With the recent execution of 38-year-old Joseph Gardner on December 5/2008, the State of South Carolina has executed its 40th resident since the return of capital punishment to the Palmetto State.
After my recent experiences with the legal systems lawyers and courts, I can no longer support the finality of capital punishment based on the output of a system that has now become more corrupt than those they purport to judge.
It is not that I do not support equitable and fairly meted out punishment for those who do wrong. It is that a system that exonerates OJ Simpson for murder in 1995 and then commits him to 13 years for a questionable robbery exactly 13 years later - clearly out of revenge - must seriously be suspect.
When I receive legally prepared documents that cannot spell addresses right, get zip codes right, find a correct address in the era of google, or even effectively lay out a case on behalf of a plaintiff or a defendant; when the court room is so preoccupied with procedure it cannot find the case, and the arraogance of the fools that manage the process is so self enamored it forgets who it is there to serve, the system has lost touch with reality, and should not be trusted for anything.
Within the last several years I have observed such incredible incomptence from lawyers and judges, and those that they employ to build their cases that I can no longer trust any aspect of the American legal system.
Like the perfect child that is caught in a first known lie, every thing the child says thereafter must be made suspect unlike ever before. A new reality is faced, and the loss of innocence is the death of trust, and the consequent chaos of required proof is required with every new comment.
The same is now true of the American legal system (and political system) in that it is now the turn of the legal system to prove its innocence. I now consider it the guilty party that must prove its innocence. And apparently I am not alone. The growing chorus of malcontents brought together through the new trumpet of the internet is beginning to seriously erode the publics confidence in such a mismanaged system.
It is time for good men to reexamine every aspect of the legal system and offer new hope. And unfortunately it will have to come from outside of the current system, because those that are married to it are so blind in their affection for the status quo, they lack all objectivity.
And so it is that I call for the growing cry of the public to be unified in a baseline of reformist thinking so that once again the results of a courts edict can be again made trustworthy, the results of the output proven, and a new standard of integrity set.
We have done ourselves as non-lawyers a great disservice in allowing the legislatures of America to be dominated by lawyers, and a new political standard must become to elect anyone but the lawyer in elections so that the basis of legal standards can be set by those who bring enough objectivity to establish new and reasonable legal standards.
Until that day is done, and integrity becomes a trustworthy norm again, I will no longer support capital punishment.
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