the wrong side of the law

What is the price we pay for law and order? Is it monetary? The cost of prisons must be considerable. The impact of the loss of man hours on the all important GDP is no doubt a notable agenda item for lawmakers. Certain freedoms must of course also be curved for the greater good. I certainly don’t feel that I need stop signs. I tend to stop as a matter of principle when huge chunks of metal are speeding in a direction that conflicts with my own.

These are all noteworthy costs, but in my opinion the biggest, most disturbing, most neglected cost is summarized by a well known term in US law: reasonable doubt. Thanks to an overabundance of soppy US law dramas, one could be tempted to say this term has become a cliché. Thing is I suspect it never had well defined meaning to start with. This is quite convenient and one could be forgiven for thinking that there may even be a conspiracy to that effect.

What I mean is: how much doubt is reasonable? It’s not like it implies a probability. An omniscient observer could go and count all the convictions, among those count all the wrongful convictions, and divide the latter by the formula to find a percentage. This percentage would be a point estimate for so called reasonable doubt. One in a thousand may sounds acceptable, until you consider the millions upon millions of convicts world wide.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of wrongful death sentences discovered posthumously through technological advances like DNA testsing, and while that particular variety of fuckup is the most harrowing and regrettable, less grave wrongful convictions by extension also occur…albeit reasonably infrequently.

These unlucky souls pay the true price for law and order. Just imagine being in that position: your friends and family could turn against you, you lose years of your life, your job, your ability to find a new job, traveling privileges, the trust of those around you to mention just a few. No amount of proclaiming your innocence is ever going to make the suspicion go away. Not to mention your disillusionment with society, the law and your Faith.

So there is implicitly this reasonable amount of lives destroyed every day. The good news is that a reasonable proportion of us will never experience the wrong side of this coin. Consequently we sit back, throw our hands in the air, shrug, and say that this is the only way. It’s the best system we’ve got. That’s what was said during any dubious social system, official or otherwise, used in the past. Many historical social constructs now seem inhuman or barbaric in hindsight, e.g. stonings, the exile of lepers, and lots of other stuff in the Bible. I suspect history will not look kindly upon current penal systems.

But what do those on the other side of the fence (or bars) have to say about the reasonableness of the situation? I wonder. The dilemma is that these victims of Justice have no voice. Would you believe a convict that claims he is innocent? I doubt these people even bother proclaiming their innocence. Notwithstanding the futility of it: rather a criminal than a victim.

People are seldom touched by something if it has no direct bearing on their lives. Innocents die every day all around the world, but blissfully ignorant I go on with my personal pursuit of happiness, which includes finding a pair of jeans that sits just right, owning a coffee table that really ties my living room together, and writing supposedly clever, idle messages on my blog. However, if I were to get the wrong end of the justice stick, I would probably fall on my knees like Charlton Heston and damn the whole system to hell. And it won’t be because I would learn anything I did not already know, I’d be more like the crusading cancer survivor. Only no-one would feel sorry for me.

Since childhood I’ve felt this vague discomfort when hearing this nebulous term “reasonable doubt” blurted out patriotically and unflinchingly by some American idiot: “Yep, proof must be given beyond a reasonable doubt. Them’s the rules, sonny”. I tried to picture this concept of reasonableness, but to no avail. I imagined instead that it’s just my obsessive compulsive thoughts getting trapped in some tricky but negotiable corner of reality again. When you’re young you assume the fundamentals had been sorted out long ago. As you get older you start to realize they never will be.

The conspiracy, then, is more insidious than most: we lie to ourselves to make things simpler, more acceptable. It just makes evolutionary sense. Reading this has put you an infinitesimal amount off the ideal track to oblivious happiness and the procreational benefits that tend to accompany it.

Now, next time you watch some David E. Kelly legal farce containing the inevitable smoking gun or verbal abuse induced confession, you too will feel a rational amount of discomfort. This is my gift to the voiceless.