On being judicially judicious

The Shawshank Redemption is the kind of movie you sit through in rapt attention the first time, that you continue to quote from years later and one that leaves you with a very disturbing after-taste, every time you watch it -- not because Andy Dufresne gets convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and goes to prison for life, not because he escapes with an ingenious plot, but because the former is so frighteningly possible in real life and the latter that much implausibly surreal.

Since I don’t believe in justice being served on judgment day or in the after-life, and I barely believe in an omnipotent entity called God who watches over us and balances it all out, I very desperately need the reassurance that man gets his due, both good and bad, in this life, on earth, under the watchful eye of a book of laws (and I don’t mean the gold-gilded black one with the fairy tale about the stable boy). I wish the rest of human kind would get real and concur that we only get one shot at serving justice and even if it is by thought-capable, tangible, fellow human beings it must hold a certain level of credibility.

A week ago, I watched the Jessica Sanders’ documentary, After Innocence and I must say, the movie not only offered a lot of food for thought, but also took away my long-held belief that I held unthreatened monopoly over criticism of the many flaws of the justice system. Last year, I followed the Scott Peterson trial with a certain degree of interest and watched a person get convicted of murder and given the death sentence without a shred of evidence. A stone-faced expression, an extra-marital affair and being in the wrong place at the wrong time do not a murderer make.

What is scarier than the ruthlessness of a man that did or did not kill his pregnant wife, is that human beings are so involved in waging an all-out war against “evil” that they don’t seem to stop and wonder if the evil they are fighting is rightly placed. It could be an innocent guilt-free civilian who hasn’t hurt a fly in his entire life (his only fault being that he doesn’t flex his facial muscles often enough), a husband that wants to carry on what remains of his life after tending to a comatose life-partner for a decade or a 12-year old boy on anti-depressants.

The law not only follows a fault-ridden system in its hurry to dole out penalties, it also brands a person with evil, satanic and heinous tendencies, on his way to the prison cell. I sometimes wonder if the prison sentence is much needed solace for a human being that has been stripped of all self-esteem, virtue and credibility by the mirthless eyes of the court, media and society, that shun him before even proving him guilty of his crimes or trying to understand what heart-rending circumstances lead him to them.

It’s funny that while books like A Time to Kill and movies like A Few Good Men, which look beyond the crude physical act of murdering a person and delve deep into the human psyche are given a lot of credence, we so easily disregard a person’s emotional and mental state of mind at the time of crime in real-life situations.

A few weeks ago, a man was released from prison after spending 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. It saddened me that I found it on a corner of the yahoo news home page and didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in the mainstream media. With American news channels as person-centric as they tend to be (Natalie Holloway, Michael Jackson, Ashley Smith & the Runaway bride, for crying out loud!), what IS evil is that a man spends a wasteful quarter century in prison, and it goes unnoticed.

After Innocence focuses on exactly these problems with the justice system – through the representation of the lives (or lack thereof) of several such unfortunate exonerees, it brings out the painfully careless way in which a court of law punishes those that merely have the misfortune of being caught under its radar – basing life sentences on mere eye-witness accounts of victims who are obviously disillusioned post-traumatization, refusing to do a DNA test when it could so easily be done and in one case even ignoring the results of a forensic exam and detaining a convict in prison years after the records clearly ruled out his involvement in the crime.

To my libertarian mind, which defies regulation even when carried out in pristine fashion, vigilante justice, although anarchic, seems a more logical and satisfying solution to the problem, as opposed to a regulated court of law that sadly makes inexcusable mistakes...

In an age of microchips and supercomputers, why are we still using flawed testimonies and circumstantial evidences to make cases? Why aren’t we using science where we can, to make our lives easier and fairer?

In an era of protesting anything Science (abortion, stem-cell research, GM foods) are we merely apprehensive about playing God or are we so terrified by the prospect of an Asimov-grade takeover of man by machines that we are willing to forego an obviously fool-proof solution to a problem and look the other way?

Science is the tool in man’s hands, and it is there for us to use. The micropipette on my bench seems to be in no hurry to turn around and slap me in the face. Let’s use it to add an objective dimension to our otherwise human-error prone society...