my instincts were against the herd.
Now, if we could turn the herd against the zealots in Congress and so many Statehouses, persuade the herd these guys deserve the gibbet far more than a forlon mom
vox
Atta, You caught this one, right?
The jury had better watch out, or as punishment, Nancy Grace will inhale all of them into her gigantic nostrils.
It used to be that people understood that a jury trial by one's peers was supposed to offset the tremendous power of the state to fuck up people's lives arbitrarily or because of political mischief or because some prosecutor wanted a better office--because most citizens understood that they could find themselves in exactly the same situation as the accused.
From the jury trials I've been on, people have completely forgotten that principle--most jurors instinctively align their views with the state and the prosecutor. If this jury didn't find the evidence persuasive in spite of the media blitz, good for them.
Montag -
WTF? That's ahistorical nonsense.
"It used to be" that trial by ordeal or trial by combat was common practice until a bunch of elites decided it was stupid (probably because they got burned during a trial by ordeal) and trial by jury became the standard practice. Eventually that became English common law. Hundreds of years later a bunch of American revolutionaries with Enlightenment ideals thought it was one of the good things about English Law and so they kept it.
But mob justice has always been popular with the masses. You can read news reports of various other "crimes of the century" down through the years where the papers were demanding blood - who knows what the average guy on the street was thinking about it (except in those cases where the average guys on the street turned into a mob, stormed the jailhouse, and killed the defendant themselves - it's pretty easy to guess in that case).
This crap is nothing new - there was no fucking Golden Age where everyone bought into Enlightenment Ideals about law and justice. People have always been shitty and have always assumed that some folks are guilty until proven innocent - and after they're proven innocent they're guilty anyway and the jury screwed it up.
(Any time you start thinking "back in the day X was better" remind yourself "THERE WAS NO FUCKING GOLDEN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS". Your history classes have done you a poor service if they have taught you that things were better in the past. In general they weren't.)
WTF? That's ahistorical nonsense.
Yup, downright sloppy, I agree.
Except for that fucking Magna Carta thing, and Henry II's acknowledgement that trial by ordeal was just a little too strange to be afforded the term, "justice."
Sure, there's a tendency for the mob to take over, and that's where the press comes in--exactly as in this case.
But, I'm going to tell you something--in every one of those jury trials where I reminded people of the facts and the failure of the prosecutor to make the case, and where I also reminded people that if they were in exactly the same position, they would want the same consideration, every jury turned around in less than two hours--sometimes grudgingly, because they wanted their prejudices to prevail--but, turn around they did.
So, people will understand, if they are reminded of that state power and what it can do to them.
I have to believe, because of that, this jury by peers business was once known and acknowledged--albeit not universally and absolutely--as a right of the common people, regardless of how many recorded instances there have been of prosecutors steering juries to a desired, but wholly unjust, conclusion. The adverse affects of British trials by judge or military tribunal in the Colonies were what impelled the Founders to add trial by impartial jury in criminal matters to the Sixth Amendment, so, sorry, there was a recognition of the value of the principle, along with a plethora of negative examples known to the general public contemporaneously which reinforced belief in the need for trial by jury.
Do I think that this understanding has eroded? Yes. It's a general response to at least a hundred years of increasingly deceitful fearmongering on the part of the government and creeping authoritarianism, helping to generate a belief in the public that the government is the last and only bulwark separating law-abiders from huge numbers of criminals, the barbarians at the gate, even though all evidence shows the violent crime rate steadily declining since roughly the 1880s.
The so-called war on drugs (now compounded by the "war on terror") has greatly added to the hysteria and the public's willingness to abandon what skepticism it possessed about state power. This has been compounded by a win-at-all-costs-and-fairness-be-damned attitude on the part of prosecutors, since that job has become an even greater political springboard than in the past (a situation which has become progressively worse over the last thirty years as verified by criminal defense attorneys of my acquaintance).
But, do I think that such understanding never existed in this country? No.
not jazz hands enough for me to care.
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