Get your own Free Home Page
Better
A particularly vexing source of injustice is the frail and corruptable realm of human memory. Suggestible children and adults (many of us) can be led to believe that something happened that, in reality, did not happen (false memories). These false memories can be created by suggestion and imagination. Under the right circumstances false memories can be installed rather easily in some people. For documentation of many of the assertions on this page, see pages 70-75 of September 97 Scientific American.
The unreliability of eyewitness accounts points to the truth that there are false and misleading elements imbedded in even ordinary memories of ordinary events so that what really, really happened is somewhat different from what we remember happened. Social workers, police, district attorneys and other public employees are all too eager to convince us that we have done something illegal or immoral that we should confess to and/or be sent to jail for. Thus are false confessions elicited. They are also eager to badger witnesses. Thus are false testimony, false convictions, false jailings and false executions elicited. Political pressure to find and convict murderers also sometimes elicits false justice. Ambitious DAs trying to become successful politicians sometimes push false prosecutions.
Other sources of injustice are racism, individual biases, lack of financial resources in the hands of the poor and lower middle class and laws written for the benefit of attorneys rather than for the benefit of the people. Probably the greatest source of injustice is the lack of scientific finding, collecting and evaluating of evidence. Science is already leaking into the justice system. We need to widen that leak so a flood of truth will drown injustice.
The whole justice system in the US and other countries is so flawed in so many areas that numerous major reforms are necessary to achieve real justice.
© 1997 rsaxton@cyber-dyne.com
HOME
SITE MAP
Get your own Free Home Page