DON’T LET FEAR AND IGNORANCE STAND IN THE WAY OF TEN CENTURIES OF TRADITION

Dennis comments ♦ July 11, 2015 ♦ Leave a comment

Dennis L. Blewitt, J.D.,  July, 2015

One of the most significant things I learned at the University was a social psychological theory of Mead, Piaget, and Cooley, called the looking glass theory.  Simply put, it states that actions and persons are perceived by others as how the others think the viewer perceives them.  In other words, you are what others think you are.  One doesn’t define one’s self, but the self in defined in a social reality.  This perception, even if imagined can become reality if enough people believe it.  So, if one is bad, he will view others as bad also.  I am sadly reminded of this concept when studying the behavior of judges in our society.  Since they treat everyone with suspicion and as a threat to safety, I wonder what it is about them that make them behave this way.  Why ae the judges and politicians so suspicious.  What makes them disregard 8 centuries of precedent and 20 centuries of religious dogma resulting in the mass paranoia and incarceration rate in this country?  Are they so fearful that they can ignore history, precedence and common sense?

Ten centuries ago, a King (John of England) signed a document at sword point guaranteeing the right to trial by jury, the right to bail and the presumption of innocence.  This has all been abolished in about one half century or five decades.  This philosophy was embodied in our Constitution and revered since the beginnings of this country.  However, the new breed of judges have chosen to ignore all of this and confine citizens because of their uncertainty, lack of judgment, paranoia or outright stupidity.  Although people are presumed innocent, they are treated as a threat and as guilty from the moment they are arrested.  This is what once was referred to as preventive detention.  The Roman law of conquest treated all subjects as threats to rulers. England, with a different tradition based upon the religious belief that original sin had been paid for, had a different view.  Europe had an inquisition to ferret out witches, demons and other threats.  England experimented briefly, but not to any appreciable degree.  Now, ankle bracelets, blood and urine tests and monitoring are forced on people who are supposed to be presumed innocent, contrary to tradition, precedence and sane behavior.

What is really ironic is that the multitude of these judges and officials are self-professed Christians but seem to be the great believers of original sin and extreme punishment.  So, we have a bunch of paranoids daily violating the Constitution under the rubric of protection, just because they are so corrupt that they can’t conceive of anyone being harmless or innocent.  Since they are so corrupt, they believe that everyone else is too.  Innocence isn’t within their realm of thought or reality. ` Unfortunately, these minions of the masters believe they will be rewarded by the elite by helping them punish the great unwashed.  Lincoln’s view has been inverted and is now “with charity toward none and malice toward all,” the world turns.

Is corrupt too strong a term?  Is ignorance? Is bigotry?  I don’t think so.  The new rulers are indoctrinated in the religion of free market mystical governance and the belief that the wealthy need to be rich to rule.  That probably is so considering the cost of buying congressmen.  In any event, they are indoctrinated into believing that business is a better way to run things and that government is bad.  Any excesses of business will be corrected by the market.  Therefore, it is better to have prisons run by corporations.  Private courts dispense justice faster than the Constitutional Courts.  Security guards are better than police and Corporations can be trusted with secrets that the people shouldn’t be aware of.

It is all part of the big lie, funded by the big bribe.  One of the main reasons that Courts are so unfair and biased, particularly in the criminal courts, is the change which occurred in the judicial selection process.  When I first started in law, judges were senior practitioners, who had worked in the trade for at least three decades before being put on the bench.  They came from the community with a great variance in legal experience.  Prosecutors tended to float back and forth between prosecuting and working in law firms.  Most had experience with people other than other prosecutors or police.  Most had to deal with people in order to have a law practice.  However, in the seventies, the concept of career prosecutor became the rage.  Instead of giving legal advice as they were trained for, they were conditioned to win cases.  Justice became secondary.  Like the image of lawyers in Cagney films as mouthpieces for the criminals, the prosecutors became mouthpieces for the police.  Since these youngsters are conditioned to believe that business knows best, they are led like lemmings into a raging harvest of poor souls who become cannon fodder for the predatory private prisons.  Because of the repetition of the big lie, no one is outraged.  No one seems to care.

It gets worse.  When people were presumed innocent, the community became outraged with police brutality.  Now the community accepts outright murder by police.  Shock and Awe tactics of police, instill fear into the people.  Watch police behavior.  They sure as hell don’t treat people as innocents.  Thus, when a person with Down’s syndrome won’t obey an order to drop a screw-driver, instead of patiently dealing with the situation, the person is killed.  A potential suicide is murdered because the suicide weapon may harm someone.  So, if the suicide doesn’t work, the person need not worry, the police will finish the job.  SWAT units are used to arrest drug suspects and to execute warrants.  Flash-bang grenades are thrown into cribs to shock subjects to police searches.  When I pointed this out to judge Nieto in Golden once, he informed me that my clients should have thought of that possibility before having marijuana in the house.  Thankfully, plastic surgery rectified the damage.  Unfortunately, even brain surgery could rectify the ignorance and prejudice of the judge.

It is high time we start to honor the constitution and, like provided for in Magna Carta, have judges learned in the law, not indoctrinated into laissez faire revisionist capitalism, which has never existed.  It is time to hold corporations accountable and ban executives who harm society or people from holding positions which could result in such harm.  It is time to enlist judges from the community and demand that they have a broad variety of experience instead of representing the oligarchy.  It is time to remind the oligarchy that there is always the guillotine when all hope is taken from the people and they are left with only despair.  It is time to realize that the rulers have no social conscience as the nobility of the past and that their sociopathic behavior is not acceptable.  It is time to free the political prisoners of the war on drugs who feed the paranoia that keeps dictatorial personalities in power.  Go into the community.  Seek police out.  Show them they have nothing to fear.  Show them that we are people, not threats.  They are too indoctrinated and fearful to change, so we must.  Go kiss a cop.  Talk to them rationally, and not as gods.  Educate them and help them.  Then, if there is no change, see that they are fired.

In the meantime, make yourselves heard.  Speak out against preventive detention and bond conditions that feather the nests of the predatory business preying upon the poor who tend to get arrested.  Make judges and prosecutors answer for their heathen attitude that everyone is a sinner and must be watched.  Do as John Mitchel stated, and reject preventive detention.  Challenge the big lie.  Challenge the big bribe.  Start to question why these officials are so suspicious.  Is it possibly because they are fearful that we will finally see how they are screwing us?  Let me know your opinion.