Injustice On A Platter Of Democratic And Public Justice

I don't know if you've been following the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard saga, but I've stumbled upon it in the news a few times, although I didn't pay much attention to it. As of now, the trial has come to an end and Amber Heard has been marked the villain; a tag that came with a hefty sum in damages to the tune of $15million. Say what you will about the case, I respect your opinion, but I'm here to highlight a few things.

This whole saga can be said to have played out before, just without Amber being a party. How you may be asked? A newspaper in the UK once publish an article in which Mr Depp was called a "woman beater". Me Depp sued the paper to court and promptly lost. What that effectively meant is that the court agreed with the newspaper that Mr Depp is indeed a woman beater who had been abusing Ms Amber. 

Ms Amber is only a villain today because she dared to repeat that same statement, unfortunately for her, on American soil, the supposed land of freedom and justice. She was sued by Mr Depp for $50million in damages. She responded by counter-suing for $100million. The big question we should all be asking ourselves now is this, how is it that the same case, with the same set of evidence, has resulted in two conflicting judgements in two different jurisdictions. Maybe, the British judges are terrible at their job and the justice system over there is dead?

Before you make that judgement, let me give you a few facts. In the British case, the case was decided by only a judge, but not do in the American case. America has a juror system where civilians are supposed to be granted the powers of a judge. This group of civilians preselected before a case gets to listen to the argument and determine the guilty party as well as the judgement. The judge, in this case, is simply their errand boy who reads out their verdict. 

While in the British case justice was in the hands of a man who had been trained to recognise truth from a sea of lies, to recognise deceit and manipulations of desperate men, and to deliver justice without fear or favour, the American case was determined by a random group of people whose sense of justice draws from emotions, gamble, guesses and social media.

Like a lot of things we think we know today, what we think we know of this whole saga is far too underwhelming compared to what we should use to come to an assessment of it, but I'll be dissecting a few things tomorrow, so we can see how this whole case has shown that justice is subjective. This whole case has also shown me that not all those that have been convicted of one crime or the other are anywhere close to being guilty. 

To be continued..

Thanks for reading...