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A judge articulates her understanding of
a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his
children, even his life … [w]hen {judges} have finished their work, they
frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these
organized, social practices of violence.
We are taught in this culture to revere judges, and to see them as the very personification of justice. Indeed, some are given the title of 'Justice', and are treated with great deference. When it comes to violence we think of them as the solvers of violent problems, not perpetrators of violence. When a judge, in a calm, deliberate tone sentences a person to prison, that is an act of violence. When a judge sentences a person to death, that is an act of violence. When a judge throws out a case of a cop (or cops) who brutalizes or kills a 'citizen', that is an act of violence that threatens the life or liberty of the next victim. It is legal violence, violence allowed by the system, but is violence nonetheless. There is scarcely a social evil in American History that was not, in some case, at some time, approved by some jurist. During the depths of American slavery some brave souls sought relief in court of law. Esteemed scholar and historian Herbert Aptheker, in American Negro Slave Revolts (1987) quotes from the opinion of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin: "The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect…As a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it but in the actual condition of things, it must be so." (p. 66) This was thirty years before Dred Scott v. Sanford, a case so unjust that it pushed the nation towards war. Early in this century, a poor white family challenged the mandatory sterilization laws against people deemed "mentally feeble". A woman named Carrie Buck, who scored quite low on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, fought the law. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,, writing for the Supreme Court upheld the law with these historic words: "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices…. Three generations of imbeciles is enough" -Buck v Bell (1927 The Virginia Sterilization Law (which compelled the sterilization of Carrie and her sister Doris) stood for almost half a century, from 1924 to 1972. Thousands upon thousands of women, in VA and across the nation, were sterilized. The immigration cases, which excluded Chinese for over 150 years, and which stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Japanese and other Asians solely on the judgment that they were not white (and) therefore, not worthy) worked to truncate and shrivel lives and cripple hopes. Tens of thousands lived lives of pain, shame and loss, unable to own land, serve on juries, or function in public service because of their color and heritage. People seeking freedom, the right to procreate, and citizenship were damned by judicial decree, their hopes, dreams and bodies violated by law, acts of legal judicial violence © 1998 MAJ |
Legalized
Violence