Justice: A Lawyerly Response

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 5914

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, heidi <heidi.h.tandy.c92 at a...> 
replied to Peg Kerr's post:

> in the HP universe, as Peg points out, justice is almost as rare as
> it is in the real world.

Peg made the point that wizarding society was so angry at the crime 
on the Longbottoms that it didn't bother to find out whether Jr was 
guilty before convicting him. That is said to be a major source of 
gross injustice in the real world, too.

> and in making that decision, and personally overturning the
> court's sentence, he set in motion a chain of events which

led to his own death, as well as all the other bad things that 
happened. We have the trusted adult voice of Sirius and the voices of 
Ron and Hermione being shocked at a man who would send his own son to 
Azkaban, we have the idea that mercy and family feeling are both 
virtues, but mercy and family feeling that led Crouch to yield to 
his wife's desire to retrieve Jr was the cause of so much evil.

> in the Wizarding World - there's no right to a trial (snip)
> there seem to be no attorneys, and the system seems more predicated
> on hearing what the accused has to say, than on what evidence can 
> - and we only saw portions of 2 of those (snip)
 
I am convinced that those trials included a phase of presenting 
evidence before bringing the defendent in to speak for himself. The 
defendent not being allowed to hear the evidence against him was a 
shock to me as an American, and also pretty damn unfair for him to 
have to reply to (argue away) the evidence without having heard what 
it is. The defendent neither hearing the evidence nor having an 
attorney is a real Star Chamber or Stalinist show-trial set up, so I 
hope that normal defendents in normal trials have attorneys.