Tag Archives: justice

An Obama-Clinton ticket. P.S.

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

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I have reread yesterday’s post (December 13th, 2011).

Let me summarize it.  I wrote

  • that an Obama-Clinton ticket might prove a good combination.  But I also wrote that
  • no one could know whether or not Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been a better President than President Obama.  And I said that
  • members of the Tea Party and hardline Republicans systematically oppose proposals brought before by President Obama, which is unacceptable.

In other words, anti-tax extremism being at the centre of the current debate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would also have had difficulty ensuring the debt is paid without making substantial cuts in essential areas such as social programmes.

Yet, I think an Obama-Clinton ticket is a very good idea.

However, I may not have seemed very kind to the electorate.  Those Republican members of Congress who say ‘no’ systematically to proposals put before them by President Obama were elected by the people.

But it would be my opinion these voters were probably blinded by the candidates who needed their votes.  As soon as President Obama was elected into office, Sarah Palin was telling Americans that if the health-care reforms the President wanted to put into place were signed into law, grandmothers would be killed.  Grandmothers were not about to be killed, but panic-mongering is very effective.

In other words, I hope I didn’t offend anyone.  And if I did, I apologize.

I want to make very sure my readers know why I oppose anti-tax extremism.  The answer is simple.  I do not think the poor and the middle-class should foot the entire bill, i.e. repay the debt incurred by a previous Republican administration.  It would not be just.

* * *

But, let me add that, if united by a common purpose, Americans do what needs to be done.  When Europeans were fighting a demented dictator: Hitler, Americans and Canadians gave their lives to liberate Europe.  During the year I lived in Normandy, I saw the vast fields of little white crosses and marvelled at the courage Americans had shown.  Not to mention that having liberated Europe, they went on to rebuild it.  Remember the Marshall Plan.

There are so many dimensions to reality and so many shades to every colour, that it is dangerous to allow oneself to be dogmatically one-sided.

 * * *

December 14, 2011

On Troy Davis: reasonable doubt

18 Sunday Sep 2011

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Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed, by lethal injection, on Wednesday, September 21, 2011. On August 19, 1989, Mr Davis was found guilty in the shooting death of Savannah, Georgia Police Officer Marc MacPhail.  Mr Davis is now 42 and has been in jail for twenty years.  But there is doubt concerning his guilt.

*   *   *

So, let us please go back to the trial of O. J. Simpson, a former football star and an actor, who was accused of killing his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and an innocent bystander, Ronald Goldman.

It started with a police chase worthy of a Hollywood film.  Mr Simpson tried to escape driving a white Ford Bronco. This was a spectacular beginning to Mr Simpson’s trial and, to a large extent, matters remained spectacular.

The trial of O.J. Simpson lasted nine months, from January 9 to October 3, 1995, and was televised in full.  In a sense it was a forerunner to current “reality” shows.  When the police caught up with Mr Simpson, he had “lawyered up.”  So it was quickly established that, if found guilty, O.J. Simpson would not be executed.

Mr Simpson then gathered a team of lawyers whose names will go down in history for their brilliant defense.  Given his fame and wealth, Mr Simpson could afford Robert Kardashian, Johnny Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz and Barry Scheck, and this “dream team” lived up to its reputation.

Basically, all the “dream team” had to do to save their client was to introduce an element of doubt.  The DNA evidence pointed to guilt on the part of Mr Simpson, so viewers expected a guilty verdict.  However, when Barry Scheck heard the testimony of the DNA specialist, he managed to turn the trial around.  He suggested that the DNA evidence that was being used to establish guilt on the part of O.J. Simpson had been contaminated by the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime scene investigators.

As a result, possible guilt on the part of Mr Simpson was suddenly shifted from the accused to the Los Angeles Police Department.  At that point, the trial gained a surreal dimension and retained this dimension when Mr Simpson tried on the infamous glove. The glove did not fit, but that could be explained.  It had been wetted, causing it to shrink as it dried.  Moreover, sufficient time had elapsed between the day of the alleged crime to the day the glove was brought into evidence for the glove to shrink further.  Had the glove fit, O.J. Simpson’s lawyers may have been surprized.

Marcia Clark, the main prosecutor, was not surrounded by a dream team of lawyers. Consequently, it was not established scientifically that the glove did not fit because wet leather gloves shrink and because leather gloves shrink if they are not worn.
That glove should have been placed in a protected environment. That precious element of doubt had therefore been introduced.  O.J. Simpson was found not guilty.

*   *   *

It appears that there is reasonable doubt in the case of Troy Davis.  However, on August 19, 1989, the day Troy Davis was found guilty of the shooting death of police officer Marc MacPhail, he did not have by his side a lawyer of stature, a Barry Scheck.

Indeed, what of that element of doubt?  It is there.

I have therefore reflected that there may be several cases when a person stands no further than one good lawyer away the death penalty.

Whether or not he has killed, I hope an angel will help Mr Davis cross the narrow distance, a mere thread, between the finite and the infinite.

*   *   *

September 18, 2011

The Procrustean Bed

15 Monday Aug 2011

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In a version of this blog, now erased, I said that once some of my first-year students said to me that, since they were now adults, i. e. away from parental guidance, they were free to scream at the top of their lungs, during initiation. My response was that their freedom ended where mine began. And I also said that, henceforth, I would treat them as adults. When they were in a drunken stupor and screaming as loudly as they could, I would not phone Campus Security, but the local detachment of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police (RCMP).

However, in my next blog, I stated that many of these same students had matured and that, as adults, they had not ceased to amaze me. For instance, they had learned that, although they were individuals, they lived in a collectivity and that, under acceptable circumstances, they had to respect members of that collectivity.

Occasionally, those students would ask for my opinion on various topics. I did not like giving my opinion. They had to adopt their own values. As a result, the only comment  ever offered when we discussed thorny issues, was that, in my view, morality ended where inhumanity began. This, I would add, had often been my beacon when making decisions. There are so many murky areas and shades of grey galore.

I also told my students that there were times  when a rule had to be broken in the interest of justice or some higher value. Justice, I would explain, can be a Procrustean bed as is also the case with bureaucracy. Greek mythology’s Procrustes, had an iron bed. If a person he laid on his bed did not fit it from end to end, he would stretch that person. Conversely, if the person was too tall, Procrustes resorted to an amputation.

In other words, I would tell them that one cannot rearrange reality to fit a theory. Certain things change, others remain. Certain things are right and others, wrong, but what about the rest? The meaning of a word can change if the word is used in a different context:  denotation vs connotation i.e, “mistress” and “to record” vs “to throw away old records.”

Similarly, the notion of freedom has fluctuations. It is relative. However, I would add there are times when a crime is a crime is a crime.

Life can be a labyrinth. I hope my students got an education that is useful to them.  I loved them and I miss them.