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What is Justice?

What is Justice? Is it the triumph of truth over falsehood and the catching and proper labeling and
punishment or rehabilitation of a criminal? Or is it the triumph of the Department of Justice over those
they accuse, regardless of guilt or innocence? To be honest, I don't know the technical, legal definition
of 'justice.' I do know that my own internal definition sits squarely on the first shot at it in this
paragraph. Prosecutors in an adversarial justice system have a hard job. They must, as part of the job
description, do their best to win their cases. Truth and justice are supposed to win out in these cases,
but what happens when the defense just isn't as knowledgeable and skilled as the prosecution? Does
the prosecutor try to lose? Or does she push on and convict, even being morally certain that the
accused is innocent? If she wins knowing the accused was innocent, how then is justice being served?
Poorly? If she chooses to lose, then how is she not failing at her job, which is to do her best to win? Is
justice served in such a case? And just how far is the concept of, “doing her best to win” to be taken?
At some point, a prosecutor is going to run up against a wall, and all she has to do to pass it by entirely
and keep on going is to - twist, just a little; a phrase, a word - just tweak it a little bit; not much, not
much at all - just enough to win. And again, how is justice served if the law itself must be warped to
achieve it? And at what point does the prosecutor draw the line that says, “This far and no farther”? Is
that little tweak, that tiny twisting of a definition alright? Okay, then how about next time, when all she
has to do is conflate certain terms that most people aren't sure about anyway and push through it so fast
the jury never notices the difference; with luck, neither will the judge. Another win - for a totally false
definition of a term using one word that might have had nothing to do with the case at hand in place of
another, but the defense didn't catch it. Neither did the judge, so how is it the prosecutor's fault? Her
job, after all, is to win.

Let's say that finally, one day, the prosecutor experiences a frisson and notices that she's actually
standing, looking down on a seated patient in pain and telling that patient that either she lies on the
stand and tells the court, under oath, that she traded sex for drugs with her doctor, many times, or she
goes to jail for decades on trumped up charges - her normal dose of medication can be hyped to the
jury so that they'll accept it as drug abuse, aided by a careless doctor; the patient/witness can also be
jailed for attempted drug dealing with just a little more lying. Either way, the prosecutor is going to use
this patient to destroy the doctor who had, for a short time, given her back her life. The prosecutor is
breaking the law completely, blackmailing, forcing an innocent sick person who suffers in pain every
minute of every day, to lie on the stand, to commit a crime. Considering how hard it is to turn the
information they have into damning evidence against this doctor, to help convict what is likely an
innocent doctor, she has to twist everything - office notes, prescriptions, the definitions of “addiction”
and “dependency,” and then to nail it down, she has to blackmail and innocent patient to convict an
innocent doctor. Because to convict is her job, she tells herself. Maybe this prosecutor will decide at
this point that things have just gone too far. If she doesn't, then she is near the end of building a little
dictatorship for herself, with her as Lord High Prosecutor and Executioner, bane of the innocent, and
eventually if not already, friend of the wealthy and influential. After all, if she's gone that far already,
why not go the rest of the way and reap the rewards? Hers will then be one of the highest-ranking
criminal positions in the country, one that's almost unassailable. And she is now and likely has been for
a long time the destroyer of the law she swore to serve and the citizens she was appointed to have under
her care.

The law has become a playground, a game for the wealthy who cannot be touched by any law and by
agencies profiting from an endless “War On Drugs” that's really a war on sick citizens and adults
making free choices for themselves to find scapegoats for their crimes while robbing people made
helpless by pain, the poverty it causes, and the destruction of the Social Contract, of everything,
including their lives, often one, slow, painful minute at a time for whatever remains of those lives. The
Drug War is now known to be the immediate cause of all the societal problems the proponents of this
obscenity insist are caused by drugs - inanimate, nonsentient substances that cannot act on their own.
And the fear-mongering by officials is such that people who have never learned to think for themselves
and who expect the government to protect them in all ways simply accept any loss of liberty this
government says is necessary. In time, it will be all liberties that are in the way.

There's only one true answer here to what should be done, where to draw the line: the instant a
definition has to be twisted, or two terms conflated so that no one notices and suddenly you're talking
about something else entirely while the judge and jury are thinking you're all still on the original term,
the judge must stop it right there, and the prosecutor must be replaced and forced to go into defense or
to retire from the practice of law. She must be made to remember why the law exists and who she is
there to serve in the first place. If she must twist the truth at all, it's a lie, nothing more or less than a
lie, and a lie told in order to convict a person who cannot be convicted without lying is a large step on
the road called Evil. Why wouldn't conviction of a crime, or more likely many, many crimes like that,
not carry the death penalty in a country that uses it so casually on the poor? Is this what we want
running our courts? Because that's what is running them now.

So much normal, generally harmless human behavior has been criminalized, much of it by the back
door, that America now has more people in absolute numbers as well as a higher percentage of it's
population in prison or otherwise entangled in the legal system than any other country on earth,
totalitarian or not! This is not the country I volunteered to risk my life in order to serve. I know that
both of my parents, were they alive, would feel the same. My father was USN aviation ordinance, my
mother was a WW II Army (photographer) vet with service in Germany, my brother was Army, I was
Navy Hospital Corps, one Uncle was Construction Battalion, another uncle was USN in both the
European theater and the South Pacific, a grandfather was a Merchant Marine in a German ship taken
by right of angary that ran munitions, cousins have served, a great grandfather was army in WW I
along with other relatives – every male relative and ancestor I can find has served in wartime, all
having volunteered. I’d like to say that I, with the rest of them, have earned the right to be heard, but
the fact is that we fought because every citizen has the right to be heard. Our founders, and I have no
doubt my own ancestors, have already earned us that right. Now it’s up to us to keep it along with our
other “rights” that are fast becoming easily ignored or removed privileges. A judge recently ruled that
an activist on probation was forbidden to exercise his First Amendment rights. If he uses that right to
protest an illegal ruling, then he’ll instantly lose it because he’ll be in prison. The surviving founder of
the Pain Relief Network, which is the sole pain treatment advocacy organization that is actually making
waves and trying a legal approach to the illegal, immoral and unethical takeover by the DEA of the
practice of medicine in this field, has been given the choice of beggary and her reputation as
trustworthy, so that is the loss of any ability to function as an activist, and the financial destruction of
PRN, or giving up her rights under the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. These
are acts by judges that should instantly trigger investigations into those rulings and past rulings. How
often are these people setting the Constitution and the Rule of Law aside, and under what imagined
authority? As for USAG Tanya Treadway, she lost her way a long time ago if she ever knew it to begin
with. After her actions in the Schneider case alone, she certainly belongs in court – as a defendant. I
refuse to believe that because her job description is to win, that means she is to win at all costs to
anyone, guilty or innocent. Her attack on Siobhan is an illegal abuse of her authority, and it removes
any hope that a physician, once accused by the DOJ, has any chance whatsoever to return to his
vocation. Every citizen has the right to be heard – unless, according to Tanya Treadway, said citizen
gets in her way while she’s trying to railroad another doctor, who is supposed to be an easy victim, into
prison. As Siobhan put it, “To be accused is to be destroyed.” Arthur Anderson was innocent. They
fought and proved it, but the DOJ is government funded and they can attack almost forever. The
financial firm won, but they were destroyed in the process. And that is not justice!

It is up to every American to decide for him or herself just what constitutes justice, especially now
when the government is almost completely under the thrall of the multinational corporations. As jury
member when we are called, we have the power to convict the accused, to acquit, and we have the
power of jury nullification, which no judge will inform us of. It consists of declaring the accused not
guilty, as a choice, not according to the evidence, when we-the-jury feel that the problem is that it’s a
bad law. That power extends further, though: We the People out-number the government, physically.
We out-number the military, though we don’t out-gun it. As with any country anywhere, We the People
have the power, but we must choose to act together, choose to exercise that power together, else we
may as well not have it. If we see injustice happening, we can either listen to the “experts,” who will
always be happy to tell us what to think, or we can gather the facts and think for ourselves. Thinking
alone isn’t enough, however: we must act! This “corporate government,” the very one we were warned
about when I was young by then-President Eisenhower, will always, so long as it has power in the
government, choose to benefit business, even at the cost of human lives and suffering. Corporations
are soulless creations that exist for only one reason, like an amoeba: to grow, and the only way they can
grow is to have ever-expanding profits. Of course this is impossible, because it requires an infinite
system with infinite resources in which to grow. This is the basic premise of the “Free Market”
business philosophy. Of course, there is no such infinite anything, so the corporations will simply
continue to take until the system, the country, the populace - until something collapses. As it stands,
Americans are the most industrially poisoned people in the First World, and almost in the world,
period. As with the situation described above, the actual law, what the Constitution says, doesn’t
matter in the least. It’s good business to use whatever resources there are, and robbing doctors and
imprisoning people is good business for a lot of businesses. It will continue to be so until We the
People choose to change it. Or until we’re all in prison or dead, and they don’t care which comes first.

Ian MacLeod
September 12th, 2009
Activist, PRN, Nonprofit, Nonpartisan, 501(C)(3) Corporation.
Veteran, Disabled, Chronic Intractable Pain Patient, 25 years
Oathkeeper.
Primum, non nocere!
Illegitimis non carborundum!

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