David L. Hoof

JUSTICE

Imagine Portia’s speech on mercy from The Merchant of Venice, or Solomon’s deliberation on the fate of a baby. Consider the divine Biblical constraint, “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord, I shall repay.”

Each of these injunctions is ignored by a current American justice (sic) system in which arresting officers are empowered to murder or maim a suspect before arresting him or her.

Understand that Project Innocence has opened our eyes to the reality that the injunction to the jury to find guilt, “beyond a reasonable doubt” has failed hundreds of time. At every stem of the criminal system, the operation of fear, suspicion and cynicism shackles the process meant to protect a fundamental concept.

Playing to popular politics and personal prejudice, the justice system has blasphemously dismissed warnings, ignored acquitting facts, concealed exonerating evidence, and treated trials as circus events marching toward the drumroll of execution.

As justice delayed is justice denied, and the accused may await years before their court dates, justice no longer exists in America. A common outrage, and rage to deceive itself that a danger has been removed from the streets railroads juries to repeatedly convict on the sheerest of circumstances. Just as the best medical care is a luxury of the rich, the rich and guilty may buy their way into acquittals that a poorer suspect, defended by a court-appointed lawyer, cannot afford.

As presently arranged, no one in America works for the criminal justice system. When every policeman has a license to kill because he, or she, fears for his life, then no suspect is ensured the right to a fair trial. As currently practiced, justice has been supplanted by a system of mechanized vengeance.

In the age of hippies, right wingers used to jeer, “Next time you need help, call a hippie.” Please do. At least you won’t be executed in a caged squad car while handcuffed, the arresting officer claiming that you tried to escape.  Read More 

CRIMES (against humanity)

Now here’s a lexicographic hot potato if ever there was one. Like the green revolution and sustainability, it has managed to gather caché in nearly nation in the world, depending on whether it was victimizing or victimized. While victimizing, crimes against humanity are glossed over as patriotic, heroic actions, or inevitable mistakes in the fog of war. But when victimized, a nation pays eternal homage to the words of George Santayana at the entrance to Auschwitz, “The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.”

Crimes against humanity break down along both cultural and national lines, the outcome, as often, depending on the country. At Nuremberg the Allied Forces, sans the Soviet Union, tried certain high ranking Nazis as war criminals and left some of them swinging lifeless at the end of a rope. Had there been videophones among the executioners, their podcasts would have gone viral on You Tube.

The Soviets, who made no distinctions between German combatants and Nazi Party members, wreaked a terrible revenge on all German POWs, exiling them to Siberia. Incongruously, the triumphant United States conducted no war trials against the Japanese, despite the mass murder of the Batan Death March, the torture and execution of America POWs in camps, and the genocidal extermination of Nationalist Chinese in Nanking.

Either someone did not think of the Japanese as human, or the U.S. acted to deflect the accusation of its own crimes against humanity after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which more civilians than military were killed.

Inside nations, some still cling to playing God, despite God’s Biblical warning in the Book of Romans: “Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord; I shall repay.” In all industrialized countries other than the United States in the so-called free world, capital punishment is regarded as the state lowering itself to the offense that the convict has committed.

Ironically, in America the Beautiful, state sanctioned killing or a murderer is regarded as a form of deterrent (studies show it is not). In God-loving U.S.A., modern humans still howl for vengeance as loudly as their primate ancestors.

The United States Supreme Court once ruled that execution was “cruel and unusual punishment.” Not only that, but prosecutions seeking the death penalty are, according to journalist Stanley Cohen, more expensive to the state than a plea bargain leading to life imprisonment without parole.

Beyond that, as Project Innocence has shown repeatedly by using DNA evidence, persons originally convicted beyond a reasonable doubt were in fact not guilty. Ergo, the system pretending healthy skepticism has reached its verdict by some other process, probably fear, repulsion, outrage and suspicion. Bringing us to another line from the Bible, this one from the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” Not “Thou shalt not kill unless the son of a bitch is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” or even if he (or sometimes she) confesses.

Unless society sets the example by avoiding lethal violence, it, too becomes a mass murderer, committing crimes against humanity as coolly, regularly, and unapologetically as the Nazis did against the Jews. But then, as Condoleeza Rice said of the secret prisons and torture at Abu Ghraib, “I was all legal.” This was the same defense offered by attorneys for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg. Maybe tort is a cognate of torture.  Read More