Tuesday, August 29, 2006

PRECEDENTS FROM HELL!

Funny, how the courts use precedents in this province. As I sat in the courtroom last Thursday listening to Madam Justice Brown cite all the reasons why she wasn't going to give me a jury trial, I found my mind wandering. But I allowed my mind to go ahead and wander because I'd heard it all before. And I already knew why she, or any other judge in BC would never give me a jury trial. Because if I were given one, I would probably be acquitted. Which would enormously upset the whole court system that operates only on precedent. When it suits them, that is.
Because there are different kinds of court precedents, the ones the judges love to quote and the ones they never use. Like what, you might ask? Well, like the one that was set way back in the 1950's when Robert Sommers, BC's first forest minister was caught accepting bribes in exchange for granting a huge tree farm license to British Columbia Forest Products. Poor ole Sommers did two years in prison and it ruined his political career. However, the precedent setting part isn't about a weak politician, the woods are full of them, but about the fact that a BC Supreme Court judge allowed the company that did the bribing (BC Forests Products) to keep the tree farm license they had obtained through paying criminal bribes.
Now isn't that an interesting precedent? See how flexible our courts are when they want to be? And how agreeable the attorney generals? Together they will even allow a company, if it's big enough, to keep the proceeds of their crime. This was a major precedent and the principal of protecting big corporations is still with us, just never referred to by the courts.
No, the courts never mention the Robert Sommers and BC Forest Products precedent, only the ones where they can quote unceasingly about how rotten civil disobedience is and how if it isn't severely punished the entire edifice of law, in fact our entire civilization would fall. But they must know, somewhere deep within their corporate law washed psychics that the opposite is true. That civil disobedience is not hostile to the law but is part and parcel of the law. Civil disobedience is the major vehicle for evolution of the law. Simply witness the fact that Madam Justice Brown is even on the bench. If it hadn't been for lots of civil disobedience both she and Chief Justice of Canada Madam Beverly McLaughlin would be home daring their husbands socks. However there is a larger court than the trial courts of BC. There is the court of public opinion. Anyway, I'm appealing Madam Justice Brown's ruling. Betty Krawczyk



1 comment:

  1. Anonymous8:23 PM

    Ah, Betty, I so admire you. There was a time when I thought that more women in the professions would help women and those of us who were not in those professions would benefit. But sadly, they have been co-opted by careerism. The abstract male law has become more important than the idea of justice. Silly me. I thought women would help other women, but wow was I wrong. You know it is not the idea that you have defied the law. It is that you have not bowed down before the authority of the law and that is what they will not tolerate.In any other culture than white culture you would be regarded as wisdom personifed, but not in white male culture where women are expected to think that the law is equallly applied to them. It is not. The male is the norm. what women feel and think is nothing.Those women who are in professions are so into proving themselves equal to men that they have forgotten they are women who have always been regarded as second class and incomprehensibe to the the powers that be.I have seen professional women totally reverse themselves in front a male authority. The law is male made for males and their values. I do not know how to help you. But I send you my blessings and thank you.

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