I’ve been listening to a lot of Broadway showtunes lately,
and I couldn’t help but make a connection between what’s going on in “justice”
systems and a song from the musical Chicago.
The song is called Razzle Dazzle and in case you aren’t familiar with
it, it’s about a lawyer named Billy Flynn who tells his client she has nothing
to worry about because the courtroom is just a big three ring circus and he is
the biggest star there is- then he proceeds to tell her that if the story is
presented well enough, the truth doesn’t matter at all, and they’ll get the
outcome they want because he’s able to draw attention away from the truth.
Sounds familiar, no?
Doesn’t matter what the truth is, it only matters what story they can
get you to believe, what razzle dazzle they can use to distract from what is
actually going on. Such as what they
print in the paper, or what lies they tell, or convictions secured by
confessions given under threat.
If a confession is given while the subject is being
tortured, can that confession be believed?
Can it really be something that we can bank on when the person likely
just said what the torturer wanted to hear so the pain would stop? Absolutely
not. That concept is clear, but the next
step down (the voltage switch just next to this one, to borrow from a previous
blog) seems to be less clear, though I don’t know why.
If a person is told that their family or other loved ones
will suffer in some way (whether physically or on the front page of the paper
in a slanderous article) unless they plead guilty, is that not also a “confession”
that ought not to be trusted because it was only given in order to avoid pain? And yet, this style of threat is the go-to
for the system in my town.
Take a look at how many people go through these steps: Plead
innocent, plead innocent, plead innocent, suddenly change their plea to guilty… Why?
From personal experience it’s because they are told that they better
plead guilty or their loved ones will suffer.
Why are the judges, lawyers, and cops afraid of actually going through
the process of finding TRUTH? Is it laziness
or something more sinister? Heaven
forbid we actually do some detective work and find evidence instead of simply
counting on a guilty plea garnered through the old faithful threat! Why change into something real and actually JUST
when the three ring circus is working?
After all, as Billy Flynn would say: “Give 'em the old flim
flam flummox, Fool and fracture 'em, How
can they hear the truth above the roar?”
More to come…
