Justitia

There is something fairly comforting about being able to dip back into history and find that what we practice in government has a long tradition.  It would be a bit disconcerting to me to discover we'd been making the stuff up as we went along.  I'd rather have something tried and tested to guide us.  It's sort of  like driving on a familiar road at night.   You know the place where the deer like to cross and where that tight turn comes next.    No surprises when you are weary and eager for home.

For centuries, check that - millenia - the idea of justice was widely interpreted.   It could have meant  something akin to what we practice in court today in America or it could have meant something far less pleasant.  Perhaps death summarily enforced.   I reckon that more than one person in our human past sizzled on a hastily built bonfire or hung from an solid oak tree branch without so much as a charge placed against them let alone given a presumption of innocence.

To me, that is what is so maddening about the Trayvon Martin case.  It's not that a young man is dead and another is being persecuted because of it.  It's not because of a Florida law some take issue with.  It's not because, as the world so readily sees, we Americans still can't get past race as a divider of our souls.  The key issue to me is that after the Romans spent so much time trying to teach us how to get it right, after the English brought us the magnificent Magna Carta, after centuries of legal precedent that brought light to the darkness of assumed guilt, that we choose to let Justice peek through her blindfold in adjudicating the case.

I'll put money down that the easiest legal job in the world right now is the court defense of the man who shot Trayvon Martin.  The shooter may have acted with the most despicable motive of racial hatred and profiling.  He may have hunted Trayvon and killed him without so much as a second thought.  But, because of the way we as a people have treated this case, there is absolutely no way in this world that the accused, if he is indeed every indicted and brought before a jury of his peers, can get a fair trial.

When the president of the United States and various members of Congress, the media and the entertainment class pontificate in soapbox forums only available to them about the facts of a homicide case and the innocence or guilt of the parties involved, the idea that justice will remain unbiased becomes laughable.  There will, naturally, be a few of us scattered throughout America who will remain blissfully ignorant of this precedent setting matter.   Even so, cobbling together an unbiased jury, particularly one composed of members who won't, in some way or another, maneuver themselves on to the panel to benefit from the notoriety, will be impossible.

Baring the visitation of an alien craft to earth with no knowledge of what happened in Sanford, Florida a few short weeks ago and with that ship bearing a group of beings willing to serve on a jury, justice cannot be served.  All one has to do in defense of Mr. Zimmerman is play to the jury a video of our elected representatives prejudging the case on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.   Heck, Attila the Hun or Charles Manson would walk free after that embarrassing show.

Instead of standing back and seeking out the facts these past weeks, we have busied ourselves with gathering wood for the torching at the stake.  Others have cleverly knotted the rope to ensure when hung from the tree it does its job on the first fall.

And what about the rest of us? Too quick to judge as well and cursed with idle hands, we have busied ourselves with stripping Justice's blindfold from her face.  We are complicit in insuring she can only see what lies in our biased minds and festers in our sordid, selfish hearts.