gracchusdixit

For nearly 500 years, the words, “Justice is blind,” have symbolized everything we wish our legal system to be: objective, impartial, and blind to distinctions of wealth, power, privilege, or race.  Equal treatment before the law is the bedrock of a decent and democratic society.  It is the only thing separating us from societies that are run by thugs and criminals.

No human institution is ever perfect, and our legal system is no exception.   To say that “justice is blind” is to raise a high ideal, one that we must work hard to live up to.

It has become abundantly clear, however, that we are no longer even trying.  Our legal system is not merely imperfect, in the way of all human institutions, it has become fundamentally flawed and corrupt.

The first glimpse of this sad reality came after the financial collapse of 2008.  Our leading financial institutions committed crimes—not errors of judgment or imprudent mistakes, but blatant and deliberate fraud.  The result was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which cost millions of Americans their jobs or their homes or both.  Eight years later, not a single senior executive in any of the companies that caused the crisis has been indicted, let alone tried or convicted.  We have been told, time and again, that financial crimes are too “complicated” to prosecute successfully.  That’s nonsense.  Hundreds of executives went to jail after the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 80s.  Dozens were convicted after the failure of Enron, and the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was forced to close its doors.  But not today.  Now, not only are the companies that caused the 2008 financial catastrophe too big to fail, the criminals who run them are too big to jail.

The second signal of the corruption in our system of justice came when George Zimmerman, the self-appointed “neighborhood watch coordinator” of a gated community in Florida, killed an innocent and unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.  Zimmerman was acquitted of his crime after local police rigged the investigation and Florida prosecutors bungled the trial because of negligence or intent.  Since then, we have seen countless examples of the same pernicious pattern:  Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and others.  In all these cases, local police unions have rallied around the officers who perpetrated these crimes, demonizing the victims and defending the officers themselves as heroes who “put their lives on the line”.  Since the average cop has no more chance of dying in the line of duty than the typical motorist has of dying behind the wheel of a car, that claim is a shameless distraction, designed to ensure that criminals will never be punished.

And just days ago, we witnessed perhaps the most appalling demonstration of all, when the Senate Intelligence Committee published the findings of its years-long inquiry into acts of torture committed by the CIA at the behest of the highest officials in the land. Those who authorized these acts, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush , insist that the “ends justify the means,” that any action which saves American lives is honorable, moral, and legal.  Those who perpetrated these acts deny that “enhanced interrogation” is torture at all but is, instead, a “useful tool” for defending the nation. Those who should know better, including the current President of the United States, urge us to “learn from the past” and “move forward,” as if such insipid clichés were an adequate substitute for justice.

The acts of torture authorized by Cheney and Bush, and committed by the CIA,  are unambiguous crimes under international law and our own laws.  They are crimes that we have condemned publicly, legally and officially for three decades.  They are crimes that demand, not explanation or expiation, but trial, conviction, and punishment.

Until we punish the most powerful criminals in our society—bankers who steal, police who commit murder, politicians who break our laws and betray our ideals—we will be a nation where justice is no longer blind.  We will have become a nation that is blind to justice.