America is a nation founded on the abuse of law. The original laws set up in the US during the Revolutionary Era were designed to disenfranchise women, slaves, and the Native population.
The only real revolutionary element to these laws was that they disenfranchised the power of the British King and British nobility, too. Because of that, the new US laws were considered radical for their time.
US law has been modified through the years, often only through bloody conflict. Still, the basic disenfranchisement of the common person remains the bedrock of American law. The law in the US is based on assessing the purchasing power of the individual. Those with little ability to purchase legal ‘rights’ get the book thrown at them, so to speak. Those with major purchasing power, write the books.
Understanding that the US is a nation historically founded on abuse of law to disenfranchise people helps us better understand how the US court systems have consistently allowed torture of prisoners to occur. A recent case ruling is illustrative of how rampant the abuse of law in the US really is… Judge Won’t Inquire Into CIA Tapes Case
Here, we see that a judge summarily refuses to investigate the destruction of evidence of abuse and torture of prisoners by the government. This ruling is not an aberration in American law. In fact, it is par for the course.
Law today does not protect us in America. Law abuses us and we should look towards trying to modify the abuse of law as has had to be done previously for slaves, women, and Native Americans. The modifications and changes in the previous abuse of American law that were made in the past, are far from being enough to protect us today.
Today, the whole American legal apparatus is a structure more guaranteed to deny us rights, than to guarantee that we have them. We need another Revolutionary Era that could change that. Without it, we will continue to be a nation where the common citizenry is more abused by law enforcement than protected by it. In a way, the police today are every bit as much the king’s men as they were before Independence Day, 1776.