The adjectives of imperfect justice

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