The adjectives of imperfect justice

Thanks to the insurance company PT Asuransi Jiwa Manulife Indonesia, the word "justice" has acquired a resonance unknown so far. To my surprise, I discovered that just like there are many shades in a hue, justice includes various types.

You are traveling in a jam-packed bus. Your purse is snatched and you immediately raise the alarm. You may have thought that your co-passengers were a docile lot, but no, injustice to a fellow traveler galvanizes them into collective action. The thief gets caught, beaten black and blue and the purse recovered. This is "summary" justice, hot, instant, delivered on the spot.

A murder had taken place. Everyone knows that accused Number 1 committed the murder. But, no eyewitness would dare testify; either they are threatened or bought off. On top of that, highly-paid defense lawyers exploit legal loopholes, like "establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" and "the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt", to the hilt, and they steer justice away from a death sentence.

The murdered man's family wonders whether the process of justice was too meticulous and fastidious, or just a farce. Whichever, the family members decide that justice should work the way they think, and they way-lay the Number 1 and kill him. This is "raw" justice, deployed when a court fails to deliver real justice.

Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, mentions in his books how delivering "raw" justice is an article of faith with the mafia, and how because of this, it is not viewed with revulsion but has come to be accepted in certain sections of society.

It is common knowledge that much to our dismay, powerful people evade justice. But, "divine" justice, sometimes also referred to as "poetic" justice, gets them sooner or later. Take Hitler. For all the absolute power he wielded and the terrible destruction he caused, he had, finally, nothing left but to kill himself in defeat and disgrace, and beg the few people left with him in his "bunker" to burn his body using petrol, violating his own orders reserving the use of petrol only for army use.

Again, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines is another classic example of "poetic" justice. For all his regality and divine pretensions with which he ruled Philippines, as he liked. He ultimately, was unable to handle the pent-up wrath of his own people. He fled the country in disgrace, and later returned, not as a VVIP, but as air-cargo and traveled in a box in the hold of the aircraft. Is there any doubt that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but surely?

Rarely, "justice" is put on a roller-coaster ride, such as the recent Manulife case. Justice, which used to get bouquets, got brickbats, from all sides. So much so, many felt that it would dry up investment inflows to Indonesia and dubbed it, "meat-axe" justice.

Most lawsuits has a kind of symmetry. Debtors versus creditors in bankruptcy cases or husbands versus wives in divorce cases to name a few examples.

However, in the Manulife case, an intriguing feature was that it was not clear who the defendant was and who the plaintiff was because both parties to the suit happened to be the owners of Manulife, erstwhile and current. Failure to disentangle this has merited the epithet "murky" justice.

Again, a dividend is an appropriation of profits. There is no question of sharing the sale of proceeds for assets realized through bankruptcy proceedings to take dividends home. Assets primarily belong to debtors, not equity holders. This mix up between dividend and debt has earned the sobriquet "muddled" justice.

There is an eerie side, too. The judgment opens the way for owners of a company to declare dividends for themselves and liquidate those dividends by selling the assets of the company. Maybe we can call this a sort of "junk" justice.

Last, we may remember the case of the two cats with one piece of cake that sought the help of a monkey to divide the cake equally between them. The monkey, taking advantage of being the adjudicator, went on taking a series of bites, under the pretext of dividing the cake equally, and through this see-saw process, gobbled up the whole cake, making the cats victims of "bum" justice.

Indeed, civilization dawned when mankind realized that under this type of "ape-man" justice, life was "nasty, brutish and short".

Since then, civilization, a hallmark of society, and justice, a hallmark of human majesty, have marched together and changed man from a beast to a citizen. This journey is still a work in progress here, and Indonesia has stated its goal is "all for one, one for all". When this summit of civilization is reached, we will have "perfect" justice, its true adjective, and along with that its natural byproduct, good governance.

-- G.S. Edwin