What to Do When the Police Lie

John Dwyer writes at the Good Men Project:

The façade of the courthouse is made entirely of windows. The only entrance is a revolving door, of course, and everywhere you look is steel and glass.

Irony doesn’t exist, for legal reasons.

My brother is 45 minutes early for his court date. He tells me this will be a “discovery,” and we both have no clue what exactly this will entail. His lawyer is 5 minutes late and arrives without any explanations.

Earlier, my brother, Mike, commiserated with his friend and fellow defendant, “We paid fifteen hundred bucks. You would expect this guy to be on time.”

“Yeah,” his buddy agrees, “I want my money back.”

Fifteen hundred dollars seemed like a cheap price to pay for justice to me. I wanted to say that if that’s all it costs, then they’re getting away with highway robbery, and cheaply. Only, they never robbed anyone and they certainly never assaulted a cop. Forget prison, everyone in court is innocent. But it’s true, and we forget that until it’s us standing in front of the judge.

Stereotypes exist because they’re often backed up by anecdotal evidence. The stereotype that Asians are good at math persists because Chinese speaking children are better at math than English speaking children. Chinese represents numbers with single syllables, and is completely straight forward – no numbers end in “teen,” and thirty is “three ten,” instead of a word that kinda resembles three. And while we’re dealing with numbers, there are more than a billion people in China, so what’s true for the Chinese is true for Asians, statistically speaking.

Mike and his friend stood outside their courtroom as the doors closed and a session started. They are both big, but not supersized big, so much as football-sized big. Mike’s hair is somewhere between dirty blond and mud brown and his personal grooming leaves a little to be desired. His patchy facial hair brings to mind either a mangy dog or a much-loved teddy bear, depending on how well you know him …

Read the rest of Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.  Part 3 is scheduled for May.