I’m beginning to think we’ve lost all sense of proper accountability and justice.

On the one hand, no one can seem to convict Robert Blake or O.J. Simpson or what seems like a host of other celebrities charged with murdering their spouses or companions by express design. (And we’ll see how Phil Spector makes out, when that finally goes to trial in January 2007, almost four years after the incident.)

On a larger scale, we have a civilian administration that appears to have deeply lied to the military, from top to bottom, and which is responsible for the death and damage of thousands of U.S. troops — not to say hundreds of thousands of civilians overseas. This same administration routinely overturns or subverts or rewrites either the Constitution directly or any number of underlying principles, habeas corpus being only the most recent example. And yet at least so far there seems to be little direct prosecution of these actions and not enough outrage.

On the other hand, a jury in Los Angeles yesterday convicted an 89-year-old man of felony manslaughter for “running down and killing 10 people at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market.”

From the Times:

UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said the jurors’ difficulties suggested that they simply could not accept that ‘human life can be lost in a tragic accident where no one is at fault. The jury finds it hard to believe there might be a noncriminal explanation for this.’

I wasn’t on the jury, but I have a noncriminal explanation for this: mistake. Confusion. Accident.

If I had been the mother whose three-year-old child flew from her arms and to her death, I’m sure I would feel differently. But I can’t bring myself to believe that George Weller intentionally sped through the marketplace with the intention of taking out as many bystanders as possible. In fact, as someone whose van was grazed last week in the parking lot at Albertson’s by a thoroughly distracted and seemingly stone-deaf mummified husk of a woman who didn’t see us and didn’t respond when I blared the horn and tried to get out of the way, I think the true culprit is the system that licenses the elderly and performs no further checkup.

Of course, applying that logic, the true culprit of the malicious malfeasance in Washington would be the people who allowed them into power.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 8:41 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.