There is a well-known joke that asks the question, what do you call five hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?—a good start!—in fact, I've never told this joke to anyone who didn't laugh, or at the very least, smile and nod their heads in agreement. Lawyers are often seen as opportunistic parasites. Whether we see them as "ambulance chasers" or people who otherwise sue, prosecute, or defend those who would cause us harm—civilly or criminally—they certainly get a bad rap when it comes to their profession as a whole. In the world of criminal justice, lawyers are blamed for wrongful convictions; and if they happen to be prosecuting us for crimes, we see them as hangmen in suits who generally lie and manipulate the legal system to get our blood on their ropes or blades at any cost. In civil law, they often represent malicious corporate agendas, find ways to shield billionaires from liability, and rarely seem to be known for morality or righteousness. And while the criticism is justified; and though I myself have had negative things to say about lawyers, I will also say that their profession is noble—maybe even the most noble—because it quite possibly serves the highest good: that being, the law.
You might be questioning, how is it that the law is a good thing if it's so frequently twisted to serve agendas that don't serve us? Or, when the law is used to deny someone their rights, or take from them their property, liberty, or lives, how could it possibly be perceived as something good? There are even "secret laws" that govern aspects of our lives, laws that have been categorized by the federal courts as "abominations," and yet, they still exist. And, as most of my readers know, I have been deprived of two decades of my life because certain laws were ignored, where the agenda of my prosecution and conviction was more about political expediency than justice or truth. Therefore, how do I defend the assertion that the law is good?
Because the law represents humanity's best efforts to establish fairness and justice in societies just as complex as the biological organisms it attempts to govern. By no stretch of the imagination is the law perfect, but it represents our noble, collective intentions of guiding ourselves by the light of reason and logic as opposed to being ruled by the tyranny of power wielded by someone's ego. And, while the argument can be made that the law is too frequently co-opted for the very malicious agendas it was invented to prevent, the reality of its misuse doesn't detract from the simplistic beauty of its nobility; if anything, the fact that it's misused should infuriate us all to the point of action: that action being, that we pay closer attention to the laws enacted on our behalf, as opposed to just delegating our civil duties to the elected representatives who are likewise co-opted by the very same malicious agendas, that, theoretically, laws should protect us from.
Which is not to suggest that everyone become a student of rhetoric and law. It's simply an observation that, it's better to be ruled by logic and reason than the alternative. I currently live under that alternative: it's called the American prison experiment; basically, the closest we can get to observing a dictatorship without having to leave the country. Where a single man or woman (the warden) is given a small fiefdom, instructed to follow certain established laws, but since it's considered such an undesirable place, only rarely are their actions observed by anyone with the willingness or authority to place a check on their tyranny. Basically, he or she is a dictator, and ultimately, the outcome and product of laws ignored or not enforced; where no consequences ensue, and their decisions can seem like the mad rantings of a belligerently drunk psychopath—or in a word, chaos. Dictators are not concerned with the legality of their actions, they are instinctive creatures whose choices are predictively based on self-preservation, personal interests and gain. And that being said, while our attempt to codify reason and logic through laws can certainly be infuriating—even more so, when the laws meant to protect are turned to our detriment—the alternative is insanity disguised as every variation of the goodness it is not.
Many have followed the legal challenges I have faced in my ongoing efforts to achieve exoneration from my wrongful conviction. Which means that you've witnessed from a distance the heartrending experience of having state and federal courts perform judicial back flips to prevent the rights and guarantees of the laws of this nation from being applied to my case—and ultimately, to my life. I won't tell you that it's not heartbreaking, because it is; but not because it's the rights and liberties of my life that are seemingly forfeit, but because the law ceases to be a good egg the moment that logic and reason are supplanted by emotions like fear, hate, or even love—or supplanted by the all too human vices of vengeance, greed, or ambition.
The law is a mountain we collectively build upon, and like all things it has momentum. And that momentum is premised on our decisions to move into the light of reason or the darkness of chaos. We cannot and will not have it both ways. The premise of law is to not be governed by tyranny, even though that's what occurs when we allow laws to be drafted by lobbyists or otherwise co-opted by agendas that are hostile to our liberties and rights. In those instances, the law becomes a bad egg and our enemy. But not because it's inherently bad, but because we have collectively disavowed our responsibility to the law and the goodness of the basic premise on which it stands—freedom from tyranny through the light of reason.
Essentially, the bad egg is what the good egg becomes through our neglect. It's the tyranny of a dictatorship even though it calls itself a democracy or a representative government. A state of controlled chaos where legislative decisions aren't defended by reason or logic, but by the ever changing whims of emotion and vice. When we allow laws to subjugate or diminish our personal rights and liberties with no corresponding benefit to our collective good, then, obviously the laws are not based on logic or reason. For example, fear. Fear is neither logical or rational, and the laws that it engenders are likewise neither. And yet, how many legislative bills against crime, terrorism, and drugs have been legislatively enacted from that very premise?
As implied from the joke about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, they are likewise considered bad eggs, but that's not what they are. A bad egg is the irrational product of life divorced from reason and called chaos, but most lawyers are still salvageable because they are still inherently rational. And rational means that a conversation can still be had where reason and logic can still be debated and possibly even prevail. Which brings us to perhaps what the real punchline of the joke, from the beginning, should be: five hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean—instead of a good start—a tragedy—because it would mean less potential advocates defending the rights and liberties that make freedom possible.
The fact, that I am still afforded the opportunity to present the illegality of my conviction to a court and make my arguments points to the good egg elements of the nation and the lawyers who defend its laws. Of course, it would be irrational of me not to see the presumptive futility of my efforts; in that, while the courts may permit me to speak and otherwise make my arguments, what does that matter when the ensuing decisions are so divorced from reason that justice can't prevail? In other words, why try if the outcome is already corrupted by the divorced reality of reason from law? To which, I say, that righteous efforts should never be deterred, because the consequences of our efforts can rarely be seen from where we stand in the present moment; and, courts are still made up of lawyers who, at the end of the day, are still men and women who struggle to apply the reason and logic of their humanity to the best of their abilities—which means, anything is possible, and, perhaps the law is noble precisely because it is as imperfectly perfect as our very humanity.
Image: Courtesy of Freepik
