Archive for December 20th, 2008

To me the most important protection of our democracy

should be the insulation of our judicial system from corrupt

influences.  If justice comes down to who has the most money,

society as we know it would disintegrate.  For a society to

survive the people within it must, after all, believe in their elite. 

And they must have trust in the fairness of their judicial

systems.  The only other way to hold society together is

with a large internal “security” force.

In a national bestseller, “Personal Injuries”, Scott Turow

vividly describes what can go wrong when “The Judge” is on

the take. The story involves favorable rulings in personal

injury cases where insurance companies are on the hook

for huge settlements.  Common wisdom holds that insurance

companies use the pretext of those monstrous settlements

to charge their customers outrageous fees for what are in

actuality rare cases.  The lawyers get rich, the judges

(in these cases) get a nice bonus of some sort and the

insurance companies get to raise their rates. The plaintiffs

get hugely rewarded for their pain and suffering and as a final

tribute to a system gone horribly wrong, the evildoer is severely

punished.  Everyone involved is the winner, the insurance company

pays off, and if there is a loser somewhere, no one cares.

WE, the majority of people in USA, have a firm belief in our

democracy (with a few detractors), and a strong backbone

of religious and moral convictions. And WE overwhelmingly

support our judicial system.  I believe as a society WE feel shame

when the bad guy goes free (take OJ for example) or when the

good guy gets wrongly convicted (take the hundreds of inmates

recently freed from years of confinement by new DNA evidence).

So what in the world are WE thinking when WE allow the most

politically motivated, and by extension the most heavily influenced,

people in our society to –APPOINT– the judges who sit on the

highest benches in the land. Every honest person needs to believe

that the person presiding over a court of law, and possibly

sitting in judgment of him, will be impartial, which is inherently

an oxymoronic concept under these circumstances. Shouldn’t

WE the people be voting on these guys?