Justice Left the Building

I don’t want to get into the details here, but I spent the last week with Dawna up in Colorado as she was forced to navigate what is, quite frankly, a broken fucking judicial system.

I always naively thought the judiciary was about justice. I thought it was a system designed for, by, and of the fucking people.

Naivety. What are you going to do?

I mistakenly believed the judiciary was made up of judges and lawyers and administrators whose charge was relatively simple, even if accomplishing it wasn't: protect justice, preserve individual liberty, and make damn sure the enormous power of government was never wielded casually against the individual.

That naïve view aligned pretty well with what I understood to be the vision behind the country itself. People who had just told a king to go fuck himself sat down and deliberately constructed a government whose power was supposed to have limits.

So, in fucking theory, the halls of justice should be hallowed. They should feel magnificent. Not because judges need marble buildings and fancy fucking robes, but because of the weight of the responsibility entrusted to the people inside them.

The government can take your money.

It can take your property.

It can take your freedom.

In some circumstances, it can take your fucking life.

A system entrusted with that kind of power ought to operate with almost terrifying levels of precision, restraint, accountability, and respect for the individual.

That's what I thought, anyway.

Life has increasingly taught me that our judicial system has remarkably little to do with actual justice or the preservation of liberty. What I saw instead was a self-serving bureaucracy perfectly content to keep people trapped inside its machinery while everyone involved continues feeding the fucking beast.

And this interaction with that system left a bad fucking taste in my mouth.

Holy fucking hell.

True justice requires facts. It requires ethics. It requires people willing to look at evidence rather than assumptions. Most importantly, it requires a system that understands the person standing before it is a fucking human being whose liberty actually matters.

What I saw didn't feel like that.

I watched as roughly forty fucking people showed up to a county courthouse, all apparently given the same appointment time: 8-fucking-30.

Okay.

Bullshit.

With only a few judges available, clearly forty people did not have an 8:30 appointment. What they actually had was an instruction to surrender their morning to the judicial system because apparently the system's time matters and theirs fucking doesn't.

That's a small thing.

Except it isn't.

Because it reveals something about the relationship between the institution and the people forced to interact with it. You show up when you're told. You sit. You wait. Nobody owes you an explanation. Nobody particularly cares what else you were supposed to be doing that day.

Your time belongs to them now.

Then I watched person after person stand up and tell essentially the same story. They were trying to engage with the public defender's office. They had called. They had emailed. They had knocked on doors. Calls weren't returned. Emails weren't answered. Doors weren't opened.

Some had already been caught inside this machinery for weeks.

And now some of them were standing in a courtroom for what appeared to be the sole purpose of getting a public defender officially appointed to them.

Think about that for a fucking second.

We talk endlessly about constitutional rights as though possessing the right and being able to exercise it are the same fucking thing.

They aren't.

A right you cannot practically exercise isn't much of a right.

And meanwhile, the clock keeps moving.

Memories fade. Witnesses forget. Details blur. Police officers who deal with incident after incident aren't going to possess pristine memories indefinitely. Eventually everyone starts relying on reports, notes, paperwork, and whatever somebody bothered to write down while the event was still fresh.

Yet someone's liberty may depend on those memories months later.

Justice delayed isn't just inconvenient. Delay changes the quality of the fucking evidence.

And through all of this, the people caught inside the machine are expected to wait patiently while the machine takes its sweet fucking time.

That isn't how a system charged with protecting liberty should behave.

The judicial system was never supposed to exist for its own convenience. It wasn't supposed to become an industry whose processes matter more than the people trapped inside them. And it certainly wasn't supposed to treat individual liberty like an administrative inconvenience that can be dealt with whenever somebody finally gets around to answering the fucking phone.

Yet that's what I saw.

Maybe that's what bothered me most.

There was no majesty.

There was no sense that everyone understood the incredible weight of what was happening inside those rooms.

There were calendars.

There were forms.

There were folders.

There were people waiting.

There was bureaucracy.

Lots and lots of fucking bureaucracy.

And somewhere beneath all of it was supposedly justice.

I just couldn't fucking find her.

Maybe she got tired of waiting for someone to call her name.

Maybe she got tired of leaving messages nobody returned.

Maybe she was told to show up at 8:30 along with forty other fucking people and eventually decided she had somewhere better to be.

Whatever happened, one thing became painfully obvious after spending a week watching the machinery grind: Justice has left the fucking building.