The Poisoned Tree
An IllAdvised Opinion on Two Wrongs
The biggest problems with our ‘justice’ system involve innocent people being punished. This flagrant injustice hurts us all, and especially the innocent person. But our society is also damaged when truly guilty people are not punished. And one of the most egregious ways that happens is called the ‘Fruit of the Poisoned Tree’. This doctrine takes the age-old adage of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’, and turns it on its head and makes its opposite a legal principle. It takes two guilty people and lets them both off the hook!
Again and again we see that our justice system has pretensions of being the NFL. In the NFL when both teams commit some foul, what can happen (and I’m not a football rules expert) is that neither team is punished. And that’s fine… for a game. But justice isn’t a game. The goal of justice should be that all guilty parties are punished justly for all of their crimes.
When a policeman violates the law and, in so doing, discovers evidence of a crime, a true crime. Like, you know, someone standing over a dead body with the gun in their hand, what should happen is that the policeman is punished for violating the law (and punished severely) AND the murderer is punished for committing the murder. What does happen is that they both get off.
We treat the police officer as if he was playing for some team. The ‘government’ team. Or the ‘prosecution’ team. And so when his team doesn’t play by the rules, they get punished… as a team.
And we treat the criminal as if he, too, was on a team. Indeed I think they even use those words, “The Defence Team”. So, when the ‘Prosecution Team’ commits a foul, the ‘Defence Team’ gets some kind of benefit. But they aren’t teams, this isn’t a game. The goal of a game is entertainment, and we consider it much more entertaining when everyone has to play by the same rules, and everyone plays as a team. This is supposed to be a justice system, and the goal should be that everyone who is guilty of a true crime gets punished for the crime.
So, the policeman who commits a crime (an actual crime) should be punished for that crime. Him, not his team. If, while committing that crime, he uncovers evidence of someone else’s crime and if the jury finds him credible (which, you know, he was committing a crime at the time!) then the person who committed the crime should be punished for the crime they were committing!
We all understand the goal. We wish for our authorities to be forced to act in accordance with the laws they are supposedly enforcing. And we all understand that, to a certain extent, those authorities will be frustrated if they lose a case. But the punishment for committing a crime should not be ‘frustration’… it should be a punishment, laid down in the law, proven to a jury. And it should not be carried out against the ’team’, but upon the person or persons who committed the crime.
And no one can even pretend that one of the goal’s of our justice system should be to let murderers walk free. If they do walk free it should be because our justice system failed. Which, being staffed by sinful men, it will do. Being staffed by men with less than omnipotence and omniscience, they will not be able to gather all of the requisite evidence and witnesses. Being surrounded by a sinful community which might even support the murderer, it might well fail.
But it should never fail to punish a murderer because a policeman broke the law.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
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Or, ‘The Supreme Court for Dummies’.