I was a volunteer chaplain at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. I worked at the county jail from 1977 to 1982. I also worked with the pre-trial release program of the Department of Economic Security and accepted prisoners to my halfway house, if I thought I could work with them. Many of these prisoners I got personally involved with. I went to their trials. I learned a lot about the “injustice system” because none of these prisoners had the money to really hire an attorney, so most of them had court-appointed attorneys to defend them. And a lot of those attorneys were wet behind the ears.
It is true that many prisoners are sorry they got caught but are not so sorry they did the crime. So I tried to work with the one in a hundred, who I felt was a victim and innocent of what he was charged with. Countless times I had to experience what I felt were innocent victims going to prison or being prosecuted by high-powered prosecutors in the District Attorney’s office.
On the other side of the coin, I know there were many prisoners who were guilty who were set free by a jury because of the smooth-talking defender. Most of these prisoners came from families with money to hire better attorneys. Basically, what I learned very quickly is that all too often money bought freedom for the guilty and lack of money meant prison for the innocent.
So I began to see that in the criminal justice system, often the “criminals” were the attorneys and the judges, who went only by the letter of the law, because that is how they got to be judges—by compromising their integrity for position and power. Once I attended a court hearing for a mother of three children who the father had custody of. He tricked the mother into giving him custody, saying it would help him in his taxes but that they would in reality have joint custody, etc. But when he was given custody, he would not let the children see their mother, and he turned around and sued the mother for child support. The father and his new wife together made more than $100,000 at the time (and that was twenty-five years ago).
The judge’s decision was for the father, who had hired a high-powered attorney. The mother had no money to hire an attorney, and since this was a civil matter, the court did not appoint her a lawyer. The judge went by the letter of the law and not by the grace of the law. The letter of the law states that a woman should also pay child support. But in this case, the father knew that the mother was not working and had quit her job to go into human-rights advocate work. This decision by the judge caused this mother no end of grief for many years. And because of the father’s cruelty, he turned her three children against the mother, and she has not seen the children for more than twenty years.
In a true judicial system, that is overseen by a governing board of men and women who know the Creator, attorneys would not have to win their cases, unless a person was really guilty or really innocent. In other words, they do not have to take a case if they are a defender and think the person is guilty. As a matter of fact, they should not take the case. The defender should only take the case if the person is innocent. That is what a defender is. A defender’s job is not to get a guilty person off, like in the case of O.J. Simpson (who many think is guilty) and countless others. This is real crime. And the prosecutor should not prosecute a case if he thinks the person is innocent. He should not bring false evidence to light in the courtroom nor should the attorney use his or her smooth tongue to convict the innocent. There are many prisoners in prison who are innocent because the attorney was the criminal.
Attorneys justify themselves charging huge sums of money an hour—some $600 or $700 an hour or more—because they are white-collar criminals. They can get away with it and look good. But if they had a real true conscience before the Creator, they would not be able to do these kinds of things. These are not just attorneys of criminal law practice, they are attorneys of all kinds: family practice, immigration, First Amendment, you name it. They somehow justify their huge incomes, and the whole system is set up for the attorneys to make lots of money. So too are the laws set up for the attorneys to make money, and the attorneys make the laws! And so usually the only ones who win in the judicial system are the attorneys, and all judges were once attorneys.
Lest we forget, the judicial system is one of the branches of government, and in the Supreme Court the nine judges, who were once attorneys, have the final authority in all the cases that are brought to them. Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President (who nominates them by and with the advice and consent of the Senate) and hence they are influenced by other interests and have to compromise even more. The problem is these nine souls most of the time, for more than two centuries now, have been new souls with one lifetime of experience. Under a true Divine Administration this would never be allowed.
The need for judges has been the case ever since civilization began to develop, long before the book of Genesis was written (attributed to Moses) and long before the Pentateuch (the books of the law) was written (also attributed to Moses). Moses appointed judges for all the tribes to judge the people. Later in history, when the people cried out for a king, the king became the main judge. But other lesser judges still existed, all by the grace of the king, and if the king was a godly king, this worked out fine. If he was not, evil men became the judges and injustices occurred.
This is true down to this very day. Today, many judges should never even run for office, realizing that they cannot really make decisions for true justice, even if they win their judgeship. If they are naïve and do not know that, they find out real soon that they will not advance in the system unless they make decisions based upon the influence of corporations and money people with private interests involved. Many judges who find this out do resign, but many do not and allow themselves to be trapped in the system of greed by compromising their own values for the sake of prestige and bigger paychecks and payoffs.
As history passed from the time of Moses down to the present age, the need for attorneys in all walks of life became the norm. The majority of these attorneys work within the corrupt system, and even if they wanted to do something right, they find out that it is very difficult because the system complements greed, money, and power—not truth, innocence, and goodness. The poor and disenfranchised have very little chance of justice in the present judicial system. That is why our prisons are full of slaves, who “work” for the owners of the privatized prisons by just even their mere presence, because each prisoner brings in a certain amount of money.
In the Old Testament is a story of two women who came before Solomon. Both of them claimed that a child was theirs, so Solomon said, “I will split the child in half and then give each mother a half.” When the sword was raised, the real mother put herself between the sword and the child, and Solomon knew who the true mother was. Today, if the false mother had money, she would win custody of the child over the real biological mother. It has happened time and time again in today’s courts. Fathers who are actually drug users and criminals, because they come from wealthy families, win custody over the mothers who do not have the money to hire high-powered attorneys.
Justice to the people? There is very little justice, unless you can buy it in present-day America. Money buys better education and healthcare, travel, luxury housing, and of course the subject of this article: favorable decisions in the courts. The Constitution is even interpreted wrongly by unscrupulous attorneys who make amendments to the Constitution that are criminal. They make laws that our Founding Fathers ran from in Europe. The whole reason they came to America and fought a revolution from England was to set up a Constitution of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Until we get back to that raison d'être, there will be no justice, and our present judiciary system will only be a tool for the 1%. As Moses and all the prophets of the Old and New Testaments and all the visionaries of history tried to tell the people in the renaissances of their time, without a moral standard (a SpiritualutionSM—a spiritual revolution), the country will fall into violent revolution. Hopefully, there will never come again in this country a revolution of arms, but in order for that not to happen, more and more Americans of the once-middle-class have to wake up. The bought-and-paid for police force have to wake up, and even young men and women (and older men and women alike) in the military have to wake up, for it is by force of arms and certain laws that the 1% now control the people—it is not love and certainly not justice.