BARABBAS JURISPRUDENCE
By Judge Te Whetu o Rongo
The institution of one court of appeal may be considered a reasonable precaution; but two suggest panic – A. P. Herbert, literary celebrity.
Courts operating today in the Anglo-Saxon tradition are nothing but sheer shameless shameful satanic political branches of government gone berserk. Power crazy government has an insatiable appetite. The word “government” has nothing to with governance. It has everything to do with absolute authoritarianism. The courts work for the greater evil of government. One makes the law, the other interprets the law, and the third enforces the law. In this unholy satanic trinity of power sharing, the people are the most expendable and dispensable. This is the pivot of the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudential mentality. It defines and refines the death grip on our senses, sensitivities and sensibilities. Basic human rights have been mortgaged by the government shrouded in a guarantee of absolute power through a written constitution.
And litigation is a horrendous gamble. You walk into court a cow, and exit as a sausage. You lose in the first court, and then you appeal that decision and another decision in the final court of appeal until you are dissatisfied with this contempt of court actions you undertook.
The excrement-filled belief in an “independent judiciary” is another farce wrapped in hubris and hypocrisy. How can any judiciary in any part of the world claim “independence from fault, fear and favor” when all these snakes are paid for by the government they serve? Surely there ought to be a better system. And there can be such a system when the super-rich, super-successful and super-smart people are elected by the People to find justice between disputants. These are eminently qualified to sit as judges. They are not motivated by wealth, money or the creepy side of capitalism. Who needs the law?
Bring in the banking industry which is invariably, and admittedly, the fourth branch of government, and see the fireworks begin. Wall Street controls the American juggernaut. Make no mistake about this bold and old assertion because no matter where you go this Barabbas jurisprudence follows you like a persistent shadow. This is pure chaos, pathos and bathos. We, the people, seem to accept it as if there are no escape routes or exits. It is always the Peoples’ fault. They love doing nothing except moan, groan, haw, hem, rant and rave.
All forms, types and classes of fines and taxes are nothing but punitive measures inspired by the banking industry. The government is not satisfied with its power to print and mint paper “money” but it wants more of this addiction. Taxing and fining the governed is an art and a science.
Take mortgages for example. The courts will always always set the criminal bank free despite the victim proving the fraud perpetrated by the bank. The Barabbas jurisprudence can only be overcome if Pilate is removed from the equation. And you and I know who Pilate is in this context.
In criminal cases, the government wants a conviction at all costs because a conviction guarantees multiplication of your prison bond. How do you think judges and prosecutors are paid? By printing and minting more paper money?
Our perverse judicial power is vested in the politics of written constitutions. The interpreter of the law does not administer justice but the rule of law based on his or her background in education, upbringing, political tendencies, bar practice, political philosophy and apple-polishing to a large degree.
Justice Hugo Black had this say: “Judges are not essentially different from other government officials. Fortunately they remain human even after assuming their judicial duties. Like all the rest of mankind they may be affected from time to time by pride and passion, by pettiness and bruised feelings, by improper understanding or by excessive zeal.”
Justice Felix Frankfurter added to this sentiment: “A judge should be compounded of the faculties that are demanded of the historian and the philosopher and the prophet. The last demand upon him – to make some forecast of the consequences of his action – is perhaps the heaviest. To pierce the curtain of the future, to give shape and visage to mysteries still in the womb of time, is the gift of the imagination. It requires poetic sensibilities with which the judges are rarely endowed and which their education does not normally develop. These judges must have something of the creative artists in them; they must have antennae registering feeling and judgment beyond logical, let alone quantitative, proof.”
Throw of the dice characteristics?
My particular favorite quote about judges is from Lord Justice Scrutton: “The habits you are trained in, the people with whom you mix, lead to your having a certain class of ideas of such a nature that, when you deal with other ideas, you do not give as sound and accurate judgments as you would wish. This is one of the great difficulties with Labour. Labour says ‘Where are your impartial Judges? They all move in the same circle as the employers. How can a labour man or a trade unionist get impartial justice?’ It is very difficult sometimes to be sure that you have put yourself into a thoroughly impartial position between two disputants, one of your own class and one not of your class.”
And we are supposed to trust these biased gang of goons, bastards and bandits peddling justice in our courts where basic human rights are trampled upon and destroyed? These judicial acrobatics must stop now. We have the formula..
And the great Judge Jerome Frank wrote: “In a democracy, it can never be unwise to acquaint the public with the truth about the workings of any branch of government. It is wholly undemocratic to treat the public as children who are unable to accept the inescapable shortcomings of man-made institutions . . . the best way to bring about the elimination of those shortcomings of our judicial system which are capable of being eliminated is to have all our citizens informed as to how that system now functions. It is a mistake, therefore, to try to establish and maintain, through ignorance, public esteem for our courts.”
Judges can make a difference if they are not part of an organ of government. If nobody is above the law – forget about the royal prerogative and presidential privilege – then we need an independent body of judges bereft of government control, influence, authority, consent and regulation. Judges of the people by the people for the people makes a whole lot of sense. People choose the judiciary. To hell with judicial appointments and selections by the executive.
According to the other great jurist Learned Hand, judges must be acquainted with the works of Acton, Maitland, Thucydides, Gibbon, Carlyle, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Plato, Bacon, Hume, Kant and Rabelais. Judge Hand believed in an educated judge who can fashion the findings of the law according to the immediate needs of a bruised society without carving a new law and creating new statutory fabric.
These people conscious judges I quoted above could do nothing as sitting judges to change the status quo. They did not want to be jurisprudential rebels. They wrote prolifically about reform and change, but very little can be achieved or accomplished without people power and police power established by the People NOT by government.
These judicial acrobatics must stop now. We have the formula.
Justice Robert H Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court did not mince his words about his robed brethren: “. . . men who make their way to the bench sometimes exhibit vanity, irascibility, narrowness, arrogance, and other weaknesses to which human flesh is heir.”
Nothing that police power established by the People cannot cure.
VOX POPULI VOX DEI (Latin: the voice of the people is the voice of God)
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