The Procedural Fucking Dance

I had the pleasure of interacting with the “judicial system” up in La Junta today.

And my God, what a fucking joke.

I sat there watching person after person shuffle through that courtroom, and I couldn't stop thinking about how profoundly fucking far we've traveled from the idea of justice.

Justice. That's supposed to be the fucking point, isn't it? Righting wrongs. Protecting liberty. Holding people accountable when they harm someone else. Giving the accused a place to stand before the enormous fucking power of the state and demand that it prove its case.

Instead, I watched the machine.

Person after person came before us. And from where I sat, I didn't hear anyone talk about a victim. I didn't hear anyone explain some terrible wrong that needed to be made right. I didn't watch the scales of justice carefully balancing the liberty of one human being against the harm done to another.

I watched scheduling. Attorneys coordinating dates with a judge. People being told when they needed to come back. Another case. Another date. Another person stepping forward only to become another entry on somebody's fucking calendar.

It was the procedural fucking dance.

And here's what bothered me: every one of those people had to be there. They had somewhere else they could have been. Jobs. Families. Children. Lives. Whatever the fuck they had planned for that morning ceased to matter because the state told them to appear in a particular building at a particular time and answer to its authority.

That's an extraordinary amount of power when you actually stop and fucking think about it.

We just don't stop and think about it anymore.

That's the problem.

We've become so accustomed to the machinery of government that the exercise of state power has become mundane. Sit here. Stand there. Come back on this date. Talk to this attorney. Sign this paper. Wait for your name. Your entire fucking day belongs to us until we're finished with you.

And everybody in the room acts like that's normal.

Maybe to them it is. Maybe when you spend every working day inside the machine, eventually you stop hearing the gears.

I don't.

And I couldn't today.

Which brings me to the fucking prosecutors.

The district attorney sat there looking like she'd rather be just about anywhere else. Slouched in her chair, legs spread, carrying herself with all the solemnity of somebody waiting for her number to be called at the fucking DMV. Then she called for her assistant, who slowly wandered up to the prosecutor's table dressed in (I'm not making this shit up) what appeared to be fucking pajama bottoms.

Pajama bottoms.

In court.

And maybe somebody will tell me clothing shouldn't matter. Maybe they'll tell me competence matters more than appearance. Fuck, I've made that argument myself. I ride a Harley to work. I'm not putting on a pantsuit and pretending to be somebody I'm not simply because somebody decided that's what leadership is supposed to fucking look like.

But this was different to me.

This wasn't about conformity. It wasn't about demanding a fucking suit and tie. It was the slothenness of the whole fucking thing. The posture. The movement. The apparent complete absence of reverence for the extraordinary responsibility represented by that room.

Because if you're going to wield the fucking power of the state over another human being, I think you ought to feel the weight of that power.

You ought to understand what that fucking table represents.

The government can take someone's money. Restrict someone's movement. Put someone in a fucking cage. It can reach into a person's life and compel obedience in ways almost nobody else in our society legally can.

That deserves some fucking reverence.

Not reverence for the judge.

Not reverence for the prosecutor.

Not reverence for the fucking building.

Reverence for the responsibility.

Because it isn't another day at the office for the person sitting on the other side of the fucking room.

That's their life.

That's their liberty.

And watching people exercise that kind of authority with all the solemnity of a sloth wandering toward another fucking eucalyptus leaf bothered the hell out of me.

I kept thinking about the principles this country supposedly began with. A government whose power was supposed to be constrained. An accused person with rights the government was required to respect. A justice system that wielded enormous authority precisely because taking someone's liberty was supposed to be an enormously fucking serious thing.

I found myself wondering what James Madison would think if you dropped him into that courtroom.

Not the marble-statue Madison. Not Founding Father Madison. Actual James Fucking Madison.

Drop him into a chair. Explain the machinery to him. Let him watch the docket.

I have a feeling he'd have some fucking questions.

Would he slam his fist on the judge's desk and demand an accounting for what became of the principles he helped put on paper?

I don't know.

Time travel remains disappointingly theoretical.

But I know what I wanted to ask: Where's the fucking justice?

Because procedure isn't justice simply because it happens inside a courthouse. A calendar isn't justice. A docket isn't justice. A prosecutor isn't justice. A judge isn't justice.

They're pieces of a system that is supposed to produce justice.

And there's a fucking difference.

A dozen or so people came before us, and I didn't see one fucking hearing of substance. Not one balancing of the scales. Not one moment where I thought, There. That's why we built this fucking institution.

I saw process.

I saw dates.

I saw calendars.

I saw people waiting around for the privilege of being told when the government wanted them to come back and wait around some more.

And that's what kept bothering me as case after case moved through the room.

The casualness of it. The normalcy. The fucking banality.

Government has accumulated an astonishing ability to compel ordinary people to stop whatever they're doing, appear before it, spend money defending themselves, rearrange their lives around its schedule, and potentially surrender pieces of their liberty.

And we've built so much procedure around that power that sometimes the procedure itself seems to have become the fucking point.

Keep the docket moving. Schedule the next hearing. Call the next name. Feed another person into the machine.

Next.

Next.

Next.

And maybe tomorrow one of those cases will actually arrive at something resembling justice. Maybe a victim will be made whole. Maybe someone who hurt another human being will be held accountable. Maybe an innocent person will walk away vindicated.

That's what the fucking institution is supposed to be there for.

But what I saw today wasn't justice.

I saw process.

And those aren't the same fucking thing.

When a government exercises power over an individual, I think it should have to justify every fucking inch of it. Not because government can never exercise power. Not because every defendant is innocent. Not because every law is illegitimate.

Because liberty should be the default position.

Taking it should be the extraordinary one.

Instead, somewhere along the way, we built a machine so enormous that compelling people to surrender pieces of their lives to it became routine.

And everybody sits in their assigned chair, playing their assigned part, acting like it's completely fucking normal.

Maybe that's what bothered me most.

Not that the machine was broken.

That everybody seemed perfectly comfortable with the sound it was making.