It’s a question of courage
Ordinary people are defamed hourly and cruelly, especially on the internet, but for them there’s no recourse. Even lesser lawyers charge like they’re superstars, a great deterrent for the indignant. Access to justice is for the rich, as the current defamation trial involving Sir Robert Jones illustrates. He’s paying for it because he says he was called a racist, and an ensuing petition called for his knighthood to be taken from him.
Jones has a history of litigating. He can afford it, and it’s his right, which goes to show how rights and money are inextricably linked.
There’s no silver bullet to solve the problem of access to civil justice, Chief Justice Helen Winkelmann said earlier this month, but she’s aware of it. That’s nice, but nothing will change. Lawyers like money too much.
Westerns often show the cowardice of ordinary people in the face of thuggery, almost as if they foretold the Trump presidency, where justice takes dramatic and unexpected turns. That Trump’s Justice Department is challenging the sentence of his personal friend Roger Stone, while three prosecutors have withdrawn as a result, and one has quit, brings such issues to mind.
Stone was found guilty of trying to sabotage a congressional investigation threatening Trump. Prosecutors asked for a seven to nine-year sentence. The bare facts. The link between power and justice. It cuts that way too.
In Twelve Angry Men, a young Henry Fonda plays a regular guy reasoning with a fractious jury, slowly winning them over to a just verdict. No wonder then that Mitt Romney is my current hero for his one-man stand against the rest of the senate Republicans, who voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial.
I’m not cynical about people who are deeply religious, like Romney, and believe in the importance of acting as their conscience dictates in public as well as private life. I’m cynical about how many of his endangered species remain on the planet, though, and how so many get away with so much because they’re rich and entitled.
People who don’t get represented fairly here, no matter how grim their situation, are children in unsafe families. Babies grabbed from their mothers in police-backed raids make an ugly picture, but so do small children killed by live-in boyfriends, distraught mothers and angry fathers.
What gets me is not so much government involvement as the need for it. Where are the wider families looking out for the babies? Where is the leadership into communities suffering deprivation, addiction, thuggery and child neglect? Why is violence accepted by so many mute witnesses, and why do some people value loyalty to their mates and family more than suffering kids?
Two small children are this week’s victims so far, one dead in Rotorua, the other grievously injured in Flaxmere. If the investigations run depressingly true to form nobody will co-operate with police. Some past examples:
In 2000 ‘‘Lillybing’’ (Hinewaoriki Karaitiana-Matiaha), a 23-month-old, died from massive facial burns, injuries to her vagina and abdomen, and fatal brain injuries. Two women were jailed, but no-one has revealed who sexually assaulted her.
Twins Chris and Cru Kahui died of skull fractures in 2006 from blunt-force trauma while in the care of their father, who was acquitted. A group of adults that came to be known as the ‘‘Tight 12’’ refused to help police. There were many adults in the house when the children died, yet nobody saw a thing. As if. Witnesses such as these are where the very idea of justice collapses. It costs nothing but courage to speak up, as Romney did, yet somehow it’s too much to ask.