Justice

3 Pages 714 Words

Of course I looked “justice” up in the dictionary before I started to write this paper and I did not find anything of interest except of course a common word in every definition, that implies being “fair”. This implies that justice would have something to do with being fair. I thought that if one of the things the law and the legal system are about is maintaining and promoting justice and a sense of “fairness”, they may not be doing a spiffy job. An eye for an eye is fair? No, that would be too easy, too black and white. I could cite several examples where I thought a judge’s or jury’s ruling was not fair, but I won’t cause frankly, we’ve all seen those. I actually believe in our legal system and I believe in justice. I believe in justice as an ideal that we strive for and that is what it means to me. The legal system, when looked at closer is not just justice but instead- judgement. You can be punished when found guilty, in a number of ways, but who knows if they’re “fair “punishments, its all a matter of opinion. Is life in jail, say 25 years, going to be enough punishment for the parents charged with brutally murdering their daughter Farah Khan? Her life was brief, but whoever killed her also mutilated her body parts. The possibilities for her life were endless, she could have lived to age 95. So is 25 years enough for her killers? They’ll be able to walk free at the end of their term, and perhaps few will remember them then and what they did. Why is justice important then? Because although the legal system is not always right, it needs that lofty ideal of justice something to strive for, something to hope gets accomplished, the hope for every victim of a crime in any nature. The seeking of justice is a tiring and long quest akin to the seeking of truth, for they are closely linked and without one there may not be the other. Without the understanding of what really happened in an event or place and time ju...