The
government today announced plans to overhaul the justice system. The news comes
in the wake of a nationwide survey that revealed alarming shortcomings in the
current system. Responding to the news, ashen-faced Lord Justice Dredd said: “the
current system is in dire need of change. It is riddled with loopholes that gravely
restrict the freedoms of ordinary multinational corporations to kill people for
their own good while at the same time enabling far too many people to get away
with things they didn’t do. We simply cannot go on like this.”
The
government plans to bring the country’s justice procedures up to speed with the
12th Century by introducing methods that have been found to be so successful in
the field of international diplomacy. Innovative developments in international relations,
pioneered by great minds such as the philosophers Genghis Khan and Attila the
Democrat and exemplified by the US and other peace-loving empires have brought
us many benefits such as peace being just over the horizon and increased
profits for arms manufacturers and other humanitarian organisations.
Pioneered by
the selfless diplomatic efforts of the US and UK in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq
and so on, the new procedures will enable prosecutors to go straight from
allegation to execution without the intervention of costly trials, presenting
evidence and other unnecessary steps that only served to delay fast-tracking a
guilty verdict.
Under the
new system, Lord Dredd will assume the newly established post of Lord High
Executioner (LHE). The post will include duties hitherto assigned to different
people but which will now more conveniently accrue to the same person. These
duties include the following functions:
- Counsel for
the prosecution
- Weeding out
evidence and other impediments to swift justice
- Judge
- Jury
- Executioner
- Media
liaison
The post of
counsel for the defence is to be abolished as unnecessary as it only gets
people into endless arguments and invites mischievous demands for proof. In any
case, it is self-evident that anyone really innocent would not have been
accused of anything in the first place.
Lord Dredd’s
duties will include a watchdog function in which he will scour the land for
people he doesn’t like and then loudly suggest they might have done something. Formal
charges will then be laid via the fiction department of Lord Dredd’s newly formed
Media Liaison Office.
As people
suggesting someone might have done something is all the evidence one really
needs to be fairly certain that they probably did it, and as being accused of
something is a sure sign of guilt, we will then be able to move straight to
execution within days, thus saving everybody the hassle of having to think or
the accused the trouble of having to attend a trial.
Expensive
courts, court buildings and so forth will be abolished and a brief trial
conducted in a “virtual unreality” world known as The Media specially fabricated
from jigabytes of information streamed from such reliable sources as MI6, the
CIA, Tel Aviv and Kiev, resources which we are lucky to have on account of
their complete facelessness and reliability.
Articles in
the press slagging off the accused, hitherto deemed prejudicial to justice,
have been discovered to be all right after all and will now be treated as proof.
Accused persons will be found guilty if the weight of media accusation establishes
their guilt beyond reasonable thought.
Certain
outmoded practices will now be phased out. Primary among these, for example,
will be the notion that murder is unacceptable no matter who did it. Accused
persons will be let off the hook if:
- They can
show that someone else did the same thing or even worse.
- The victims
or people in the vicinity of the victims really had it coming by virtue have
having done something or their ancestors having done something any time over the
past 2,000 years.
- They show remorse
as evinced by such things as borrowing large sums of money from the IMF,
ceasing to complain when democratically run over by a tank, donating all their
worldly goods to a needy oligarch or can show they were funded by the CIA.
Successful
prosecution will require.
- The
weight of public opinion as to probable or even unlikely guilt or innocence,
except where it disagrees with:
- A
decision by the LHE that the accused did it.
- The
weight of newspaper sound-bites saying he did it and
- Er . . . that’s
it.
Punishment
of the guilty person will be swift and indiscriminate and preferably before
anyone has to waste their time trying to work out whether the guilty person did it
or not.
When someone
is found guilty by weight of accusation, his family and neighbours will also be
adjudged guilty by association (or geographic location) and subject to
collateral punishment. The district in which the guilty person lives will be
carpet bombed on the sound judicial principle that if you kill enough people
you are quite likely to get the accused as well (unless he has moved) which,
let’s face it, is the sort of vengeance that makes the hearts of men glow in
the dark.
It should be
born in mind as the scythe of justice sweeps the land (or someone else’s land)
in an orgy of collateral punishment that in any case guilty people who probably
were up to no good are very good at hiding in the place where they live and sneakily
living next to people next door.
Apart from that is the fact that anyone sinister enough to be an innocent bystander or otherwise
get in the way of the justice system’s Nerds-of the-Court and their blameless Missiles
of Retribution is just asking for trouble. Besides, evil-doers are well known
for their penchant for disguising themselves as innocent bystanders, children,
pets and other agents of Beelezubub.
It is after all
- as the philosopher Aristhrottle once pointed out -better to kill a hundred
men on the off-chance they did something or were thinking about doing something
than let one guilty man go free: there is no knowing what manner of harm he
might then visit upon his fellow man.
