.JPEG)
In my law enforcement job one of my duties is to review electronic communications that are received by my agency that the system has segregated because of a potential threat. After a week of reviewing communications generated by the trial (and verdict), listening and watching media interviews, and observations I’ve made I decided to sit down and draft this. However, I’m not going to talk about the trial, there are more than enough “experts” doing that already. The only thing I will say is that my friends and law enforcement coworkers (past and present) that I’ve spoken with were not surprised at the Not Guilty verdict on First Degree Murder. This trial has put a light on our society that we may not like, that makes us uncomfortable, and that may cause us to address just what is happening in order that we change for the better. People have a right to be angry and feel frustrated because a child has died and there is not an explanation. It is how we react and how we react that is the real issue.
First and foremost people need to stop threatening and being hostile towards the jurors! With the exception of one, none of them wanted to serve on that jury. Despite not wanting to be there, being isolated from their family, friends, familiar surroundings they served. Agree or disagree with their decision all you want, but acknowledge the fact that they made it. And before you say that you would have made a different decision remember that there was a lot of information that we saw on TV that they were not allowed to hear, they were out of the room. If you still know that there is no way you would have done what they did, think about the time(s) you received a subpoena for jury duty. Did you serve or did you try to find a way to get out of it? If you served, thank you for your service. If you haven’t served I hope your still as civic minded the next time you receive a subpoena.
People have been writing my agency expressing, demanding that Casey Anthony be put on trial again and again until a jury finally gets it right. Others want to blame “the system”, we have to find someone or something to blame besides ourselves. The United States judicial system isn’t perfect. BELIEVE ME after being a law enforcement officer for over thirty years I can vouch for that, but it’s much better having a system where your are presumed innocent until proven guilty instead of the other way. There are those that have claimed to have been “railroaded”, and there have been actual cases of innocent people being convicted of a crime. What do you think would happen if the burden of proof was on you the accused to prove your innocent, I for one don’t want to experience a system of Guilty until proven innocent.
Like I said the system isn’t perfect, none is, but instead of dismantling what we’ve spent over two hundred and thirty years building, how about improving upon what we have. Regardless of what we do, we the society need to also take a look at our expectations and perceptions. Yes, expectations, a part of the problem are what a lot of people perceive as fact and as a result the expectations they’ve set. A glaring example of this can be found on television and how we think of the programs we watch.
For over two hundred years criminals were put on trial and convicted without Gil Grissom or Horatio Caine getting on the stand and professing the defendant’s guilt. Yes I am referring to characters from the popular TV shows CSI and CSI Miami. I know, those shows aren’t real, they’re dramatizations, and everybody knows that! Really, does everyone know that they are fictional dramatizations? When you look up CSI Miami on the internet one of the first listing you’ll find is from Wikipedia, there the program is listed as “CSI: Miami (Crime Scene Investigation: Miami) is an American police procedural television series”. Not a dramatization, not a “soap opera”, it’s “police procedural television”.
I’m not blaming those programs, I happen to enjoy them as entertainment, and there lays the concern. A large number of people don’t differentiate the entertainment from real life, it’s “police procedural television”. This is nothing new; fifty years ago people were convinced that the guilty person would suddenly stand up from the audience at trial and proclaim their guilt because that’s what happens on Perry Mason.
In addition to being able to recognize the difference between “procedural television” and entertainment, people need to put a human life and non human life in their proper prospective. I went out to dinner the other night and was sitting near the entrance of the restaurant. I watched a family walking up to the door, as I watched I thought I saw the wife’s purse start to move. Then I saw a little head pop out of the top, it was a small dog. A moment later I saw the family walking back to their car to leave and the wife was beyond upset, she was angry! What had her upset? She could not bring her dog into the restaurant, but her anger wasn’t because this was a Service Animal she used to cope with life, this dog was one of her children! Now I have had pets throughout my life that I was fond of, BUT!!!!
We can’t tell the difference between a fictional program and real life, or a living breathing human being that came from our seed and a canine (or other animal); do we really have a right to be angry with a jury verdict?
Maybe we need to slow down, take a deep breath, and get our priorities straight before we tear down our judicial system! That deep breath might also give us enough time to realize that what we want to do regarding the members of the jury, or Casey, is a crime even in the idealistic system we now want to create and will make us no better than the one we despise for “getting away with her child’s death.”
That’s My Opinion, What’s Yours
1 comment:
The following excerpt from Wikipedia makes it abundantly clear that Jefferson was addressing the prohibition of a state mandated religion. Jefferson did not address the prohibition on the public display of religious icons that define a supreme being. If a display of a religious icon is non-sectarian in that it is not used exclusively by one organized religion, it is incomprehensible to me how a court of law can deem it can, impede the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances”.
The First Amendment reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ....", while Article VI specifies that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." The modern concept of a wholly secular government is sometimes credited to the writings of English philosopher John Locke, but the phrase "separation of church and state" in this context is generally traced to a 1 January 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson, addressed to the Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist Association, and published in a Massachusetts newspaper. Echoing the language of the founder of the first Baptist church in America, Roger Williams—who had written in 1644 of "[A] hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world"— Jefferson wrote, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State".[1]
Jefferson's metaphor of a wall of separation has been cited repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court. In its 1879 Reynolds v. United States decision, the court allowed that Jefferson's comments "may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment." In the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote, "In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state." [2] However, the Court has not always interpreted the constitutional principle as meaning absolute separation of government from all things religious.[3][4][5][6]
Public debates about the proper extent of church/state separation in the U.S. remain vigorous and impassioned. Politically active evangelical Christians such as David Barton, a former co-chair of the Texas Republican party, emphasize the religiosity of the nation's founders and assert that "separation of church and state," as widely understood by modern historians and jurists, is a "myth" and that the U.S. was founded as a religious, Christian nation.[7]
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.
Post a Comment