PARALLEL PLEAS

Two seemingly totally unrelated matters over the past couple of days came up parallel on my intellectual radar...President Obama's visit to China, and the movie "Law Abiding Citizen".

First, the movie. It is the story of an educated family man , wonderfully played by Gerard Butler, who in the first scene sees his wife and young daughter raped and murdered by two armed intruders into his home. The killers are identified by Butler and captured. The prosecutor, Jamie Foxx, enters into a plea agreement with the one who actually committed the murders, ostensibly for the purpose of maintaining a high conviction rate, under which the killer received a nominal 3-year sentence in exchange for testifying against his accomplice...who is found guilty, put on death row, and executed.

Butler is horrified at the injustice of the plea bargain and the failure of the criminal justice system, and implements his own personal scheme of justice by systematically killing every one who had anything to do with the plea bargain. Foxx is last on his list. How Butler manages to continue his rampage though he is being held in solitary confinement in prison, is an intriguing part of the movie, but not the focus of this post...which are the rampant injustices and dangers of our prevailing plea bargaining system under which criminals are prematurely set free and their victims unremembered and dishonored.

My views on plea bargaining are set forth in an earlier post about the Michael Vick case, "Justice Vick-timized".

President Obama, this past weekend, sought fit to enter into his own plea bargaining agreement with Red China. Unspoken to be sure, but a plea agreement nonetheless. His deal was as follows: in exchange for the Red Chinese strengthening commercial exchanges and continuing to lend us money, he would ignore China's oppression of its people, its restraints on freedom of speech, assembly, religion, reproduction and emigration, its jailing of anti-Government protesters, he would abstains from visiting the Dalai Lama because Red China objected to his making the trip. And to seal the deal, the President wore a Chinese style shirt to help him project a spirit of camaraderie and friendship and the "we are all the same and I am one of you" attitude he carries to the dungeons of the world and their ruthless rulers.

Justice is the cornerstone of civilization. Failure to treat others for precisely who and what they are, in the manner they deserve by their chosen actions, not only fails to punish evil, but narrows the distinction between good and evil...and tears apart the very fabric of civilization. In the movie, Butler threatens to tear down everything that supports the unjust criminal justice system. "It's gonna be Biblical", he warns. The President ought see the movie...and soon.