The teapot’s boiling. American legal justice, always difficult (like all judicial systems on the planet) has become the focal point, well, of just about everybody, including foreign oglers, with the outbreak of a triumvirate of ebola-like cases—Travon Martin, James Brown, and Eric Garner. (One could cite a hundred other cases which don’t, for some reason, ascend to the attention level of the aforementioned trinity.)
Legal justice is not difficult to adjudicate. Ideal legal justice is impossible to adjudicate. In point of fact, it has never, once, in all of human history, ever occurred! How could it be otherwise? Is the guilt-non-guilt ratio in a trial 46% to 54%, 16% to 84%, 1% to 99%, etc., ad infinitum? And if guilt is assumed, what defines equitable punishment among judges and juries with infinite variations of perceptions of what is best, even acceptable? (A proven child rapist got off recently without, literally, a slap on the hand, and another man—surely there is one—who is innocent awaits his final injection.)
Our system, at its best, is the best in the world. That doesn’t prevent it from being horrific at times. After all, in a trial, you have sinners judging another sinner, a sinner defending a sinner and a sinner (or sinners) condemning him, with yet another sinner in a black robe who can express immense power over all the other sinners. Plus a courtroom full of sinners protected by sinners with guns. And still other sinners reporting on the event. And finally, there are all those other sinners—by the hundreds of millions in the three aforementioned cases—hearing about the trial and pontificating about what “true justice” would look like.
What to do? Surely, we must not give up seeking justice! Any other response is imbecilic, anarchy (produced by either apathy or activism) being the most lethal disease in the governance pharmacopeia. We have to keep on doggedly trying even when “heart and nerve and sinew” (Kipling) are exhausted from the struggle.
It is little comfort to realize that none of this is new. Three thousand years ago the reputed wisest man who ever lived, Solomon, said “…I saw under the sun (meaning everywhere) in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and in the place of righteousness iniquity was there.” (Ecclesiastes 3:16) Do all we can to ameliorate that fact, the fact is as inviolable—-and as universal—as the law of gravity.
Two other facts (real ones with sharp edges!) will sober us if not fully satisfy us in this boiling-kettle moment: (a) Each and every one of us, for our good and for the good of all others, must not let the kettle fire-stokers overwhelm us; we must keep everlastingly at the pursuit of the dream of our forefathers to seek, as a people, justice for all. That pregnant phrase must persistently animate and energize us. Such a pursuit demands unflinching and unwavering and unrelieved tenacity. We really have no other choices, do we? (b) Second, we must live out the significance, in the narrow confines of our own individual hearts, the most consequential judicial reality for each of us, that judgment which our forefathers called “The Final Assize.” It is the one in which each of us will sit in heaven’s dock in judgment before God who “will render to every man according to his deeds.”(Romans 2:6) It will be a day when “God will judge the secrets of men” as well! (Romans 2:16) Our focus then will not be on our frustrating and often fraudulent justice systems, but on that setting in which, for eternal weal or woe, (as Lincoln famously reminded us), “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” (Psalm 19:9). No side-bars, no copping pleas, no bought juries or judges, no manufactured evidence, no appeals (to whom!), no forensics (the Judge knows it all!). And miscarriages of justice, being, by definition, impossible. Until then Travon Martin and James Brown and Eric Garner and their judicial progeny must absorb our minds and hearts and wills, but on that inevitable occasion our concern, one may be assured, will not be about them, but ourselves. Existentiality will overwhelm metaphysics!
We must not be less vigilant about earth’s justice for others now, but are well advised to be more vigilant about heaven’s judgment on ourselves on a day to come. One of the many salutary effects of so doing would be a greater motivation to seek, now, justice for others. Why? Because those two trial settings—theirs now and ours later—are substantively connected morally; I do myself a favor then to be more consistently energized about justice for others now.
Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas