I do not have a wish to live under fear of the Spanish Inquisition or in the era of Communist Soviet Union. Yet, you might however wonder on occasion what happened to the Democracy of the United States, particularly if you get caught up the wrong way with the law.
Here is the list:
• If you get arrested, you may be held for 24 hours without being charged. You are permitted to make only one phone call, i.e. once your call is over you have zero contact with the world until your attorney arrives. Then of course if you can’t afford an attorney, the government will provide you with one – yeah, the one who works to satisfy his employer, the government; not you.
• If you are busted for an alleged crime, this would include busted via the use of sting operations, which means a crime would have not occur if not for the Feds placing it under your feet, your name gets plastered negatively by Federal officials who hold highly-publicized press conferences before you are convicted. If and when your name gets cleared, no media or Federal official is there to make news out of it.
• When in criminal court, your future is in the hands of a group of unemployed individuals who are so smart that they couldn’t find a way to avoid getting involved in this thing called Jury Duty, and/or your immediate future it is in the hands of a person in a black robe that can add or subtract years of misery to your life, based largely on his/her mood.
• If the government wants to fry you, they will charge you with laws that were last enforced before the 1929 Stock Market crash. In addition; for one alleged act, they will charge you under endless types of counts such as Fraud, Mail fraud, Wire fraud, Bank Fraud, False Statements to a Bank, etc, each charge thrown at you a half a dozen times or more, which in turn might land you 1,225 years in prison. Oh! And by the way: Willfully saying a lie to a Federal Agent even if you are not under oath is a felony that can land you a few more years in prison.
• For cooking your books in order to get bank loans worth less than $50 million, you might get up to 1,225 years. However, a $50 billion Ponzi scheme gets you only 150 years.
• You can be incarcerated for three years if you violate the tax return perjury status, i.e. you purposely under-report in a tax return your income. Then again, if luck is on your side, you might become America’s Treasury Secretary who oversees the IRS, or perhaps you might be one of the top tax-writing lawmakers in the country, despite the fact that you recently cheated the tax system with tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars.
• When in prison, you are the dog of the Prison Worden and correction officers who treat you as dirty scum if they want, and dump you in “the hole” for days and weeks, disregarding the fact that it might permanently affect you psychologically, yet… there is zero-to-nothing that you can do about it.
• When you are done with serving the prison sentence, you might be ordered to live for a while in a halfway-house until you get accustomed to the free life. But of course, when your sentence was handed-out, there was a big chance that you were not permitted to return to your home for even one more time, and a half-way house to “train” you how to lose your freedoms is not even an option. Instead, you get taken straight to a prison cell.
• Finally, when you are over with all the above, you are a felon for life, regardless of how small of a crime it was. It is a stain on your record that endlessly impedes on your freedom.
I certainly don’t want to get caught up in the justice system of Mexico, China, or even France for this matter, and I am truly grateful to enjoy the freedoms that we all have in the democracy of the USA. However, after taking a glimpse into the justice system of the United States, I finally understand better the quote – by Winston Churchill: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise.”