By: Jordan Gaskin
The American legal system is broken. Within trials, truth is replaced by the ability and skill of a lawyer to deceive. Judges can be biased against you regardless of what you did or didn’t do. Other people skirt their way around jail time and other punishments, even if they clearly did what they were accused of doing. Your basic amendment rights as an American can be disregarded and discarded. Judges acquit federal workers who commit crimes when if those people were in the shoes of an average American citizen, they would certainly end up with jail time. This is our legal system.
So, how and why are judged biased against you in court? Simply put, judges are politicians. 39/50 states hold elections for their basic trial courts and intermediate appellate courts. As can be seen by their campaign videos and general advertisements, judges win elections by showing that they “beat down all crime”, as in the eye of an average american that doesn’t know any better, this is what makes a good judge. Michigan’s Justice Taylor in his campaign video even states that he is a “former prosecutor”. There’s a big problem here; these judges don’t care to state they have a good knowledge of the law; they’re stating that they’re friendly to the prosecution, because it wins them the most votes. Because of this, in certain cases, the verdict is decided before the trial begins.
An Alabama blogger, Roger Shuler, sat months in prison for exercising his first amendment rights. While yes, it was revealed that the guy was a pretty crazy conspiracy theorist who spread false information, it doesn’t justify the fact that the man he was speaking out against could put a restraining order on his writing. Shuler rightfully believed this to be completely unfair and unconstitutional, and so he not only refused to remove his earlier blog posts, but continued writing them afterwards. Because of this, Shuler was arrested for contempt of court and put in prison for five months. The Alabama news website states that, “While in many circumstances it is not unusual to find someone in contempt of court for refusing to obey a court order, it is virtually unheard of in the context of allegedly defamatory speech.” This is what’s known as arbitrary use of power, or in other words, one of the main reasons Americans fought for independence from Britain about 200 years ago. Judges have the power to interpret and enforce the law based on what they believe those laws to mean. I don’t think that’s really representative of what justice should be (Faulk).
According to the Health Impact News Network, in an article written by Arizona judge John F Molloy, over 70% of low to middle class Americans cannot afford the cost of justice. Lawyers prioritize making money because it’s their job, and I understand that, but the average American’s dependency on lawyers makes things difficult. Molloy states that “Today the skill and gamesmanship of lawyers, not the truth, often determine the outcome of a case. And we lawyers love it. All the tools are there to obscure and confound.” He also states that “The system’s process of discovery and the exclusionary rule often work to keep vital information off-limits to jurors and make cases so convoluted and complex that only lawyers and judges understand them.” Thus, our dependency on lawyers increases, and they can increase prices and get more job opportunities. Once again, I do understand that lawyers only want to make more money. That’s the point of having the job in the first place. Doing so at the expense of the accused and the defendants however, I entirely disagree with. That’s not justice
Rich lawyers can manipulate the legal system to their favor, and the worst part is that it happens all the time. An article by Guillermo Contreras on expressnews.com states that on July 2015 a San Antonio lawyer gave a jurist cash, paid for repairs on his vehicles, and sold him a Mercedez-Benz in exchange for favorable rulings on cases. Sheri Qualters of The National Law Journal wrote an article that states that texas lawyer Marc Garrett Rosenthal bribed judge Abel Limas for months before finally getting caught. Richard Scruggs is the richest lawyer in America, with a net worth of $1.7 billion, who had bribed judges for years for favorable rulings before he was finally found out. The list goes on and on, and it won’t end until something changes with this system.
Kalief Browder was sixteen years old when he was sent to Riker’s Island, New York City’s main prison complex, for a crime he did not commit. This sixteen year old was jailed, with absolutely no conviction, for 3 years. There he was abused by inmates and officers alike, which can be seen by the video evidence provided by Jennifer Gonnerman’s article on The New Yorker. After losing 3 years of his life, and getting almost no compensation for it by New York, Browder tried going back to school, though constantly paranoid that everyone wanted to hurt him. Kalief took his own life only four months ago, having lost his sanity as a direct result of being placed in solitary confinement for over 1,000 days. Browder wasn’t meant to stay imprisoned for 3 years; he was waiting for a trial that never came, and there was nothing he or his family could have done about it. This is proof enough that something like this could happen to anyone, including you or me. It is beyond ridiculous that any random bystander can be accused for a crime, and then sit 3 years in jail waiting for a trial because of delays. It’s just stupid that a situation like this was, and still is possible .
None of these occurrences are far-fetched or rare. How many times have we seen police brutality as a news headline, and then people becoming even angrier when they find out that those police officers were acquitted? Lawyers bribe judges all the time. Judges interpret laws in their own ways that reflect only themselves. Our legal system is meant to provide justice to the accused, but many times I can only see injustice. The scariest part about it is how these injustices could affect anyone that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why is this still allowed to happen? Why is it so difficult to get a fair trial at a reasonable price? Many people say that the legal system isn’t broken, and that it’s doing the job it was meant to do. I disagree, because if that were the case, there wouldn’t be so many instances of injustice slipping through the cracks so regularly. Something obviously needs to change here; I’m just not sure what that “something” is.
