Let’s take a closer look…
Dateline Sunday, February 24th
After a very busy and draining week-end I decide to take to my bed before the Oscars are handed out tonight-you know, read a little, cat nap, and/or work the New York Times crossword puzzle-chill as the ‘twenty-ones’ say. Kid Bell and I are such movie aficionados that you would think we were Daniel O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn with a pair of fake-gold statuettes for Gone with the Wind and The Best Years of Our Lives, respectively. We love movies and usually agree on what’s good and what’s not.
I was mindlessly reading a good fictionalized book about Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs and trying to solve my puzzle with the television turned on to MSNBC, when all of a sudden-you know those jolts that happen-I started paying attention to a special called In the Shadow of Justice about two men who had been tried and convicted for the murder of a bouncer in a New York nightclub more than fifteen years ago. Although I started paying close attention mid-way through the docu-drama, I was able to follow the thread of the story: two minority men had been railroaded by an overzealous District Attorney, and although the evidence was overwhelmingly against the Prosecutor, these men were in prison for fifteen years while all these machinations of the Court System denied, delayed and doubted that the two were innocent. A couple of men in the prosecutor’s office were convinced that they didn’t do the crime for which they were tried and convicted.
One young man from the Dominican Republic was set free and then immediately rearrested by the Immigration Department so they could deport him as an undesirable, which they summarily did. But the second defendant was kept in prison while those rusty, slow and oftentimes dead still wheels of justice were supposedly moving toward a new appeal to the Judge in the case to dismiss his charges.
I am such a big old sissy and moved to tears when I see this last defendant’s heavily made-up, clanging cheap jewelry, big old mama crying over her son, and the tears won’t stop when a detective who had retired from the detective force because he felt injustice, not justice, had been done followed this case through to the last appeal cried at the verdict as well. Because the evidence to keep him incarcerated was not there, he was released. Big mama and the detective and a few defense attorneys and I bawled our eyes out.
But that was not the end of this young man’s misery. The District Attorney filed new charges and he was retried-and was unanimously found Not Guilty by all twelve jurors.
The District Attorney issues a statement, ‘the people have spoken.’ Yeah, and you would rather have had an innocent man spend the rest of his life in jail rather than to admit you were wrong.
There were very powerful on-camera interviews with several men from law enforcement and the legal system who said that the problem with the Justice System is that those who gather evidence and arrest suspects and try these cases often do so with an arrogance and an immutability that does not allow for the real story to be told-oftentimes, for the real evidence to make it to trial. We know that hundreds of men and a few women have been freed from prison when relatively-new DNA proves them innocent. A young man from Long Island, New York was in prison several years for murdering his parents, and after reviewing suppressed evidence about the deceased parents’ shady business partner who was in the area at the time of the crime, was released from prison. The District Attorney is threatening to retry him.
We live in a country that guarantees one is ‘innocent until proved guilty’, but those who run the judicial system think that they are entitled to make a case like they want to and the evidence be damned. In this column I have written about Nancy Grace who stamps suspects ‘guilty as charged’ with little to no hard evidence to support her claim; just an old wound from the murder of her fiancée many years ago in Georgia. She can’t seem to get over it and those who are charged are convicted on her show night after night.
Ladies and gentlemen, I write “Wake up” “Snap out of it!” We are in a time when we need to be conscious and aware of all that is going on in our lives and make sure that those accused of crimes, especially minorities who are more likely to be charged with a crime, get their day in court with all the evidence, especially that that is not planted to make the case for the prosecution, comes to the courtroom for the right decision to be made.
Ta ta.
To hear more about this topic and other interesting subjects, listen to Margaret Wendt and me every week on Spiritual Truths at www.margaretwendt.com. Just click “Other Radio Shows” to find us.
About Albert Clayton Gaulden
Transpersonal psychologist, astro-intuitive, author, lecturer, spiritual life coach and founding director of the Sedona Intensive, www.sedonaintensive.com, Albert Clayton Gaulden has influenced countless individuals from all walks of life-actors, athletes, financial specialists, teachers, families, psychologists and psychiatrists-from all corners of the earth-helping them to retrieve their authentic selves and to tap into the inner core of their power. Albert’s unique gift in the field of Transpersonal Psychology is responsible for his fearlessness when confronting the client’s inner conflicts. In his recent book You’re Not Who You Think You Are, Gaulden writes “Men and women are the same; each of us needs to get in touch with our invisible partner, or shadow in order to be emotionally healthy and happy.”
