Justice For All?

"No justice, no peace!"

   Federal judges will be getting long-overdue pay hikes as well as back pay for the six times they were denied scheduled raises. Two court decisions said Congress was wrong in denying raises to nearly 2,000 federal judges throughout the country in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2007 and 2010.
   The Congressional Budget Office, in a letter to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cited court decisions that "Congress may not withhold automatic salary increases for certain judges and that it improperly did so on six separate occasions." Result: Judges will now receive pay hikes automatically, as well as back pay for increases they should have received.
   The total cost of compensating the judges for lost pay and coming increases will be some $1.2 billion over the next ten years.

   Comment: It's a truism that money buys justice. Wealthy folks can hire squadrons of lawyers, while others must rely on Legal Aid from volunteers or government-sponsored agencies. At the same time, judges regularly leave the bench to return to private practice; that's where the big money is.
   As it is, federal district court judges this year get a salary of $199,100, and circuit court judges get $211,200. At the U.S. Supreme Court, associate justices draw a salary of $244,400, and the chief justice gets $255,500.
   Prosecutors also have the resources of government to investigate and pursue suspects for years, if need  be, before filing charges, and then spending more time and money as the case moves through the court system.
   Major corporations and the wealthy can often outspend the state in marshalling and continuing their defense, but legal resources for others are severely limited or nonexistent.
   The question then becomes this: Is justice distributed evenly and fairly among all groups -- economic, demographic, ethnic and racial -- in America?

   Money talks, it has been said. And those with more money can talk longer and louder than those with less.
   There's also a tendency among law enforcement officials to aim at easier targets to score points toward a perceived "quota" of sorts to build their reputation and show that they're doing their jobs well, by citing the number of convictions they have obtained. Moreover, there is less publicity over cases involving the unknown. In cases involving celebrities, major corporations, the wealthy and other public figures, prosecutors lose credibility when they lose a case.

   Meanwhile, our resident cynic points out that five of the six times federal judges were denied scheduled pay hikes were during a Republican Administration, and the sixth was during a midterm election year with a Democrat in the White House.
   "No justice, no peace!" the protestors chant. There's more to that than simply a demand for justice in individual cases. It applies to the whole of a just society, where all are created equal, and thus deserve equal treatment under law.