'What is Justice?'

“Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a

long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep
melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet
high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped
his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it
again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching
continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.”

The above excerpt from the American Classic Tom Sawyer relives the adventures of a boy faced with a daunting unpleasant task. The boy concocts a plan to convince other that it was their duty to whitewash the fence and, in fact, it was more than just a little bit of fun to do. He convinced his friends to do his job for him and have some fun while doing it.  

I am going to supposed that you have heard the term grand jury indictment in your casual reading of Newsday or any other local paper. The defendant has been “indicted by the grand jury on a felony charge and…”  

This sounds very ominous, foreboding and serious. Why would the American Justice system seek a criminal indictment by the stately grand jury unless the defendant was a hardened criminal, drug lord, murderer or member of organized crime?

Would it surprise you to find out that the grand jury system is nothing more than a legal whitewashing designed to convince simple citizen, accused of a crime, to plead guilty without the benefit of a trial? In this grand jury system a group of 23 of your neighbors without the benefit of any legal experience are forced to accept the job of being your judge and jury. 

The defendant is not allowed to present his side of the case and the grand jury hears only the prosecution’s case; the prosecution’s witnesses. The prosecution’s evidence is all neatly packaged up by an Assistant District Attorney who probably has less concern about real justice that the accused defendant.  After all, in the life of an A.D.A. it is all about conviction rates.

The crimes brought before the grand jury are often the result of over inflated charges, for  seemingly minor infractions, designed to force defendants to plead guilty without the benefit of a trial wherein they could present their side of the case. Many of the defendant’s are poor misguided citizens who may have stepped out of line but they are not felons. 

The legal system has designed this neat little package called the grand jury which forces some 90 percent of the defendants indicted to plead guilty without ever going before a judge or ever being allowed to present their side of the case at trial. Talk about a whitewash job!

Whitewashing the fence may have been all good fun for Huck Finn and his friends in Tom Sawyer but what passes for justice in our legal system is a far more dangerous legal whitewashing designed to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights and it should be abolished.  If law enforcement has enough evidence to arrest an individual than it stands to reason that they should have enough evidence to go to trial without the need for any whitewash!

- Patrick Ingegno can be reached at inner-circle@optimum.net or www.innercircledebtsolutions.com