A Piece of a Woman's Mind

Over the past few years I have come to believe that our justice system in the U.S. is very dysfunctional. This dysfunction has led to slow justice or a total lack of justice in many civil and criminal matters as well as rulings on local, state and federal laws. Endless fighting over interpretation of laws is confusing and unsettling to the general public. What is legal and what is not?

I am greatly frustrated when I realize that ALL practicing U.S. lawyers, the vast majority of our judges at all levels (some elected judges may not have a law degree) and many of our lawmakers in our State legislatures and the Congress went to the same law schools and were required to pass bar exams for the jurisdictions where they practice law. Judges at the highest levels went to the same prestigious law schools and early in their careers served as clerks for other sitting judges who graduated from prestigious law schools. In other words, all of these players in the justice system should have been exposed to the same legal foundational documents (e.g. constitutions) concepts and approaches to the law. Let’s face it. The legal profession in the U.S. is one big, incestuous family.

Lawmakers have access to lots of trained lawyers and experts in every discipline to help write clear, concise laws. Apparently the first failure is that laws are not clearly written. In almost every big case a judge or a jury makes a ruling. This ruling is followed by an endless series of appeals. During the appellate process, judges overrule each other, in some cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All of the players in the justice system spend their time endlessly questioning, interpreting and manipulating the law. This causes seemingly never-ending delays due to overcrowded dockets and late-arriving or newly discovered evidence. These delays mean that the end goal of speedy justice is defeated.

I could be cynical and say that the goal of the justice players is job security and higher legal fees. Maybe they all just enjoy the game of one-upmanship so much that they lose sight of their sworn duty to uphold the law. They seem to forget that you can’t uphold a law that never leads to a final verdict which delivers justice under the law. Delayed justice infuriates those people who are waiting and hoping for justice and sends a clear message to wrongdoers that there is no reckoning for breaking the law. The pervasive atmosphere of judicial dithering most assuredly contributed to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.  

I will end this musing with an excerpt from my book A Women’s Paradise which talks about women’s experience of justice since the beginning of civilization.

“WOMEN HAVE YEARNED FOR JUSTICE SINCE THE BEGINNING OF time. It is fitting that justice is often depicted by a blindfolded woman holding scales in her outstretched hand. It does not mean, as many have said, that justice is impartial and unbiased. Rather, it symbolizes that men have consistently prevented women from influencing or defining justice. Historically justice has been a group of laws and customs authored and administered by men. Even in the case of societies ostensibly concerned with law and order, the same cadence repeated itself over and over. Men passed a law. Men ignored the law. Men enforced the law only when expedient to do so. Men continued doing business as usual.

This meant that there was never any justice for a woman because a crime had to be committed against her before she was allowed entrance into the justice system. Once inside she found that the laws and judgments were determined totally by men. No matter what punishment or consequence was meted out to a lawbreaker under the justice system, a woman first had to suffer a trauma or an outrage that affected her negatively for the rest of her life. There was no just remedy for that and no effective advocacy by men to prevent crimes against women in the first place.

From a woman’s point of view it appeared that men stood back and watched other men commit heinous crimes against women. At some point the watchers decided that these criminals had surpassed an acceptable threshold. Then groups of men made laws against those heinous crimes. However, since the crimes had already been committed, the miscreants continued to commit those crimes for which the example had been set. They were in no way deterred by the laws or the haphazard enforcement thereof. Again, men continued doing business as usual.

Women want justice to be a positive, consistent, safe way of living and not an afterthought for the purposes of punishing a crime already committed. We are fed up with cruel, controlling men whimsically, periodically pulling the carpet of justice out from under us. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, was famous for promulgating the Four Freedoms which were freedoms that everyone in the world ought to enjoy. Now that women are at last in charge of this territory, it is appropriate to propose four new freedoms that all women should be able to enjoy:

Freedom from rape, murder, and burning at the stake

Freedom from trafficking, prostitution and slavery

Freedom from embedded, institutionalized discrimination or involuntary medical treatment or confinement on account of being a woman

Freedom to control their own bodies and to raise their children without the expectation of poverty whether a mother is single or married.”