Injustice For All

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem Finch, a young boy, is shocked when, in the face of overwhelming evidence proving his innocence, a white jury convicts a Black man of raping a white woman. It seems, however, as if nearly everyone else in the novel (with the exception of Scout, Jem’s sister) knew what was going to happen, that this particular sort of injustice was not unexpected, and even inevitable. 

Jem asks his lawyer father how this happened, and Atticus says, “I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.”

We have seen plenty of other real-life infamous miscarriages of justice. Despite overwhelming circumstantial evidence, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of butchering his wife. Self-appointed vigilante George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murder after shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, as he was walking home. Four cops were found innocent of viciously beating Rodney King, even though the assault was caught on videotape. Their guilt was indisputable; yet they got off. 

Disbelief, outrage, and anger came at the heels of these verdicts. The Rodney King decision sparked the L.A. riots of 1992, and the Zimmerman verdict ignited civil unrest nationwide; yet after the fires went out and the dust had settled, people shook their heads and accepted these injustices as foreseeable, even inevitable. The wheels of justice don’t always turn the right way.

America witnessed another example of blatant injustice just this past week. Despite a raft—no, an ark—of evidence proving that ex-President Trump incited a riot at the Capitol Building on January 6^th, he was acquitted of wrongdoing at his Senate impeachment trial. The jury in this case was not twelve regular citizens easily confused by hate or blinded by racism and fear, but one hundred US Senators, citizens highly qualified to judge the guilt of our commander-in-chief. But when push came to shove, like the jurors who judged O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, and George Zimmerman, the US Senate ignored the facts and followed the path of least resistance. 

The cards were stacked against the defendant. Every juror was a witness to—and a victim of—the crime in question. Any of them—regardless of party affiliation—might have fallen prey to the bloodthirsty mob rampaging through the Capitol. Hundreds of hours of evidentiary videos taken during the riot were admitted into evidence. The president was shown time and again riling up his constituency and encouraging violence. A conviction should have been a slam dunk but fell ten senate votes short. It was painfully obvious that, like the other trials cited, the verdict had nothing to do with the facts. 

Why? It had to do with not-so-hidden agendas. Forty-three senators wanted to keep their jobs so badly (and to do so, they couldn’t afford to alienate the Trump base) they voted not guilty. Some may have voted to acquit out of apprehension, afraid that the same thugs who raided the Capitol Building might come after them. After all, these insurgents are linked to the same group that tried to kidnap (and execute) Michigan governor Gretchen Witmer. The insurrectionists are violent, they are angry, and they now think (with justification) that they’re protected by Trump and the new Republican party. So, the Republicans bowed down to them—and to Trump—out of fear.

As a people, we’ve tolerated glaring injustices in the past. We lived with slavery for over three hundred years, and even then, had to fight a bloody Civil War in order to rid ourselves of it. We watched George Zimmerman and O.J. go free. We watched the cops who mauled Rodney King get off. And now we watched Trump get away with it. Again. At times, waiting for American justice is like waiting for the Detroit Lions to win the Superbowl.

We look to our national leaders to protect us and to look out for our best interests; in this case, they’ve failed us miserably. Republican members of the Senate—with seven exceptions—are the new paragons of national spinelessness. Whatever their selfish and short-sighted reasons, they voted to exonerate the ex-president. In the face of incontrovertible video evidence, sound recordings, and sworn statements—never mind the fact that they witnessed the crime themselves—these Republicans voted not guilty. 

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, while strongly denouncing Trump’s actions and recommending that he be prosecuted in a court of law, did not vote to impeach him. As tight as he is with the powers-that-be in the party, it seems obvious that he is simply trying to keep the deranged voters of the extreme right happy by keeping Trump in the picture—even as he languishes in his Florida swamp. McConnell’s position, his power, and his wealth are inextricably tied to Trump and the Republican Party—and so he refuses to do the right thing. 

When given a chance to clip the wings of a dangerous demagogue, forty-three senators chose to support this national blight of a man. They turned a blind eye to justice and to us, their constituents. By protecting their high-powered lucrative positions, they betrayed the Constitution. 

The ultimate irony of this verdict is that these spineless cowards are the ones we’ve entrusted to preserve the very freedoms that they now, through self-serving selfishness, are endangering through the very institution that gave them that power. They are violating our trust in government at its deepest level. They are a violation of everything we believe about American. Watching them exonerate Trump was like watching Teddy Roosevelt rob a bank or Gerald Ford kick a dog. It was unthinkable and un-American. But they did it.

 Even worse: they’ve done it before, and we know they’ll do it again.