A Legal System Only a Mother Could Love

Burt Prelutsky
Monday, December 15, 2008

I think I understand the reason why so many politicians are reluctant to take a tough stand against the illegal aliens pouring in from Mexico. It’s partly pandering for votes, partly providing corporate America with cheap labor, and partly a natural reluctance to be branded as racists by the liberal media, Latino leaders on the make, and the moral cretins in the ACLU.

I don’t like it, but at least I can understand the tawdry motives. However, when it comes to our legal system, I am totally at a loss. More often than not, I feel as if I’ve fallen down the same rabbit hole as Alice, and found myself lost in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.

Why, for instance, do we go so far out of our way to protect criminals? It’s as if we’re playing a game and all the rules are in their favor. For instance, why should a cop making an arrest have to pause to read the perp his rights? Why shouldn’t jurors be made aware of the defendant’s criminal history? Why should a cop’s honest mistake work to the felon’s advantage? One final question: When is a bloody axe not a murder weapon? Easy answer: When it’s spotted in the back seat of a car that’s been stopped because of a malfunctioning brake light, and not because the driver was suspected of whacking off his wife’s head.

The liberals would have us believe that all of these so-called safeguards serve to protect us all from police malfeasance, but most of us, I dare say, would prefer to take our chances with the cops and be protected from the madman with the axe.

I realize that not everybody is as fond of capital punishment as I am, but why is it that rapists and pedophiles aren’t at least locked up for life? The rate of recidivism among those two groups is staggering, but we continue meting out sentences that are the equivalent of wrist slaps, guaranteeing that our women and children will be preyed upon by the same creeps in the future. We talk about a pedophile who has served a five year sentence as having paid his debt to society. Bull. Even if he were drawn and quartered, he wouldn’t have begun to pay.

We pretend that registering these perverts is a deterrent and that our kids are safe if we order the monsters to stay a hundred yards away from parks and playgrounds when any sane person knows that an adult who can’t be trusted within a hundred yards of a four-year-old should be locked away in a dungeon and gnawed on by rats. Or at least be forced to watch “The View” or re-runs of “Hardball With Chris Matthews” for the next fifty or sixty years.

The only message we send when we allow those without souls to walk free is that we care more about them than we do about their innocent and inevitable victims. What is especially disgusting is that for each one of them, there are scores of lawyers eager to defend their right to walk amongst us. Why is it we don’t register these members of the bar as sex offenders? After all, they aid and abet criminals just as much as the guy driving the getaway car for bank robbers. I have always wondered how these legal eagles feel when at the end of the day they go home to their own children.

Before you rush forward to defend this cockeyed legal system, allow me to conclude with yet another example of this lunacy. I recall reading about a man who was found guilty of killing his young bride. The judge gave him six years-to-life. I ask you, what kind of sentence is that? What is the message? The killer gets a mere six years for cold-blooded murder, perhaps with time off for good behavior, but if he doesn’t make his bed or eat all his vegetables, he could rot in jail for the next sixty years?!