Tea at Trianon: Our Judicial System is Broken

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 2, 2024

Our Judicial System is Broken

Our former President, Donald J. Trump, has been subjected to the scrutiny of a public trial and found "guilty" on 34 counts of what amounts to a misdemeanor under the usual circumstances. But since Trump is running for President of the United States, the circumstances are not usual and so the law has been compromised in order to try to halt his campaign.

The people who hate Trump are willing to destroy our legal system in order to ruin him. A precedent has been set for political enemies to dig up frivolous charges against each other in order to take the other out of the running. This could result in chaos and the complete collapse of our system of government. Are politicians going to begin assassinating each other, as they do in other countries? I am reminded of the recent film The Last Duel (2021) which is based upon the medieval practice of allowing the accuser to fight the defendant to the death, the winner being proven by God to be in the right. That is how societies with primitive or undeveloped justice systems settled things. Have we reverted to those days yet? Almost.

I am also reminded of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons about Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, who refused to violate his conscience to please King Henry VIII. Thomas More, being a lawyer, displays a reverence for the laws of England which in his time, the sixteenth century, had taken a thousand years to solidify into British Common Law. In a debate with his son-in-law, Thomas Roper, More claims that he would give even the Devil the benefit of the law. Roper is appalled and wishes he could tear down every law which stood in the way of destroying the Devil. More responds thus:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes. I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Two hundred and fifty years later, one of our Founders, John Adams, who eventually became our second President of the United States, defended in a court of law several British soldiers who had shot his countrymen in what is known as the Boston Massacre. In an argument in which he said "facts are stubborn things" Adams was able to prove the innocence of the soldiers. Adams was an expert on British Common Law and to him the defendants, whether he liked them or not, had the right to a fair trial; he made sure they had one.

What is British Common law? It began with the sixth century and seventh century laws and customs of the Angles and the Saxons who, building upon Celtic and Roman traditions in Britain, began to have court hearings in which evidence was presented. In the late ninth century Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, codified the laws of the Angles and the Saxons, insisting that rich and poor, high and low, were all subject to the same laws. Alfred had emerged out of an era of lawlessness and disorder in which the Danes had almost conquered all the Saxon lands in England but under Alfred's military leadership had been driven back. Law and order were therefore precious to Alfred.

Under the Plantagenet kings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a complex legal system, upon which our own is based, was formed in England. In 1215 the Magna Carta stated the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, which is one of the foundations of our judiciary. We forget that under Roman Law, which many countries of Europe adopted, a person was guilty until proven innocent.

Have we taken our legal system for granted? I think so. When some people who commit crimes go free while others are hounded for much lesser offenses, or no offense at all, then the laws become meaningless. To live in a lawless land is a frightening concept but one which looms over us as our judicial system is abused and broken.

Originally published in The Easton Gazette.