Garbage In, Garbage Out

9 May 2007



Litigants, not US Legal System, are the Problem

The trouble with any system that involves human beings is, well, human beings. They aren’t perfect, they aren’t terribly rational, and in a great many cases, they’re plain stupid. When someone manages to idiot-proof something, along come tougher idiots. As proof, this journal offers a few current legal cases.

First, there’s the $65 million lawsuit over a single pair of gentleman’s trousers. Roy L. Pearson Jr., who’s a judge, is suing his dry cleaners for losing the bottom half of a suit. They claim to have found the trousers in question, but he’s not accepting them as his. Instead, he wants $15,000, which CNN reports is “the cost of renting a car every weekend for 10 years to go to another business,” along with punitive damages that run to the millions.

Meanwhile, rapper R. Kelly has been waiting for a trial on charges of child pornography for six years now. He’s entitled to a speedy trial, but one supposes he’d rather not have one. The Associated Press reports, “Presiding Judge Vincent Gaughan seemed close to setting a trial date last year. Then he fell off a ladder at home, sending him to the hospital with multiple fractures. By the time he recovered, Kelly needed emergency surgery for a burst appendix, causing him to miss a February status hearing.” In 2007, is a jury really going to convict a man for something that happened in the 1990s that wasn’t murder or treason? Mr. Kelly may well see the endless delay improving his position.

Accidents happen, of course, but there’s also stubborn silliness. In Tennessee, a man committed suicide (sad rather than silly) and his dog has now become the focus of a custody battle (silly and sad simultaneously). Alex is a 13-year-old Golden Retriever, and therefore, genetically a decent being but close to his end. A four-way battle has erupted over Alex, and a judge has appointed a lawyer to look after Alex’s interests. Satire is impossible.

And there is Paris Whitney Hilton, who is facing 45 days in jail for violating probation on a drinking and driving incident. She claims, “I feel that I was treated unfairly and that the sentence is both cruel and unwarranted and I don’t deserve this.” She doesn’t deserve great-grandpa’s money either but granddad had really good lawyers that got ol’ Conrad’s will tossed out. Still, there is an online petition to Governor Schwarzenegger to pardon her because she brings “beauty and excitement to [most of] our otherwise mundane lives.” Any life so mundane that it needs Ms. Hilton to enrich it probably isn’t worth living. Indeed, the case is enough to make one regret the passing of bolshevism.

In the computer business, there is an expression “garbage in, garbage out.” The same applies to America’s judicial system.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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