Here Come De Judge

A very interesting piece of news crossed my path this morning.  A sixteen year-old boy was convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of four people.  He was given probation.

Yes.  Probation.  The judge felt that the boy came from an affluent family and that made him feel he was subject to privilege…that being the privilege to kill whomever was irritating him.  So now the judge has determined that affluence is a “mental disorder.”  Hmmmm….

The surprising part is that the judge did not commit the boy to a mental institution like all other mental case defenses.  He chose probation.  Now if that isn’t an example of privilege, I don’t know what is!  Kill with impunity and not even be treated for your supposed mental illness.  What is likely to happen?  I suppose the DA will file an appeal and the appellate court will have more sense than this dimwit judge did in adjudicating the case.

What troubles me most about this kind of thinking is the excuse making it gives rise to for bad moral behavior.  We seem to be doing a lot of that in our society.  Good and bad seems to have taken on more shades of gray as the decades pass.  Does this mean that now blacks can kill whites because they are mentally disordered into thinking all whites are racists.  Does it mean that poverty gives one the same right to kill that wealth apparently does in this judge’s mind?  Does it mean that Muslim Jihadists should get probation for blowing up airplanes and skyscrapers in the sky because they’ve been disordered mentally by their radical faith?

Judges serve a long time and wield a great deal of power in our society at all levels.  They usually are appointed or run unopposed for their office in elections, which I find a bit disturbing.  This also reflects on the larger issue of how and who we “pick to serve” in all our government functions…and lately so far, I think we’re doing a pretty poor job of it.  We have liars and crooks at every level that literally buy there way into office and dole out special favors after being sworn in, and it’s conceivable that they are running the country into a financial disaster as well as a moral disaster. 

Don’t get me wrong here.  There are good judges and good elected officials, but it happens more by chance than it does by design.  We desperately need better-educated voters, campaigns that are equally publicly financed and given equal donated TV debate time.  We also need to see that those serving may not go to work for companies for which they passed bills for at least 10 years after leaving office, and term limits must be established that prevent elected career “royalty” in our country.  We also need to realize we can’t keep voting ourselves benefits that we can’t pay for.

These changes can happen.  But it can also happen that we go the route of all other historic democracies…and fail into tyrannical dictatorships.