MARXIST JUSTICE – From William Dillon to the Present State of Florida Courts

Suppose people were given a choice between two justice systems. In one, a person who everyone agreed they disliked, was tortured in the public square or in a stadium once a week. This would be preceded by an entire week of TV personalities talking about what a bad person he was. In the alternative system, people who had actually committed crimes like murder or theft would be secretly tracked down and arrested, in a process that mostly went on out of the public eye. People would choose the first justice system, because they could perceive its positive results and that they had control over it.

There is very little difference between this choice, and the choice between communism and capitalism. People choose a collectivist system where they can vote for a leader who promises on TV to provide them food and medicine, rather than leave it to private businessmen operating out of sight, supervised by “the invisible hand” of the price system. People choose a worse product which they feel they have collective conscious control over – communism – rather than a better product which does not directly involve them in all the choices. In both systems people eat, and both systems respond to the public demand and give people what they want. But one produces a terrible product, which system people nevertheless are drawn to.

(The difference was first described by the Physiocrats in the 1700’s, who said a “natural order” will emerge that is both different from and superior to any pattern contrived by government.)

Most people don’t even realize there is a difference between these two systems. They would say okay, how about instead of torturing a famous unpopular person in a stadium, we all agree to send police out to find the actual murderers and lock them up? In essence they say how about we collectively choose to make the same decisions that a capitalist system would make. They don’t realize their instinct for collective conscious control over the world, deprives them of the intelligence that can exist in a complicated web of independent institutions and actors. Man is designed for the state in which he originally existed, when he acted as a member of a tribe. Most cannot help but perceive all human action as from the single vantage point of their own conscious choice, and demand a system that fulfills this instinct.

(This difference is characterized in the beginning of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”, where he described how Aristotle could not imagine human organization or a “polis” beyond the reach of a synchronizing “herald’s cry”.)

People can be taught the moral that private businesses should be left to make independent choices. But they don’t have a rational understanding of why. So the moment something bad happens, they impulsively demand collective control to fix it. The moment someone goes hungry they say the invisible hand did not feed this person based on the baker’s greed alone. We need a central plan to make sure there is one baker in each town making an adequate amount of bread. In criminal justice, they would say this one guilty person got away. We need a system where the king can lock up whomever the public demands, without being impeded by a jury.

(People also blame the tragedy of life on their neighbors. If something goes wrong, they look for bad actors to point the finger at. They believe that by eradicating these problem members of society, everything will be improved. So they look for leaders who will visibly torture the bankers or whomever. This can reach the extreme case of genocide. This results from man’s instincts being designed for the environment in which he originally existed, when like an animal, his survival depended on land resources. The more people he culled the more land left for him, leading to a culling instinct at any sign of trouble. According to Max Weber, capitalism is enabled only by a Protestant ethic to blame one’s miseries on one’s own sins, and try to solve local problems by living a more Puritan life, rather than war and seizing collective control of everything.)

Some people say it is an unfortunate omission, that the US Constitution restrains government control of political speech and criminal justice, but does not stop the government from interfering in business. The Constitution was written around the same time as the first economics text, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”. The Industrial Revolution had not been around long enough to recognize that people would want a king to seize control of the means of production from the greedy capitalists, and return it to a tribal quorum. The communist revolutions did not come for another 100 years. So the US federal government is not restrained in collective control of the economy, because the states did not foresee a need for this kind of restraint. The commerce clause and the welfare clause have been used to stick the fingers of conscious collective control into a wide range of business decisions.

What people don’t realize and they don’t teach you in school, is the government is not really restrained by the Constitution in criminal justice either. There exist a large variety of tricks and immunities, from prosecutorial and judicial immunity to local and judicial discretion, that allow government officials to escape the constraints of the Bill of Rights and give the people what they want. So the people see criminals being arrested and tortured. They see the ritual of courts and the charade of law. This performance of superficial legal rituals even goes up a few notches any time the public looks closely. But what the people don’t realize is they have succeeded in frustrating the ideal design of the courts which they learned about in school, and instead have seized control to get the inferior collectivist criminal justice product which they demand.

Just as the demand in economics is to move control from businessmen to central planners, the public demand in criminal justice is to move control from courts and juries to the executive branch. The trick to easily achieve this, is just for courts to accept lies, whether in police statements or wherever. In essence, a judge says the people want this or that, so tell me a lie which I can put down in the record, to make my decision to do what they want legal. And the same executive branch can choose not to prosecute lies and to produce an unlimited number of liars. And so every legal decision of every court, can be fixed in advance to be whatever the people or the king want, by just feeding lies into the process to hack the courts and trick the Constitution. And government officials are immune to spread lies which publishers are then immune to embellish – no libel law can touch them – to assure the public like a central planner does, that whatever outcome they have fixed with lies is the one the public wants.

This process is even defended as legal, by saying it is part of an unwritten set of laws of what the king can do, which “common law” precedes and overrides anything the Constitution or Congress has said since. Congress passed a law USC 1983, which said people can sue public officials to protect individual rights from the local collective, which otherwise is free to violate every right by hacking the courts with charades, to achieve sundown laws and everything else. The US Supreme Court always comes back and says no, local judges and prosecutors have absolute immunity to do whatever they want, even police have immunity. They literally say today’s public officials have a “sovereign immunity” to do whatever the king could do, which lack of restraint is in the public interest.

You might ask is the product of Marxist Justice really as bad as the economic product in a place like Cuba or Venezuela? I offer you the case of William Dillon. Four murderers and a child rapist were let go – totally free of prosecution – to send an innocent man William Dillon to prison for 27 years for a crime he had nothing to do with. This was achieved by police and prosecutors coercing witnesses to lie, so they could convict whomever they wanted, and tell the public they are solving crime like the worst propaganda and starvation of any dictator. Government officials go on TV and tell the public their plan is working, even as they are starved of justice. And the public likes this system because they feel like they have collective control, rather than courts and juries ignoring their collective impulses like aloof businessmen.

One of the government’s strongest tricks to do this, is a thing called jailhouse witnesses. Even though courts are not allowed to use hearsay, or force people to testify against themselves, they are allowed to force every other person in the prison to testify anything they claim they heard the accused confess to. This is basically a witch-pricking device. It enables the executive branch to legally “prove” anyone they want is guilty of a crime, without any possible interference from courts or juries. The justice process is totally hacked with such liars to produce any outcome the public mob can be whipped into demanding.

The US Supreme Court affirmed that prosecutors and jailers can produce an unlimited number of such liars, to produce any court outcome they want. This works because the same courts say the defendant – the witch – is not allowed to tell the jury that the government systematically puts liars in front of them without penalty, rather just the opposite. They tell the jurors the judge and prosecutor decide what is fact, before allowing the witness. They then tell the appeals courts it is not the judge or prosecutor’s responsibility, and rather it was up to the jury to figure out what was fact and lies, or that it was all lies. (They also tell jurors to “use your common sense” which is basically spectral evidence, beliefs that come to the jurors in a dream.)

Jurors are persuaded with a variety of theater, that judges and prosecutors have made sure witnesses are telling the truth. The executive branch then brushes off appeals courts with the actual law which the appeals courts have written, that judges and prosecutors have no responsibility whatsoever to make witnesses tell the truth, and are not liable in any way when they lie. Prosecutors are not liable when they force witnesses to lie and specifically choose witnesses because they are lying, and judges are not liable when they know the witnesses are lying. And whether or not people lied is legally none of the appeals court’s business, just so long as the legal decisions based on the lies were otherwise sound. (It is even illegal today for a federal court to consider whether a statement in state court was a lie, or to accept new evidence that it was.)

So despite the Constitution or what you learned in school, witch trials are presently legal in the United States from end to end. Witch trials of the poor and incompetent for public theater are legal and happen in your city. The only limit is what government officials can politically get away with. So witch trials are legal to the exact extent the public demands, or can be persuaded to support. This no different from witch trials in Salem, where the public also only allowed those few witch trials which they thought were morally proper. The public is no less demanding in their hearts of witch trials today, than at any time in the past, and at all times consider themselves to be rational and moderate. The American public is no less dumb and bloodthirsty, and no less convinced of their own rationality and moral superiority, than any other place in history.

It may seem hard to believe that prosecutors let dangerous felons out of prison as a reward for lying to torture the innocent, in your city today. Do you also not believe that Cubans never stop choosing a government which starves them? Germans, who are able to design cars and airplanes, never thought they were doing anything wrong when they killed millions in concentration camps and destroyed their country in war. Quite the opposite, they thought they were the most moral they had ever been. They thought they were eradicating barbarism and savagery, and living in a futuristic sci-fi era of enlightenment.

You might think private defense lawyers could do something about this. They cannot. The courts have fixed the law to allow the process, and to limit what defense lawyers can do and say to nothing. Private defense lawyers are also at the mercy of the local executive branch, and of the bar association which the prosecutors and judges are members of. Their peers who are government officials have the power to bankrupt any private attorney who complains too much. But nor do private lawyers complain much, when they also benefit financially from fixing cases along patterns of political convenience without having to go to trial. They continue each case long enough for the defendant to pay his fee, then the executive branch fixes the outcome with perjury, and forces the accused to take a deal. The judge gets elected by going along, no jury ever sees it, and the public is blissful in their ignorance.

So you will not see the public, much less lawyers and judges, complaining about a system that let four murderers and a child rapist go, to imprison an innocent man William Dillon for 27 years. 40 years later we have more of it; longer sentences, more coerced testimony, more people in prison, more demands for the executive branch to do something about crime. Starved of justice, like Cubans, they give more power to the executive branch, and further abandon the system that had evolved to do better.

Capitalism and Marxism both provide some bread. Constitutional and Marxist justice both punish some criminals. There is a lot of overlap where the first system feeds or punishes the same people as the second. There are thieves and drug addicts who will be punished under either system. The problem is the trend over time. The problem is not just that executive-branch justice produces a worse product. It is that the human reflex in response to that worse product, is towards even more collective control – giving the executive branch even more power – in hopes to fix it.

Like drug addicts, people’s pursuit of their collectivist impulses is as irresistible as the tide, regardless of the consequences. Pursuing their impulses is a more fulfilling product even than eating, which they are often deprived of as a consequence. Such impulses perpetuate a loop from starvation to collectivism to more starvation, from misery to war to more misery, and from injustice to executive control to more injustice. As long as people are acting on the impulse which their deprivation provokes – collective control and kill their neighbors – they feel their action will lead imminently to a turnaround towards what they crave, even as it leads to more starvation, war, injustice, and misery.

Justice is like heroin, where most of what people buy is fake. Police do not have much incentive to lock up the innocent for years beyond just beating them. This incentive for injustice and misery, just like the incentive to seize private businesses who feed them, comes from the public. The more public oversight of justice outcomes – the more populist and idiotic, rather than simply making sure courts enforce rights – the more injustice. Marxism in justice is no different from Marxism in economics. One gives a better house, one gives a worse house, people choose the worse house. The common people will bring conditions of misery on themselves worse than hordes of benighted animals in the wild. They will kill and imprison their neighbors and children, start wars, and starve, all while seeing angels in the mirror.