As a child I grew up being taught that some things are vehemently right and some things are vehemently wrong. For example, it was a right thing to clean my room – especially without being told to –and it was a wrong thing to lie. It was a right thing to do to help an elderly person cross the street and it was a wrong thing to do to swear or hit anyone.
As I grew up, the right and wrong things broadened but were still quite clear and it only took common sense to know the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do in any given situation. However, as I also grew up, I encountered a new word – mitigating.
On the news a young man had robbed a bank. Well that was clearly a wrong thing to do – but the news anchor said that his attorney said that there were “mitigating” circumstances. Well – what did that mean? I soon found out it meant that – yes he robbed the bank but - because of certain circumstances, the crime wasn’t really as bad as one may have first believed. In fact, the young man was more than likely to get off with a warning because he wasn’t altogether wrong. Are you kidding me?
Fast forward a number of years and I found myself working in the legal profession where I still currently work and have done so for nearly 30 years. Now, to start off, I want to say that I have worked with a number of very admirable people throughout those years and I have worked with some not so admirable people. Overall, however, admirable or not, they all have become enslaved to a system that has nothing to do with right or wrong.
As young law school graduates, new associates come into the field with high expectations of making the world a better place – of protecting the rights of the wronged party whether that be in the corporate world or criminal world. They’re gun-ho and ready to go. Walking into the firm’s law library is like being let loose in a candy store. There are hundreds and hundreds of books on past case law and these books will help them to understand almost every case that they will ever encounter in their career. But what are these case law books really for? I can tell you this – they have little to nothing to do with enacting justice – justice that we as individuals have grown up believing was our Constitutional right and those law books were there to protect those rights.
Like the new associates, I started out eagerly too and, like the new associates, it didn’t take me long to understand what the law field was all about. It is first and foremost a business and a business is about making money. So, how do you make certain that your business makes money? Lawyers and law firms make money through winning cases. If you have a good “win” record you can attract more clients. Your winning record continues and you can charge your clients even more money. On the other hand, if you lose too often, you lose clients and find it awfully hard to bring in new clients. Your revenue goes down – as does your reputation. It’s a battle between winning and losing. Whether the client is right or wrong, innocent or guilty is really irrelevant.
An attorney wants to do the best thing for his/her client. This can even be an emotional goal for them, but the bottom line is and always is – that they have to WIN this case. The challenge begins between the opposing attorneys so each side heads for that large internal law library (and now even the internet) where those hundreds of beautifully bound case law books radiate their knowledge. What are they looking for in all those past cases? They’re looking for mitigating circumstances or, in other words, a way to find an area of grey so that their client is neither right nor wrong but somewhere in-between. They’re looking for a shade of grey to paint to the potential jury. They’re looking to steer a jury away from what is the real truth about the facts of the case by clouding those facts in rhetoric of ambiguity and mitigating circumstances. The attorney’s goal is to paint the circumstances of the case into a shade of grey and whoever can find the lightest shade of grey wins!
Yup – right and wrong don’t matter – it’s entirely irrelevant. Our justice system is about finding the lightest shade of grey in the case at hand and the lightest shade ALWAYS WINS. That’s why all the people who have been in our justice system walk away stunned when the outcome should have been so instantaneously clear. Of course he murdered two people. But – oh wait – there were mitigating circumstance. When he was 3 years old he didn’t get the car he wanted for Christmas. It traumatized him causing him to kill the two people. We can’t punish him for that. WHAT? I thought we were talking about two cold-blooded murders but, alas, the court system has now turned the perpetrator into the victim on some pretense that he may or may not have been abused and/or neglected as a child.
The court system is not the only “guilty” party in this mindset. Everywhere I look today people are hunting for shades of grey in order to try and justify their own inner personal agendas for committing wrongful acts. It’s as if right and wrong don’t even exist. In fact, if you point out that someone is doing something wrong or saying something wrong, they point the finger back at you and scream “hate” crime. “How dare you insinuate that I’ve done something wrong. Nothing I do is wrong.”
The saddest side-effect of the mentality we have established today in abolishing right and wrong is that God has had to be removed from the equation. The Bible teaches us precisely what the difference is between the two and it allows for no room for shades of grey. Grey is Satan’s favorite color. As long as we search for a shade of grey, then we have become one of his servants. No longer can we punish a child for doing something wrong because nothing the child does is every truly wrong anymore. There are no consequences to anyone’s actions. With no consequences we continue to spiral downward into oblivion as a civilized human race.
Unless we are willing to adhere to the truth that there is absolute right and absolute wrong in the world, that there is absolute right and absolute wrong in our actions and, absolute right and absolute wrong in our dealings with each other, then there will never ever truly be justice in our world. Unless we are willing to pay the consequences for our own actions and enforce others to pay the consequences of their own actions, then we will continue to perpetuate the loss of our Constitutional rights.
We need to face the fact that there is NO grey for true justice. Are we willing to face that? I know I am! How about you?
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