Re: [blind-democracy] 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@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> 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 our era.
> The 10-part online documentary "Making a Murderer," by 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 moot point.
> Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you 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 laws for them.
> 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."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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 our era.
> The 10-part online documentary "Making a Murderer," by 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 moot point.
> Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you 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 laws for them.
> 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."
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/president_obama_please_come_to_flint_mic
> higan_20160118/
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/president_obama_please_come_to_flint_mic
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> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_odds_of_a_kasich_miracle_20160118/
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