Was hoping to hold out a bit longer, but ill health is forcing me to bed before the deadline. Its far from award winning and my oscars gonna have to wait but...
Double Jeopardy. Fair or Unfair?
The idea of double jeopardy has a pretty sound basis. Finding its foundation in the 5th amendment, it found legal precedent in the US supreme court after Green Vs United States in 1957 where the court declared, basically, that ‘the state with all its resources should not be allowed to make repeated attempts to convict someone’. Meaning if the state with all its knowledge and power can’t fix you up, you’re probably innocent. Over here in the UK, we don’t have Double Jeopardy in the same style as the US, however, after reading up and spending hours in the library hitting on geeky women and reading Garfield, I’m sure as glad we don’t. The basis of my debate is that Double Jeopardy, whether it is removed from law or enforced by law is
unfair.
Double Jeopardy acts as a means to defend the individual from the harassment of the judiciary system. As a quick definition, it means that if you are acquitted of a crime you can’t be retried on the basis of the same evidence, and although it seems fair on face value it leaves the court open for exploitation. For example, in a case close to everyone’s heart, OJ Simpson’s lawyer, the famed Johnny Cochran, was accused of getting OJ off by playing the race card from the ‘bottom of the deck’ to the mainly black jury. If it was the case that OJ had committed the murders and got off simply on the agreement of ‘He’s black, and so are you’ surely there’s been a gross miscarriage of justice. In this case the evidence is the same, but a different jury may deliver a different verdict. In OJ’s case it would be far from practical, just bringing it up in discussion will have you labelled with a bunch of colourful descriptions, yet it illustrates the point that trails are not solely about the presence of evidence. The lawyer who doesn’t put 2 and 2 together, the jury who vote along bias lines are all threats to the legal system which are enforced through the double jeopardy rule. Its stringent enforcement can be extremely dangerous to the legal system.
However, the removal of the law is also dangerous. All of a sudden the judiciary system can harass, oppress and make an individual’s life a living hell by simply remaining unrelenting in trying to get a conviction. No one deserves that sort of treatment, and in a democracy we find it hard to believe that our government would be so inclined, however, if our history proves anything it’s that our systems are more than capable of such actions and need enforced limitations. The US Police forces treatment of civil rights leaders, or the problem of suspected terrorists sitting in guantamino ( or however the cool kids spell it) bay have pushed the need for limits to be put on the legal system. Without Double Jeopardy how many attempts would the judiciary system take in bringing a suspect to trail before it got it ‘right’? It’s a dangerous rule to eliminate.
It seems without double jeopardy we’re in a situation where there is no legal precedent to halt the judiciary system harassing or oppressing individuals they are ‘convinced’ have committed a crime. Yet the hardcore emplacement of the ‘right’ means that dangerous people can be released onto the street on the simple basis of a lawyer having a ‘bad day’. Therefore deciding whether Double Jeopardy is fair or unfair comes down to one simple question.
Who is the law there to protect?
The truth is that it’s not there to protect the prosecution nor the defendant, its role is to protect society. On one hand we don’t want a law system which can harass or endanger our liberties, yet on the other, we don’t want dangerous people to have a guaranteed ‘get out of jail free’ card should the system fail. By enforcing a law which allows these either of these to occur you’re creating a legal hole that can be exploited. Double Jeopardy should always be available as a point of appeal, but it should remain up to a judge to decide whether it’s being enacted for the right reasons. They can act as a sovereign power and make the right decision by applying the rule to the case, therefore protecting our individual liberty, without the sacrifice of the system.