Thursday, March 28, 2024

Winning not goal in real justice

October 19, 2011

Gunn

Have you ever wondered if what you watch on television or in movies has any semblance of reality? We are deluged with every form of reality TV, but do you ever contemplate if Kim Kardashian or “Big Brother” or “Survivor” has any place outside of the fantasy realm?

Are all the characters on “Jersey Shore,” “Gene Simmons Family Jewels” or “The Osbournes” just actors with some really pathetic writers filling their mouths with drivel? I know many of you will simply say, “Who cares! It is only entertainment and nothing to be bothered with! Just watch, get enough and turn it off!” But here is where I start to wonder.

“Law and Order,” as an example of entertainment, has been a show that rides the tail of reality by presenting stories that almost mirror the goings on in real life. Families being killed by angry adopted children, a stepmother who sleeps with her stepson, who then kills his father so he can marry his “mother,” a teacher who won’t leave her eighth grade pupil alone until she is carrying his baby. All of these come from the headlines of the national papers and evening news. They are the fodder of the real world, but we seem to blow them off as “just stories.”

I guess that I felt this way, too, until I started watching “Law and Order” and the O.J. Simpson trial, “Law and Order” and the Casey Anthony trial, the new “Harry’s Law” and you-name-a-popular-trial in the public eye.

What I have become aware of is a legal system that is portrayed in reality and in unreality that focuses on one thing and one thing only — who wins. I thought when I was growing up, the most important thing in a legal proceeding was that justice was served, justice for the victim but also justice for the defendant.

The victim would not be lost in the turmoil of one set of lawyers, the defense, whose only charge was to get the criminal off or the prosecution, whose only job was to convict and punish. Nowhere in either of these is mentioned justice.

Justice seems to have fallen off the table. If there is a videotape of a murderer hacking 20 people to pieces, the defense is trying its best to get it expunged. The prosecution, if it has a sense the defendant is innocent, will do nothing to help the acquittal along. The prosecutor’s job is to “win” a conviction. How many times in the recent past have we seen criminals who should have been convicted released because of theatrics — O.J. and the year-old leather gloves?

It is almost too ridiculous for the unreal TV but great in a courtroom in the U.S. Seems pathetic that something that goes on in real life is just too plain stupid to be on TV, but keep in mind it is all about winning. Life in the legal system has become just another game like basketball, soccer and backgammon. We line up two opposing forces, and we go at it. We seem to treat this and the rest of life as a means to come out on top, whether it be in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.

Winning and Charlie Sheen staring at the camera should be our wake-up call to reality. Charlie, originally played by Sheen, was an unreal character on “Two and a Half Men,” but when he stared at us in that crazed fashion after his meltdown, we saw the real Sheen looking like Charles Manson on trial. Will the real crazy person please stand up?

Maybe I am a bit crazy myself because I expect a little more from the legal system that operates in my homeland. I really want to see the innocent treated fairly, but I also want the perpetrators given justice, too.

We need to keep the innocent and the guilty in mind with that fair treatment and fair punishment. The old phrases should still be in vogue, “Innocent until proven guilty,” and “If you do the crime, you do the time.”

Craig Gunn is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.

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