Mugged by Lady Justice

by Andy Caldwell

Do you know that the federal Strategic Operations Division of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for “suspicious charges,” as these purchases could be an indication of extremism? The kind of extremism, supposedly, that makes for homegrown terrorists, active shooters, and violent extremists? The suspicious purchases (despite our constitutionally protected political and religious expression)? Guns and bibles.

Moreover, FBI leadership sought to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic places of worship; traditional Catholics are suspected of being potential terrorists because of their “bad” habit of praying outside abortion clinics.

I guess I shouldn’t complain.

In Canada, Justin Trudeau would like to imprison people who could commit a hate crime.

Criminal Rights More Important than Victim Rights

Meanwhile, real criminals continue to get one break after another. California has a long list of bills and ballot measures that enable criminals to avoid arrest and incarceration. For example, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe reported, Proposition 57 rendered the following crimes in California “non-violent” felonies: human trafficking, raping an unconscious person, drive-by shooting, assault with a deadly weapon or firearm, serial arson, exploding a bomb to injure people, solicitation to commit murder, and domestic violence.

Nonviolent? 

These bills represent the Decarceration Movement (with the notable exception of criminalizing the free exercise of our constitutional rights). The movement seeks to help most criminals avoid incarceration by focusing on the rights of criminals (instead of victims) based on the assertion that our criminal justice system is a product of racism.

Yet another new law has been passed that is expected to create a tsunami of cases aiming to overthrow even more convictions. Accordingly, our county District Attorney is seeking to hire a full-time assistant to work on cases having to do with the so-called CA Racial Justice Act. 

The RJA allows defendants to challenge their charge, conviction, or sentence if a judge, attorney, law enforcement officer, expert witness, or juror exhibited any semblance of bias or animus towards the defendant because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin, or if one of those same actors used racially discriminatory language during the trial. Moreover, the RJA allows people to challenge their criminal case if there are statistical disparities in how people of different races are either charged, convicted, or sentenced for crimes.

What obviously doesn’t matter?

Whether the perpetrator committed the crime.

Without Reporting, Incidents Magically Decrease

Conversely, black babies suffering from the effects of their mother’s drug addiction (meth, heroin, cocaine, etc.,) at Massachusetts General Hospital Brigham can’t get the break they deserve. The hospital will no longer report, as required by law, suspected abuse, or neglect if a newborn baby reports positive for drugs after birth, despite the hardship that the infant must endure.

Why is that?

Because a disproportionate number of these babies are born to black mothers. The hospital has determined that a positive toxicology test does not tell you anything about someone’s ability to parent.

In the last decade, the number of babies born every year with a dependency to at least one substance was 440,000. Ironically, the rate of infants being born in Massachusetts with a drug addiction was 3x higher than the U.S. national average. The failure to report these stats at Mass Brigham and many other hospitals across the country will serve to downplay the immense suffering of these infants to reduce the stigma associated with drug addiction.

America’s representation of justice, Lady Justice, has discarded her sword and her blindfold, and her scale is no longer balanced. Helping criminals avoid the “stigma” and real-life consequences of criminal behavior indicates that we have abdicated the moral force requisite to maintaining a civil society

And we are burying victim’s rights in a tsunami of wokeness.