THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

LEGAL PROCEDURE IS POINTLESS | 2004-03-20

As we follow the big trials, Lee Malvo, Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant, and the Robert Blake murder trial, we hear legal experts talking about the complicated and expensive procedures and other legal experts criticizing what the first set of legal experts said.

Everybody involved gets good money.

But does justice get anything out of this, or is real justice being starved by these Wise Sages the way children are starving in Tibet?

The important point about all those experts is that they don't matter. They do nothing for justice.

In court, the same silly-ass nonsense we saw in that Tibetan monastery is played out by white people. They are not called Wise Sages. They are called judges.

A judge can have fifty years on the bench, but none of it makes any real difference.

There is no evidence whatever that legal experience does any good for justice.

There is no evidence whatever that anything in American precedents or all the Latin or all the procedures mean a damned thing. There is a myth that if you have an endless number of lawyers saying an endless number of legal things, more justice results.

No way.

All that talk in the courtroom, all that experience, all those motions, none of them mean any more than that silly-ass shouting in the Tibetan Monastery.

But when white people in California sit around saying "OOOOM!" or shout crap to each other in the Oriental Mystical Way, it's just silly. Nobody really gets hurt.

But all that crap we pay for in court is covering up a desperate situation. We need real solutions, and all we get is more lawyers using bigger words.

The lawyer shouts, "Your Honor, Your Lordship, Your Majesty, what is the True Meaning of the Law?"

And the judge shouts, "The precedent in Wilkins versus Wiley shows defendant gets ten appeals instead of nine."

"Thank you Your Honor for your valuable information!" the lawyer shouts back.

No lawyer knows or cares whether another appeal will free the innocent or get one more innocent person killed on the streets. Lawyers and judges just get paid to talk to each other, and nothing is supposed to come our of it but more pointless "precedents" and technical objections.