More deep thoughts from the insane

Argus Thompson, who claims to be insane, writes as follows:

The forest and its inhabitants have rights. Rights are not derived from man. Man acquires his rights from that same source as does the pollywog, and man’s rights are no more sacred to Mother Earth than the rights of her other children, no more than the fiddling cricket on the edge of the pond or the small mountain frog sitting on the lilly pad like a green bud. Man is not the bestower of rights, but the bestowed. Man is not the creator, but the created. Man is no more endowed with the divine power to decree the extinction of a fellow occupant on the face of this earth than he has been granted the power to create new life, for man cannot create a single cricket or mosquito on the lily pond. He can only rip out the lillies and drain the pond and silence the singing of the forest fiddlers forever.

But man has been charged with greater responsibilities than his brothers and sisters on this earth, for his ability to do both good and evil is greater, and therefore his responsiblity is greater.

A toast to Thanksgiving from the insane

My friend, who I shall call Argus Thompson, made the following toast for Thanksgiving.  Argus is insane, or at least he thinks he is:

“Profit is American. The Pilgrims sought profit and that’s all right. God loved the Pilgrims, and after the first Thanksgiving feast, for which the Indians supplied the corn and the wild turkeys, and the Pilgrims supplied the prayers, a regular old fashioned joint venture, the Pilgrims blew the fucking heads off the fucking Indians in the name of God and burned their forests and the Pilgrims enjoyed their profit and built their churches which proves that profit is Godly. Amen.”

Closing down the whorehouse in Washington D.C.

Dwight asked what I thought of corporate firms and the appointment of Eric Holden as Attorney General.  Holden works for one of the largest corporate law firms in the nation.  I thought what I wrote him might be of general interest. Here it is in part:

Dwight: I lost what I wrote you somewhere. It is floating around in all of its immaculate wisdom in cyberspace and will one day descend and save us all.

I wrote that corporations are dead. Therefore they require the dead to represent them. I wrote that one cannot work for the dead for very long without beginning to die, that is, the human psyche begins to dry up and one day will fall out on the carpet of the boardroom floor. It will look something like a dried up old prune.

Holden has worked for one of America’s mammoth corporate law firms. The government itself is the largest corporation known to man. Perhaps this will serve him well in managing the thousands of bureaucrats who congregate in the Department of Justice, most of whom are also dead or dying. All I ask of Mr. Holden is that he be honest most of the time and that all of the time he will refuse to use his great power for political purposes. His predecessor ran a whore house.

To that I should add:  I have spent a good portion of my life fighting big government on behalf of ordinary citizens.  I can’t think of a case in which the FBI or federal prosecutors were involved that there wasn’t hanky-panky of some sort present. When we humans have power we use it, which, in the hands of government agents, often mitigates against fair trials.  The idea of a fair trial has something to do with honest evidence and ethical prosecutorial conduct despite the imbalance of power between the parties.  Sadly, that ideal is most often vacated, and power, seeking justice or not, too often wins.

Our children as killers

In the end my principal rage against the death penalty is not reserved for those, innocent or not, who occupy a six-by-eight concrete cell on death row. I fight the idea of killing killers because we irreparably tarnish ourselves and scar our children. We were all born in utter innocence. How we grow — into the beauty of our potential, or into the failed product of hate and vengeance is a matter in which society has a profound interest.

Studies universally show that we cannot put an end to killing by killing. In fact, states without the penalty have fewer murders than those with the highest number of executions. Texas, for instance, whose homicide rate is among the highest leads the nation in executions. One need not be a statistician to intuitively know that if a killer lives in Texas he will, to avoid the death penalty, go to Michigan, a state without the death penalty, to commit the murder he contemplates. Killing, among lesser factors, is the product of the environment in which the killer was created. If the state kills, don’t we understand that killing is acceptable human conduct – that whether it is right or wrong simply depends on who is in control?

So if the function of the death penalty is not to prevent killing, what is its function? If the death penalty does not make us safer, what benefit does it provide society? I say its only legitimate purpose is to reveal the psychic makeup of its proponents. Those who yammer and scream for the death penalty do so out of a need for vengeance. In the end, it serves only our darkest sides.

For me, I would hope that we can learn that hate and retribution, that suffering and killing are not the vision of a more enlightened people nor the role model for the innocent child. How society sees itself predicts how the child will see itself – the potential killer or the enlightened citizen.

America’s great lie

The idea that we should furnish the poor with a public defender has been an effort to save our nation from shame – for sending the poor to prison without adequate representation. But today the nation’s public defender system has become a mockery of justice.

To provide an accused with a public defender who has three hundred other cases to defend is simply to laugh in the face of both justice and the accused himself. It takes me months to prepare the average criminal case for trial. The trial itself can take weeks, even months.

While O.J. Simpson was being tried in Los Angeles for murder, a case that cost millions to defend and months to conclude, another black man was being tried in the same courthouse for a similar murder. It took only three days for a jury to find him guilty. He had a public defender with scores of other cases to defend. Many prosecutors boast that they have over a 90 percent conviction rate. Little wonder. Under the present public defender system the prosecutors should enjoy one hundred percent convictions, and many in fact approach perfect conviction rates.

The public defenders in seven states have finally refused to take on any new cases. It’s about time. If I walked into court to defend my client and had never talked him, never previously opened his file, never discovered the witnesses against him, much less interviewed them, never reviewed the evidence in the hands of the prosecution, never demanded my clients rights to discovery, never read the cases relevant to the case at hand, never prepared the cross examination of the witnesses against my client, never …and on and on, I would be guilty of legal malpractice.

Every public defender who purports to represent an accused under circumstances in which he or she has neither the time nor the resources to fully defend the client is guilty of malpractice. These public defenders cannot be saved from malpractice because they are crushed under a ridiculous case load – some with even as many as five hundred cases or more. No one who was accused with such an attorney has received a fair trial and every such accused is entitled to an appeal on that basis alone. The judge must not sentence the accused under these circumstances because the judge would be taking part in a fraud on the system. Yet hundreds of thousands of indigent persons go to prison each year under circumstances no better than those outlined above.

When I was coming up as a young prosecutor, the defendants were represented pro bono by the lawyers in the local bar. It was part of the duty of members of the bar to take part in the justice system. Today that idea is unheard of. The practice of law is first and foremost a money-making profession. I see nothing wrong with that notion, but what about giving back?

Every trial lawyer should be required to take on a couple of pro bono cases every year. At our office we have a separate pro bono law firm and have for over ten years. It often brings us more satisfaction than our big money wins. The job of a lawyer is to represent the people – the lost, the forgotten, the damned, the hated, the voiceless and the poor. Indeed, God forbid, we may one day become one of those who are entitled to representation but cannot afford it.

Every time an accused goes to prison without having received a fair trial we are one step closer to the loss of our own freedoms. Our rights are, in fact, being fought for by public defenders who can never fulfill their duty to their clients because of their pathetic, impossible, caseloads. When they fail, we are in danger. Our system becomes a hypocritical charade. And we prove, once and for all, that the promised justice for all in America is an evil lie that is imposed on the poor.

If only those with money can receive justice, then how can we permit our children to recite a horrible falsehood in school when they chant, “with liberty and justice for all.” That can no longer be the truth in America.