I’m seeing anger and cynicism over Paul Manafort’s light sentence. (If you missed the news, a judge sentenced Manafort to less than four years and said he lived an “otherwise blameless life.”)
This is to remind you that cynicism destroys democracy.
Click here for a thread about cynicism, the GOP, and Putin.
Putin’s active measures are designed to get people to lose faith in democratic systems.
I spent 15 years as an appellate defense lawyer (I represented only people who couldn’t pay—I was appointed by the appellate courts and paid through California’s general budget.)
My clients were not only indigent—many suffered from mental illness. Some were homeless. Many were women in abusive relationships.
My clients were often treated unfairly.
One of the pillars of democracy is an independent judiciary. This means that judges won’t always do what we like.
Another pillar of democracy is a presumption of innocence. People talk about indictments as if they’ll somehow save the republic. An indictment is just the start of a process. Trials are always chancy. Nobody can predict what a jury will do.
This is why I have argued against people who say, “Unless they all go to jail for long periods of time, justice will not be done and the system will fail.”
For me, the concern about Manafort not serving a lifetime sentence is that he will go back to his old ways. But he can’t, really, not like before. He has been exposed. The world knows who and what he is.
Manofort’s defenders will defend him. There is nothing we can do about that. We still have people defending American slavery, for goodness sake. Those people will always be with us.
We need to wrest the country back from the far right wing and begin repairing the damage—and defend rule of law, even when we don’t like the results.
