Just Point At Him

JUST POINT AT HIM

By

Snjezana Marinkovic

and

Gregory L. Torti

*****

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright © 2013 by Snjezana Marinkovic and Gregory L. Torti.

****

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Forward

Introduction

In the Courtroom

Behind the Court Scene

Closing Thought

Acknowledgments

The following story is based on real court case. Many of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of those who were part of it.

Dedicated to most important people in our lives, those who have changed our lives for the better. Greg’s wife and son and my grandmother.

Foreword

This is my fourteenth year of living in the United States, and the sixth year of studying the American criminal justice system. Still, until this day, I was not able to come close to understanding how the famous parens patriae doctrine, the authority of the state to protect persons who are legally unable to act on their own behalf, is applied to children. I hear, read about, and witness on a daily basis children being neglected, abused, and imprisoned, but have experienced very little of how we educate parents and the public to adequately protect the youth. They are simply taken away either by Child Protective Services, or sent to a correctional facility. We simply break them, like a precious vase into numerous pieces, and then we are surprised when their budding lives start to fade away. We push them away but expect them to build their world so that we can feel a sense of pride. Yes, we often hold them to unrealistic expectations, and then suddenly strip them of any and all tools or resources necessary to use on this journey called life, showing no mercy when they make mistakes. We Americans, desperately try to correct the youth while pissing off the rest of the world by not giving the right of parole to those who crossed the line, and labeling those who are surrounded by poverty and other disadvantages reflecting inequality.

But who am I to talk about all this, and who am I to be worthy of your attention? I am a foreigner, just like you. The most significant difference between us is that your ancestors left Europe in search of a better life much earlier than mine. I still speak with a strong accent, and every day I strive to improve that so I can fit in and understand you better. This may be the reason why I choose not to sit still and watch silently. Yes, we were brought up in different ways. I grew up in a country that openly killed those who refused to take sides and by not carrying guns tried to be just. This country was proud of it, but America stepped in a patriarchal way and stopped that. America saved a stranger. It saved me. Even so, every day it is letting many of its own people suffer and die without reaching out a helping hand. It is difficult to find the right words to express adequately to you how heavily I breathe while watching millions of people who’ve been disadvantaged all their lives by their low social status having their freedom defended, while their action is misrepresented behind some closed door. They end up sitting in the courtrooms, waiting to satisfy someone’s hunger for justice. My sadness grows even bigger as my knowledge of the government of this country expands. The founding fathers were also Americans by choice, as I am now, and they strived to create the best country in the world. Now, it is up to you and me to preserve that idea, and to promote the needed change. Therefore, even though I realize that this country has the most stable constitution in the world, and that no country could match its ideas in striving for justice, protecting, and serving in the best ways possible all of its people, I am confused as to why there are still so many begging for their voices to be heard. The majority of them carry that heavy label of weaker or different. Very often, they are simply just ignored – women, gay, non-white, non-religious, mentally ill, poor, compassionate, incarcerated, and etc.

Yes, most of those who are poor would quickly be through the profiled process of drawing conclusions based on criminal behaviors, motives, personalities, visual information and demographic descriptions along with other evidence. In the course of studying the criminal justice system, I learned that due to this fast-food line through which this supposed justice is served, and based on 2.7 % accuracy, the mind of a potential criminal is often decoded by the most popular tool – assumption. Because of that, one could be labeled a sex offender based on his dirty mind rather than his actions. Additionally, 95 % of criminal cases are resolved through the process of plea bargaining, instead of being decided in a criminal trial. This might inspire us to ethically evaluate this widely used method of criminal justice. Are those who are pleading guilty really bringing the truth to the table, or are they agreeing to this popularized ultimatum to lessen their punishment?

What many of those people don’t realize is that once someone points the finger at you, it matters very little if you are innocent or guilty. It matters who you are and how you will be defended. If you were found guilty, even though your innocence is proven later, your identity is stolen forever. On the other hand, if you are found innocent, even though you committed the criminal act, you apparently have something that is stronger than truth. As mentioned earlier, many things are measured by our social ranking. In other words, the crime of being poor or different is very common. Therefore, if one has attained a higher social status, his or her harm towards the society may be viewed as less severe. Consequently, many murder cases wherein celebrities are involved still remain a mystery to this day. For instance, the murder of Virginia Rappe involving the actor, Roscou Fatty Arbuckle; and the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman involving the footballer and actor, O.J. Simpson, are yet unsolved.

What remains surprising is that within the same criminal justice system, we have the death penalty where many people are executed in spite of their guilt being proven much below a reasonable doubt. Further, within the same criminal justice system, we have that famous parens patriae doctrine, and at the same time, there are two thousand juveniles serving LWOP (life without parole) sentences, while all other criminal justice systems in the world combined have only twelve. On the other hand, we have the insanity defense, which successfully acquits many of those who are capable of telling right from wrong, but battered woman syndrome is still not considered to be a strong defense, even though statistically, every nine seconds in the United States, a woman is being abused or killed.

It seems like at one corner of the street for us awaits Get Tough on Crime and the Three Strikes Law, and at another, we are still engaging in witch hunts based on modern hearsay methods filled with a stigma. How many of them are closely connected with racial hoaxes, child abuse and sex crimes? We would probably never know.

In fact, when we turn the television on, we could see that some of the candidates for government positions committed sexual assaults and other crimes begging for our forgiveness; and then they would be eventually seated to support their kind of justice. We have wife batterers or killers who would walk away as nothing happened. We have the Paris Hilton types, the party animals who could afford to break laws just for fun. And then, we have Law & Order, where people never stop pointing fingers at others. In reality, people may do this out of anger, and for the pleasure of watching all the suffering this might cause. For many of them, the hardest thing to do would be to admit that they were wrong. After all, there will be a fear that each and every finger will be pointed in their direction. Yes, it is very easy to make someone an outcast, but very hard to even imagine taking a step in his or her shoes. Stigma is similar to the path of life – the longer we go in the wrong direction, the less we will be to look for the U-turn.

But again, who am I to tell you anything that will keep you interested in continuing to read this? Who am I to tell you to be attentive before you judge? I am someone who shares this country with you even though I came from what historians refer to as one of the most war devastated countries in the world, and what politicians today make one of the most corrupted ones. The former Yugoslavia was a country where war criminals tortured and killed thousands of people; and where more than 60,000 rapes took place. These criminals were sent to an International Criminal Court, and from there, they went to Scheveningen, a detention unit in Hague, Holland. Here, the cells were equipped with satellite dishes, coffee machines, and comfortable beds. Because of this, I fully understand the meaning of the phrase, innocent until proven guilty, as well as I understand that it is possible to bargain punishment for the guilty one. But there was clear evidence against these people from lengthy videos, photographs, documentation, and testimonies from victims, as well as expert witnesses. Even so, by European law, they were still not guilty, and some of these criminals died naturally before any kind of punishment could be imposed. The most important reason this happened, besides