JUSTICE?

[Travis In Austin]

47 minutes ago, BigStewMan said:

That statement of receiving their due was from the law.com definition of justice. strange that such an all encompassing word as "everyone" is used when I can't imagine too many situations where everyone gets their due. as Neil mentioned earlier there are situations where the victims can't get their due,

"Everyone getting their due" was popularized by Cicero. ""Justice" in philosophy has always looked at how justice as a virtue, of the individual, political bodies/rulers and society. Plato wrote extensively about it, so did Hume and Hobbs, as did Kant.

 

"The idea of justice occupies centre stage both in ethics, and in legal and political philosophy. We apply it to individual actions, to laws, and to public policies, and we think in each case that if they are unjust this is a strong, maybe even conclusive, reason to reject them. Classically, justice was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues (and sometimes as the most important of the four); in modern times John Rawls famously described it as ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls 1971, p.3; Rawls, 1999, p.3). We might debate which of these realms of practical philosophy has first claim on justice: is it first and foremost a property of the law, for example, and only derivatively a property of individuals and other institutions? But it is probably more enlightening to accept that the idea has over time sunk deep roots in each of these domains, and to try to make sense of such a wide-ranging concept by identifying elements that are present whenever justice is invoked, but also examining the different forms it takes in various practical contexts. This article aims to provide a general map of the ways in which justice has been understood by philosophers, past and present."

 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/

 

The "punishment" debate I always thought was a major skip ahead. Since the advent of DNA being used in forensic science (court room evidence) and the number of exonerations, the more important question is how is the system making such massive and systemic mistakes? Is the only "justice" in our criminal justice system the word 'justice." We have, as well as most of the commonwealth system, have an adversarial system where a jury makes a decision, whereas most of Europe uses an inquisitorial system based on the Civil law. Errors and mistakes seem to be as prevalent in both (comparing Holland to the UK for example).

 

The University of Michigan Law School maintains the Exoneration database http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx and it revealed how flawed our system is. Numerous cases involved someone wrongfully convicted where the real perpetrator continued to commit crimes, new victims and their families (they list general categories of why there was a wrongful conviction - there are so many that general patterns quickly emerged). Exonerations also include people who were on death row, scheduled for execution. It disportionately impacts minorities. We have a system that routinely wrongfully convicts individuals. Those are the ones I know for sure didn't receive justice, and those can be reduced or eliminated, without question, but at a cost. 

 

The focus, in my view, should be, is our system really looking at, and concerned with, ensuring that people who stand accused are receiving "justice" so that people do not continue to we wrongfully convicted? Or, are we still no better than a "mod mentality" with a little window dressing? Punishment is the easy part, it's whatever society says is fair and "just" punishment for a crime. The hard part is, is one punishment given out to one segment of society, and a completely different, harsher penalty, given out to another segment of society for the same crime? That's clearly injustice. 

 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail.