Process and Justice, Pride and Prejudice
Click for a time capsule.
Is what process justice? Are you asking if legal procedures are or should lead to justice? I would certainly hope they do (or at least strive to do so). If they do not, then they should be examined and corrected.
Okay, look: Opinions are as opinions will, and no, nobody needs to know everything because nobody can. But there is a reason I said it's a yes or no answer, and I expect there is be a reason you either failed or refused to deal with that point.
The answer is that process is
not in and of itself justice.
This is a known value.
Thus, one might call for "due process", or another might ask, "Isn't legal procedure, ultimately, what matters?" And someone might counter by pointing to this known value: Is process justice? No, it is not.
"Is what process justice?" You just flunked.
As you
point out↑, there is a question of statutes of limitations.
And when you stop and think about all the untested rape kits, unexamined evidence, and reports generally not acted upon, we should remember that the call to due process is intended to help harassers get away with it.
Meanwhile, in a general question of legal process, is process justice, and the proposition is
incapable of answering this point.
But here is a problem with your orientation in this dispute: Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, you and I could probably agree that, technically, Bill Clinton got some manner of due process. None of his alleged victims did, and there are multiple important points, there, but none of them suit your superficial political aesthetic. And the thing is this: No matter what the question, the answer is that it's the woman's fault. And when Hillary Clinton's opponents dragged up Bill's name during the campaign, Sanders supporters and Republicans alike were happy to make it all about her. The historical lessons of Bill Clinton's sex scandals remind that Republicans never cared. And no matter how much Democrats call that behavior sleazy, we just saw last year that plenty are perfectly willing to be sleazy. In all of this, the point of noting Bill Clinton's sex scandals is to attack women. Eventually, this fact becomes glarlingly apparent, and the only reason to refuse it is because one wants something out of doing so.
So, legal procedure in Florida, for instance, would put a teenage girl in the custody of a convicted murderer and accused child molester as a safety measure because her mother is a lesbian who might someday decide to abuse her. Legal procedure in Florida says it's not rape depending on what clothes she wears. In Seattle, we recently had a case in which our female police chief, shortly after arriving, finally oversaw the retirement of a police officer accused of serial sexual harassment. Two notes about that seem really important: First, there was a "legal procedure" at every stage of the process that prevented the officer from ever having to answer in an actual legal proceeding: Internal review, union regulations, and so on. He was allowed to retire instead of being dismissed for cause. At any rate, when the department finally intervened, they had over a hundred reports from
one victim, one woman he had used his authority to stop and harass over a hundred times.
So I ask you again, sir:
Is process justice?
And it is a
known resolution: Process is not, in and of itself, justice in these United States.
Do you know the words "kangaroo court"? Do you know what the term means?
That's why process is not, in and of itself, justice. We're Americans; we literally fought a war about this. And there are some pissy people in Alabama, for instance, who might assert we've fought two.
And, hey, as long as I'm thinking of the South, we should consider how it was before anyone gave a damn about the untested rape kits: In a time when employers complain about a minimum wage of three dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, police would not start a rape investigation without the rape kit, which ran about twelve hundred dollars, and was paid for up front. If the woman couldn't afford twelve hundred dollars in the Deep South in the 1980s, there wasn't going to be a rape investigation.
There are reasons why we're falling back to demanding the accused get the process and procedure they evaded and escaped. And when people speak of the ethics process in Congress, for instance, yeah, no wonder: The staff director for the Office of Congressional Ethics, who is also its chief counsel, stands accused of using his office to compel the arrest of others after he found himself in a fight because those people intervened in his alleged verbal abuse and physical assault of women in a Milford, Pennsylvania; one of the arrested has already seen his charges dropped and record expunged because of this. But he literally got "taken outside" for his conduct; now that law enforcement understands why, they are much less willing to charge those others. Yeah, that's the
chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics↱.
And as we learn about secret slush funds to pay off sexual harassment and abuse survivors, and requirements to nondisclosure in order to hide predatory behavior, we don't even bother asking ourselves if process equals justice because it is already a known value: No, it is not.
The famous line is that democracy is the last refuge of the scoundrel. When process is the last refuge of the scoundrel, well, justice may be blind, but She hears this bullshit.
The accused can certainly invoke legal procedure on their own behalf.
Meanwhile, appeals to process and procedure ought not ignore that process and procedure often can, and in this range of consideration very much does, forestall justice because that is what such processes are for.
____________________
Notes:
Garcia, Eric. "Report: Head of Congressional Ethics Office Sued". Roll Call. 14 December 2017. RollCall.com. 17 December 2017. http://bit.ly/2BqZnu7
―End Part I―
