In the film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera comes to Don Corleone to ask him to kill two boys that tried to rape and then brutally beat his daughter. Bonasera comes to the Don believing that what he asks will be justice but the Don rebukes him.
In the novel Don Corleone is almost cruel to Bonasera before agreeing to Bonsara’s counter-offer: “Let them suffer as she suffers.”. The Don agrees to this as it is in his eyes real justice. They badly hurt Bonasera’s daughter and in turn the Don would see that the two boys suffered. You don’t see this happen in the movie but the book describes in excruciating detail Paulie Gatto and two thugs hospitalizing the boys who hurt Bonasera’s daughter. The punishment meted out equals the crime, neither more than is warranted nor less. The thugs are warned against the two boys spending less than a month in the hospital but also warned to avoid blows to the side or top of their heads that would prove fatal.
That idea of proportional justice has been flipped on it’s head and even the word itself has been perverted, as is the case for so much of our language. Whenever a black is shot by police, and this is true whether or not the shooting was justified as most are, the mobs come out and the chant is often the same “No justice, no peace”. When giant black thug Michael Brown attacked a White cop and was justifiable capped for it, the facts didn’t matter. We got the same “no justice, no peace” bullshit….
…along with the “hands up, don’t shoot” crap that was shown to be a complete lie.
I have been thinking about this often of late: what does “justice” mean, more specifically what does it mean in a multi-racial society where an absolute majority of the population doesn’t conform to the historic governing principles of the nation either because they have actively rejected them or increasingly because they never bought into them in the first place.
One of the hard parts of this post was picking an example of criminal behavior to use for my example. I could have used Keith Melvin Moses, a 19 year old African Sideshow Bob look-alike who murdered several people including a TV reporter who was doing a segment about a murder the guy committed a few hours earlier.
Or the enormous black kid I mentioned in a prior post that assaulted a White teacher because she took away the Nintendo Switch he was playing with in class: Savages Will Be Savage.
Instead I want to go back to a different recent post that got a lot of responses: She Relaxed. This situation involved a White mother, Alexandria Borys, who became involved in a dispute in a parking lot at a Kroger store in South Carolina, and upon turning around to walk away was shot in the back by a 23 year old, dead-eyed black woman named Christina Harrison.
First we have the actual encounter itself. What causes the altercation is unknown for sure at this time, although I suspect that a woman with her two children was unlikely to be the the aggressor. Some reports are alleging that Mrs. Borys “spit at” Christine Harrison but even if that is true, and it also seems unlikely, what we see is a fairly typical disproportionate response. I can see taking a swing at someone who spit on/at you but shooting them? There is no justification for shooting a person and killing them over an altercation, even if there was the alleged “spitting”.
But now what happens? The story will fade from the media’s attention, and some outlets didn’t even seem to carry it at all for reasons you can probably figure out on your own. At some point many months or perhaps years from now, Christina Harrison will go on trial for murdering Alexandria Borys. Assuming there are witnesses, a confession and video evidence, she will be convicted in a jury trial and hopefully not offered a plea deal. Assuming she gets some significant sentence, Ms. Hendricks, currently 23, will spend the next 40-50 years in prison. As this was not premeditated, I suspect she will have an opportunity for parole after some time in prison, maybe 20 years or maybe less? I am not a lawyer so I have no idea how that works.
Is that justice? Is it just that a woman murders a mother in cold blood, an unarmed woman with her back to her killer, and that woman now will spend decades an enormous expense to the people living in a cell, eating 3 meals a day, exercising, watching TV and perhaps taking classes to enrich her prison experience?
Of course that is not just. Justice must include penalties that are proportionate. What would be proportionate, what would be real justice? Don Corleone would likely agree that only a life may pay for a life. Moreover, these two lives are not equal in value. Christina Harrison took an innocent life, she instigated the loss of life. Therefore not only is her life forfeit but justice would seem to demand something public and perhaps a little humiliating. I have long contended that hanging violent criminals in public, letting everyone see them crying for their mama and voiding their bowels while dangling, and then leaving them up for a few days, would serve as a real deterrent to crime.
Christina Harrison doesn’t deserve a merciful punishment, she deserves to swing from a gallows after being convicted of murder in a fair trial judged by a jury of her peers.
What we have instead is a system that seems completely and intentionally unmoored from justice. While the January 6th political prisoners rot in an American gulag and people like Derek Chauvin and James Fields are imprisoned for life, many other criminals walk free. Keith Melvin Moses, the African who shot and murdered three people already has a lengthy criminal record at age 19….
What is the social utility or even the moral argument in favor of someone who clearly has been on a path to murdering people to be out wandering around? Is it justice to give him his freedom to commit more violent crimes while subjecting law abiding, peaceable citizens to his predations?
Our “justice” system has been dramatically skewed in favor of the “rights” of violent criminals at the expense of those of us who obey the law. We have been placed at the mercy of these animals with only the flimsy promise that once they victimize us, the law might find them and perhaps will imprison them for a few years. With half of states now offering “Constitutional carry” and the number of concealed carriers reaching the tens of millions, some of that onus is being shifted to us in order to protect ourselves but as everyone knows, if you shoot someone even in a case of clear self-defense or defense of others, you face the real likelihood of at least being considered for criminal charges.
Travis McMichael and his father Greg McMichael have been convicted of “murder” for chasing down a criminal, Ahmaud Arbery, who was trespassing before Arbery grabbed a shotgun leading to his being shot. Their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, was found guilty of “murder” for following the action and filming it. The reason those three are in prison for life, one for simply driving behind the other two, is the fear of rioting if they were not convicted.
How is that justice?
It obviously is not but it creates the very real threat that if you defend yourself, others or your property you could be tossed in jail with actual criminals if the media and black grievance-industrial complex gets involved.
Under the rule of law where legitimate justice is the focus, the rights of the non-criminal population would be paramount and the concerns of violent criminals would be pretty far down the list and consist mostly of them having the bare minimum to eat and shelter. I wouldn’t even be all that concerned about medical care, much less ensuring sufficient entertainment and dietary restrictions for Muslim prisoners.
All of this to say that without a justice system that focuses on justice for the innocent above the guilty, there is no rule of law and that is where we find ourselves today. It is a bitter irony of life in America in 2023 that despite having millions of laws covering every potential interaction between people, we are living in the early stages of a world without the rule of law. Having lots of rules does not mean living under the rule of law.
What is worse is that there is no path forward where this changes, not without the sort of radical upheaval that many of us are planning for and perhaps hoping for. It is simply one of the ignominious aspects of life in modern America, much as waiting in line all day for a loaf of bread was one of the humiliations of life in the Soviet Union that served to crush the spirit of the Russian people.
So what are you saying? Eye for an eye?
Here is what i have been led to wonder, which is worse lawlessness or absolute Law?