It's not a Game!
An IllAdvised Opinion on Some Very Annoying Habits of Lawyers
This post is just a shot across the bow. I will have a lot more to say on this subject. But there is something that is not only annoying but is profoundly evil and that needs addressing: Justice is not a game!
I often hear lawyers say (and hopefully not mean) “Well, they had their day in court.” This is an ugly phrase with no possible good translation. The best translation is, “Well, the legal system isn’t perfect, and I hope and pray that what happened to this person is reflective of their guilt or innocence, but we all know that justice isn’t perfect, but at least they… had their day in court.”
But what it often comes across sounding like is, “The justice system succeeded… because they had their day in court.” But that is not only a lie; it is an obscene lie. If an innocent person got punished, it is far better that they were punished by some evil tyrant than that a ‘justice’ system arrived at the result of an innocent person being punished! If a father gets his parental rights stripped away unjustly (which is practically all of the time),… far better it have happened at the hand of some mafia boss than at the hand of someone we trusted to administer justice!
A similar obscenity happens when lawyers discuss the results of a jury decision. You often hear them natter along about ‘what the jury heard’ and ‘the evidence that was presented’. But if what the jury heard caused them to pervert justice, if the evidence that was presented led to a miscarriage of justice… then we should, by all means, talk about what the reality of justice is and, even if we wish to exempt the actual jurors, we need to at the very least castigate the judge, prosecutor, defence lawyer, police, and everyone else related to the case!
Or what of when they dispassionately discuss the ‘defence strategy’? The defence must have a strategy, and they must act on it, but we need to always keep in mind that it is a travesty that it matters! If an innocent person is punished because ‘the defence tried a bold but unsuccessful strategy’, that is not at all the same thing as a football team trying a ‘bold but unsuccessful play’. The football play may cause one group of fans to cheer and one to boo; the defence ‘play’ leads to injustice.
We must never forget that, however imperfect we are as human beings, the actual goal of a ‘justice’ system should be to end up in a ‘just’ result… not a ‘fair’ one. It doesn’t matter one whit if everyone ‘played by the rules’, if the end result was unjust. It isn’t a soccer game! It is life and death and freedom and slavery and innocence and guilt.