▪︎ مجلس نيوز
At the present time, it is difficult to imagine the issuance of judicial decisions, outside the background circumstances of their political cases. If we add the interference of the media variable and what it may contain in terms of stirring up and mobilizing public opinion, it will be difficult to achieve justice. Justice is not blindfolded, as some would like to be photographed. On the contrary: Justice enjoys its full senses, with which you sense the political situation, in all its aspects.
The week before last, a jury in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, issued a verdict in the case of the killing of an African American citizen (George Floyd), as a result of the excessive violence used by the police when trying to arrest him. The first accused in the case, the policeman (Derek Steffen), was convicted of all three counts of manslaughter, which the state prosecutor accused him of, with each sentence of up to forty years in prison.
Despite all the precautions taken by the judicial authorities to provide a fair trial, starting with choosing a jury that reflects the ethnic, social and class pluralism of society, passing through the temporary release of the accused on financial bail and the provision of legal protection for his defense, to the transparency of the trial, by making the trial public and broadcasting it live on the air, However, it cannot be said that the trial fulfills all the requirements of the supposed justice, to the extent that the conviction judgment was expected, and it was not surprising, except in the consensus of the jury that the accused was found guilty in all three degrees of the accusation, which the prosecution presented.
The case received overwhelming sympathy from the public with the victim, to the point where there was no opportunity to hear the defense arguments, which focused on the sensitivity and seriousness of the environment in which the police work, with the modesty of the capabilities available to the policemen, in addition to the bitterness, which the public bears against the policemen, allegedly not Their profession and their tendency to extreme violence, especially towards minorities.
The role of the media cannot be underestimated, which found in the case a news story and a live event that was allowed to be covered, live, almost all the American people were following from the ocean to the ocean, but rather the whole world. Nor can the emotional charge of the victim, with all its racial dimensions, social grievances and historical racial discrimination, faced by blacks and people of color, from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon white Protestant society. The trial took place in a charged atmosphere by the masses besieging the court, and others motivated, throughout the country for any emergency if the verdict was acquitted.
The political elites in Washington had their accounts in investing in the event. President Biden hoped that the “correct” judgment would be issued in this case. Everyone knows what the president means by this “correct” word. Republican lawmakers and elders, on the other hand, even if they timidly sympathized with the victim, they made an effort to provide justifications in the behavior of the accused officer, and their eyes on their constituencies.
The conviction ruling was not far from the atmosphere and circumstances that accompanied the case, from the time the crime was committed until the three-year conviction of the accused was issued. Justice in this trial was neither blind nor deaf, nor lost of senses.
Adalah was in control of its decision by the street, the media and the politicians.
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