bailing leaks

What I want to remember (and tell others): Ms. B, wheezing and wheeling her oxygen cart out of the courtroom, disbelieving what just happened to her son. Looking to me for an explanation i can only hastily deliver, like a menu with nothing good to offer. "Don't they care that he didn't go to jail for five years?" she asks, the frustration acute as it is impotent. "Don't they care he's turned his life around, and then they go and send him back there?" No, Ms. B, there's not a santa claus. Not for young men with criminal pasts. This is bail court in Hamilton, maybe most cities in this slick-surfaced system. Where all the procedure in the world can't protect someone mixed up in the shitty situation of being charged with a crime, and having a record, and being too poor or poorly-connected to post cash. Even if the case is flimsy. Even if he's doing what he can, working, caring for a dying mom. And, in the sickly-lit cellblock below the courthouse after his bail has been denied, my client pleads that he can't spend the summer in jail waiting for a trial. Even if the charge is bogus, he wants to plead. This is how the auto-miscarriages of justice begin, the failures far more common, far less trumpeted than wrongful convictions in high-profile trials. Once a justice of the peace figures a guy is probably guilty, and will probably breach the conditions of his release, the game's almost always over. Cards dealt from a stacked deck. This might not bother most people, but it makes me mad as hell. Because in the eddied hours between when a fella is arrested and when he's brought up for bail, there's no chance to mount a defence, not one in any way comparable to that which the police are able to mustre. This wouldn't be so bad if the cops did full and unbiased investigations, but, unfortunately, they don't. They shoot for convictions. They turn grey into black. So, in the space of a few vertigoed days, someone can go from being free, to being accused of a crime (but, of course, still legally innocent), to being held in a detention centre with Nothing on offer, a holding pen for men facing the brutal choice of accepting the case against them, or waiting and waiting for the trial that is their right. Getting 20 minutes of fresh air a day. Losing their apartments, their possessions, their relationships. Bail is so important, and is far too often denied. Just another aspect of why for too many people, for too many times when it really matters, justice doesn't.

The tender scent of failure

so it's a muggy sunday eve in western hamilton, and, because a man may be stepped over in a doorway, there's another bloody war going on, the lilacs are blooming, and justice is a dirty word, i've decided to start another blog. This is only some of why.