Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Joys of Perverted Legal Systems

Here is a campaign to try to fix the idiotic libel laws in Britain:



What I find hysterically funny is that these people are using the American laws as a device to make the UK's laws look bad. The American laws are just as ridiculous, unjust, and trashy as the UK's laws, but just not in this one dollop of a legal area. So America has a slightly better libel law. Still, the US has a decrepit legal system whose main impetus is to enrich lawyers and has next to nothing to do with "dispensing justice". In fact, I know of no legal system that really strives for "justice".

In my wide-eyed youth I thought policemen were "good guys" and that the law was there to protect you. But I was disabused on the policeman myth in my adolescence when a bored cop got his jollies chasing me around harrassing me about having a light on my bike as I delivered papers before 6:00 AM. I got disabused to the legal systems supposed interest in "justice" when I was dragged through both the criminal and civil courts by a bunch of drug users who lied to get me accused to beating up a kid. Despite no history of violence or legal problems, this crowd of thugs with a long rap sheet were able to drag me through the courts of years and years because the legal system is brain dead. My first clue that the legal system had no interest in "justice" came when nobody ever asked me for my side of the story about "the incident".

Only years later did I finally understand how I had been done in. The kid had had his bike stolen by some bullies and they beat him up. The mother used pictures of these bruises to get the legal authorities to go after me. I was shocked at how easy it was to pervert justice. The lesson I learned: always be first to the cops because once you get the state on your side, you have infinite resources to grind down the other person.

The legal system has no interest in getting at the facts or truth, so it becomes incumbent on the accused to spend, and spend, and spend to try and defend themselves from a relentless state legal system. As in my case, the criminals find this to be high fun to turn tables and watch innocent people being ground down by a system that the criminals hate. And the cops, prosecutors, and judges show no interest in stopping their being used by criminals as tools in this little cat-and-mouse game.

Here is an example from a PBS Frontline program:
Eight men charged. Five confessions. But only one DNA match. Why would four innocent men confess to a brutal crime they didn't commit?

In The Confessions, FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (Innocence Lost, An Ordinary Crime) investigates the conviction of four men -- current and former sailors in the U.S. Navy -- for the rape and murder of a Norfolk, Va., woman in 1997. In the first television interviews with the "Norfolk Four" since their release, Bikel learns of some of the high-pressure police interrogation techniques -- the threat of the death penalty, sleep deprivation, intimidation -- that led each of the men to confess, despite the lack of any evidence linking them to the crime.
The PBS program presents this as some kind of "aberration" where justice mysteriously goes wrong. But this isn't that rare. About 10% of all "confessions" of murder are made by innocent people worn down by bullying police. About one-third of all people on death's row in the US are in fact innocent of the crime but end up sentenced to death by a legal system that has no real interest in truth or justice. The legal experts know this, but you don't hear any hue and cry to "fix the system". No! The system continues to grind victims down. Nobody cares (except for the odd fanatic, the lonely voice calling for judicial reform). Sad.

Here is a very short list of innocent Canadians railroaded by the legal system here in Canada:
The Canadian legal system should hang its head in shame for the injustice it has done. It should be in a frenzy to rectify the bureaucratic wheels of "justice" to ensure this never happens again. But it hasn't. It isn't. And it won't. The police, prosecutors, and judges are quite happy to go home at night and sleep soundly despite the fact that they work for a corrupted system that willfully destroys the lives of innocent people.

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