WEALTHY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN THE UNITED STATES

I have read Carolina's article and also her previous blog, Poverty and criminal Justice in the United States, which is an excellent commentary on the Salon Article of 18 March 2014.  I do concur with her on both blogs.

It is a shame that in this land of plenty, wealth discriminates, so heavily on the poor and uneducated.    Concentrating on the wealthy and the Criminal Justice System and the double standard that exists therein, let’s take the cases mentioned by Caroline in reverse order.  

That a millionaire Tech CEO Chahal beat his girlfriend mercilessly for a half hour or more (in this instance.  We know that wife-beaters usually are repeat offenders), was charged with 45 felony counts, later reduced to misdemeanors and was finally sentenced to 25 hours of community service.  What kind of community service is he going to perform?  Teach husbands to beat their wives or girlfriends and get away with it?  We should also place some blame in incompetent prosecutors, who allowed themselves to be snowed under by wealthy attorneys.  There is a history in this country of slighting offenses against women, be they beatings or rape.

Now let  us look at the other case mentioned by Catalina, that of Ethan Couch. This young man killed four people and left paralytic a fifth one. That by my count is five crimes committed.  I agree with Carolina, if the defendant had been  hispanic or a black man, he would be sitting in jail for a great part of the rest of his life.  He is white and rich instead. The judge says, he suffers from being an “affluenza teen.” !?  I looked at a medical dictionary and could not find the term.  I also looked at a legal dictionary and couldn’t find it either.  Did this Judge invent this term?  How creative of him.  Are the Judge and the father of the defendant members of the same social club perhaps?  The sentence, 10 years probation.

Ten years for taking four lives and leaving the fifth one in a horrible condition!

I would like to ask, is this Judge still sitting in the bench?  Has he been impeached?  Because he should be.

The lawyers and how to level the playing field.  Perhaps all lawyers practicing criminal law should be placed in a roster, such as we as citizens are for jury duty; all criminal cases coming before the Court would be assigned at random a criminal attorney out of the roster.  All these attorney’s would be paid with public funds at the rate the State has fixed for Public Defenders.  That should equalize matters.

We know that this will not happen, money plays just too big a role in our society and the people who make the laws are in the hands of the rich and super rich.  As I said in a previous blog the “rich and Republicans have the best Congress their money can buy.”  We could paraphrase this and say, “the rich have the best Justice their money can buy.”