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.
