But there is a difference between the way you are treated by police and the
courts and the way a poor man of color is treated. You can use legal
representation on your behalf if you need it and even when you were poor,
you weren't ensnared by the police.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2016 11:59 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Virginia Jarvis
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Mirage of Justice
Most certainly if you are poor Justice is a mirage. But even more than
effecting the Poor, Justice is not an option for any person who is not one
of the, "Truly First Class Citizens".
And that includes not only the poor, or persons of Color, or Women, or
Elderly, or Disabled, but it includes the majority of people believing that
they are Citizens of the United States of America.
Justice is working just fine, if you are one of the small privileged
minority. The owners of this American government make the laws and rules to
serve their needs. These laws and rules also keep us cowed and confused.
By telling us that we are fortunate to be part of this Free Society, we
can't seem to figure out why we keep getting slammed to the mat. If times
are good, it's because of the clever maneuvers of our Wall Street CEO's. If
times are bad, it's the fault of the American Workers who are mismanaging
their lives. The fact that we are seen by the, "True First Class Citizens"
as a resource to serve their needs, we are consumers to be exploited, and
sucked dry of our meager resources.
Justice is alive and well. The problem is not with Justice, but with whose
Justice we are dealing with.
Leaking like the dykes in New Orleans, there are not enough, "Truly First
Class Citizens" to plug them all. And the leaks are growing.
Look around at the dissatisfaction abroad in the Land. Like Climate Change,
Social Change is rolling like a snowball heading down a steep slope. We are
in for a time of serious oppression, but the People will roll over the
Privilege, and establish a new Justice. Justice for All.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/18/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
our era.
The Mirage of Justice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mirage_of_justice_20160117/
Posted on Jan 17, 2016
By Chris Hedges
The online documentary "Making a Murderer" illuminates the
corruption and unfairness of the American system of justice. Above,
Steven Avery, one of the subjects of the film. (Netflix) If you are
poor, you will almost never go to trial-instead you will be forced to
accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor,
the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering
with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will
be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are
poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify
your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will
be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded
in assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no
jobs through the police stations, county jails and courts directly
into prison. And if you are poor, because you don't have money for
adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades
longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the
industrialized world.
If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with
a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime.
And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of
The 10-part online documentary "Making a Murderer," bymoot point.
writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, chronicles the
endemic corruption of the judicial system. The film focuses on the
case of Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who were given
life sentences for murder without any tangible evidence linking them
to the crime. As admirable as the documentary was, however, it focused
on a case where the main defendant, Avery, had competent defense. He
was also white. The blatant corruption of, and probable conspiracy by,
the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin and then-Calumet
County District Attorney Ken Kratz is nothing compared with what goes
on in the well-oiled and deeply cynical system in place in inner-city
courts. The accused in poor urban centers are lined up daily like
sheep in a chute and shipped to prison with a startling alacrity. The
attempts by those who put Avery and Dassey behind bars to vilify them
further after the release of the film misses the point: The two men,
like most of the rest of the poor behind bars in the United States,
did not receive a fair trial. Whether they did or did not murder
Teresa Halbach-and the film makes a strong case that they did not-is a
Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, youlaws for them.
are almost always found guilty. Because of this, as many activists
have discovered, the courts already are being used as a fundamental
weapon of repression, and this abuse will explode in size should there
be widespread unrest and dissent. Our civil liberties have been
transformed into privileges-what Matt Taibbi in "The Divide: American
Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap" calls "conditional rights and
conditional citizenship"-that are, especially in poor communities,
routinely revoked. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.
In any totalitarian society, including an American society ruled by
its own species of inverted totalitarianism, the state invests
tremendous amounts of energy into making the judicial system appear as
if it functions impartially. And the harsher the totalitarian system
becomes, the more effort it puts into disclaiming its identity. The
Nazis, as did the Soviet Union under Stalin, broke the accused down in
grueling and psychologically crippling interrogations-much the same
way the hapless and confused Dassey is manipulated and lied to by
interrogators in the film-to make them sign false confessions.
Totalitarian states need the facade of justice to keep the public
passive.
The Guardian newspaper reported: "The Innocence Project has kept
detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where
prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989.
The group's researchers found that false confessions were made in 28
percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in
itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions-by definition
the most serious cases-false confessions are the leading cause of
miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113
exonerations."
"[T]he interrogator-butcher isn't interested in logic," Alexander
Solzhenitsyn writes in "The Gulag Archipelago," "he just wants to
catch two or three phrases. He knows what he wants. And as for us-we
are totally unprepared for anything. From childhood on we are educated
and trained-for our own profession; for our civil duties; for military
service; to take care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to
appreciate beauty (well, this last not really all that much!). But
neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares
us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being
arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing."
If the illusion of justice is shattered, the credibility and viability
of the state are jeopardized. The spectacle of court, its solemnity
and stately courthouses, its legal rituals and language, is part of
the theater. The press, as was seen in the film, serves as an echo
machine for the state, condemning the accused before he or she begins
trial. Television shows and movies about crime investigators and the
hunt for killers and terrorists feed the fictitious narrative. The
reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten
a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97
percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases
are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we
have incarcerated at the moment-25 percent of the world's prison
population-2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of
them are innocent.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an article in The New York Review of Books
titled "Why Innocent People Plead Guilty" explains how this secretive
plea system works to thwart justice. Close to 40 percent of those
eventually exonerated of their crimes originally pleaded guilty,
usually in an effort to reduce charges that would have resulted in
much longer prison sentences if the cases had gone to trial. The
students I teach in prison who have the longest sentences are usually
the ones who demanded a trial. Many of them went to trial because they
did not commit the crime. But if you go to trial you cannot bargain
away any of the charges against you in exchange for a shorter
sentence. The public defender-who spends no more than a few minutes
reviewing the case and has neither the time nor the inclination to do
the work required by a trial-uses the prospect of the harshest
sentence possible to frighten the client into taking a plea deal. And,
as depicted in "Making a Murderer," prosecutors and defense attorneys
often work as a tag team to force the accused to plead guilty. If all
of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed
around plea agreements, would collapse.
And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public
attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement.
Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is
the inversion of justice.
The wrongly accused and their families, as long as the fiction of
justice is maintained, vainly seek redress. They file appeal after
appeal. Those convicted devote hundreds of hours of study in the law
library in prison.
They believe there has been a "mistake." They think that if they are
patient the "mistake" will be rectified. Playing upon such
gullibility, authorities allowed prisoners in Stalin's gulags to write
petitions twice a month to officials to proclaim their innocence or
decry mistreatment. Those who do not understand the American system,
who are not mentally prepared for its cruelty and violence, are
largely helpless before authorities intoxicated with the god-like
power to destroy lives. These authorities advance themselves or their
agendas-Joe Biden when he was in the Senate and Bill Clinton when he
was president did this-by being "tough" concerning law and order and
national security. Those who administer the legal system wield power
largely in secret. They are accountable to no one. Every once in a
while-this happened even under the Nazis and Stalin-someone will be
exonerated to maintain the fiction that the state is capable of
rectifying its "mistakes." But the longer the system remains in place,
the longer the legal process is shrouded from public view, the more
the crime by the state accelerates.
The power elites-our corporate rulers and the security and
surveillance apparatus-rewrite laws to make their criminal behavior
"legal." It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of
Wall Street's fraud and looting of the U.S. Treasury, the obliterationour era.
of our privacy, the ability of the government to assassinate U.S.
citizens, the revoking of habeas corpus, the neutralizing of our
Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the
murder of unarmed people in the streets of our cities by militarized
police, the use of torture, the criminalizing of dissent, the collapse
of our court system, the waging of pre-emptive war are rendered
"legal." Politicians, legislators, lawyers and law enforcement
officials, who understand that leniency and justice are damaging to
their careers, and whom Karl Marx called the "leeches on the
capitalist structure," have constructed for their corporate masters
our system of inverted totalitarianism. They serve this system. They
seek to advance within it. They do not blink at the victims destroyed
by it. And most of them know it is a sham.
"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the
right to repress others," Solzhenitsyn warned. "In keeping silent
about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears
on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a
thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach
evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are
thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new
generations."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ The Mirage of ;
Justice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mirage_of_justice_20160117/
Posted on Jan 17, 2016
By Chris Hedges
The online documentary "Making a Murderer" illuminates the corruption
and unfairness of the American system of justice. Above, Steven Avery,
one of the subjects of the film. (Netflix) If you are poor, you will
almost never go to trial-instead you will be forced to accept a plea
deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of
the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with
evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be
accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor,
and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your
innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be
invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in
assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no jobs
through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into
prison. And if you are poor, because you don't have money for adequate
legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than
those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.
If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with
a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime.
And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of
The 10-part online documentary "Making a Murderer," bymoot point.
writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, chronicles the
endemic corruption of the judicial system. The film focuses on the
case of Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who were given
life sentences for murder without any tangible evidence linking them
to the crime. As admirable as the documentary was, however, it focused
on a case where the main defendant, Avery, had competent defense. He
was also white. The blatant corruption of, and probable conspiracy by,
the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin and then-Calumet
County District Attorney Ken Kratz is nothing compared with what goes
on in the well-oiled and deeply cynical system in place in inner-city
courts. The accused in poor urban centers are lined up daily like
sheep in a chute and shipped to prison with a startling alacrity. The
attempts by those who put Avery and Dassey behind bars to vilify them
further after the release of the film misses the point: The two men,
like most of the rest of the poor behind bars in the United States,
did not receive a fair trial. Whether they did or did not murder
Teresa Halbach-and the film makes a strong case that they did not-is a
Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, youlaws for them.
are almost always found guilty. Because of this, as many activists
have discovered, the courts already are being used as a fundamental
weapon of repression, and this abuse will explode in size should there
be widespread unrest and dissent. Our civil liberties have been
transformed into privileges-what Matt Taibbi in "The Divide: American
Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap" calls "conditional rights and
conditional citizenship"-that are, especially in poor communities,
routinely revoked. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.
In any totalitarian society, including an American society ruled by
its own species of inverted totalitarianism, the state invests
tremendous amounts of energy into making the judicial system appear as
if it functions impartially. And the harsher the totalitarian system
becomes, the more effort it puts into disclaiming its identity. The
Nazis, as did the Soviet Union under Stalin, broke the accused down in
grueling and psychologically crippling interrogations-much the same
way the hapless and confused Dassey is manipulated and lied to by
interrogators in the film-to make them sign false confessions.
Totalitarian states need the facade of justice to keep the public
passive.
The Guardian newspaper reported: "The Innocence Project has kept
detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where
prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989.
The group's researchers found that false confessions were made in 28
percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in
itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions-by definition
the most serious cases-false confessions are the leading cause of
miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113
exonerations."
"[T]he interrogator-butcher isn't interested in logic," Alexander
Solzhenitsyn writes in "The Gulag Archipelago," "he just wants to
catch two or three phrases. He knows what he wants. And as for us-we
are totally unprepared for anything. From childhood on we are educated
and trained-for our own profession; for our civil duties; for military
service; to take care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to
appreciate beauty (well, this last not really all that much!). But
neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares
us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being
arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing."
If the illusion of justice is shattered, the credibility and viability
of the state are jeopardized. The spectacle of court, its solemnity
and stately courthouses, its legal rituals and language, is part of
the theater. The press, as was seen in the film, serves as an echo
machine for the state, condemning the accused before he or she begins
trial. Television shows and movies about crime investigators and the
hunt for killers and terrorists feed the fictitious narrative. The
reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten
a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97
percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases
are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we
have incarcerated at the moment-25 percent of the world's prison
population-2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of
them are innocent.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an article in The New York Review of Books
titled "Why Innocent People Plead Guilty" explains how this secretive
plea system works to thwart justice. Close to 40 percent of those
eventually exonerated of their crimes originally pleaded guilty,
usually in an effort to reduce charges that would have resulted in
much longer prison sentences if the cases had gone to trial. The
students I teach in prison who have the longest sentences are usually
the ones who demanded a trial. Many of them went to trial because they
did not commit the crime. But if you go to trial you cannot bargain
away any of the charges against you in exchange for a shorter
sentence. The public defender-who spends no more than a few minutes
reviewing the case and has neither the time nor the inclination to do
the work required by a trial-uses the prospect of the harshest
sentence possible to frighten the client into taking a plea deal. And,
as depicted in "Making a Murderer," prosecutors and defense attorneys
often work as a tag team to force the accused to plead guilty. If all
of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed
around plea agreements, would collapse.
And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public
attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement.
Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is
the inversion of justice.
The wrongly accused and their families, as long as the fiction of
justice is maintained, vainly seek redress. They file appeal after
appeal. Those convicted devote hundreds of hours of study in the law
library in prison.
They believe there has been a "mistake." They think that if they are
patient the "mistake" will be rectified. Playing upon such
gullibility, authorities allowed prisoners in Stalin's gulags to write
petitions twice a month to officials to proclaim their innocence or
decry mistreatment. Those who do not understand the American system,
who are not mentally prepared for its cruelty and violence, are
largely helpless before authorities intoxicated with the god-like
power to destroy lives. These authorities advance themselves or their
agendas-Joe Biden when he was in the Senate and Bill Clinton when he
was president did this-by being "tough" concerning law and order and
national security. Those who administer the legal system wield power
largely in secret. They are accountable to no one. Every once in a
while-this happened even under the Nazis and Stalin-someone will be
exonerated to maintain the fiction that the state is capable of
rectifying its "mistakes." But the longer the system remains in place,
the longer the legal process is shrouded from public view, the more
the crime by the state accelerates.
The power elites-our corporate rulers and the security and
surveillance apparatus-rewrite laws to make their criminal behavior
"legal." It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of
Wall Street's fraud and looting of the U.S. Treasury, the obliteration
of our privacy, the ability of the government to assassinate U.S.
citizens, the revoking of habeas corpus, the neutralizing of our
Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the
murder of unarmed people in the streets of our cities by militarized
police, the use of torture, the criminalizing of dissent, the collapse
of our court system, the waging of pre-emptive war are rendered
"legal." Politicians, legislators, lawyers and law enforcement
officials, who understand that leniency and justice are damaging to
their careers, and whom Karl Marx called the "leeches on the
capitalist structure," have constructed for their corporate masters
our system of inverted totalitarianism. They serve this system. They
seek to advance within it. They do not blink at the victims destroyed
by it. And most of them know it is a sham.
"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the
right to repress others," Solzhenitsyn warned. "In keeping silent
about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears
on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a
thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach
evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are
thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new
generations."
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