Justice

I've been thinking about justice ever since I served on that jury last week. We convicted that girl on SEVEN counts. And we did it pretty quickly. There were a couple of jurors who had doubts about the truthfulness of one of the witnesses, a police informer, but the rest of us were pretty sure that this girl was guilty, guilty, guilty. It didn't feel good though. Afterwards I had a distinctly bad taste in my mouth. Probably some of the other jurors did, too. I was sad. Even after I came home and looked up this girl's record on the web and saw that she had been in trouble for several years. I still felt sad.

My husband said, "you helped to get her off the street. She was stoned on meth when she was driving on the very same roads you drive on. She could have stolen your identity to get money for her drugs. She might have broken into your house to steal money for her drugs. Now she'll be in jail and not stealing from you or being a danger to you." I still felt sad.

If I saw this girl on the street I would never have known she had a criminal background or even that she did drugs. I've seen clean people who looked less healthy than she did. What happened to her? Why doesn't she work at Macy's, or go to Olympic College? Why doesn't she have ambitions and dreams? Why doesn't she go on vacation and tan herself on the beach and shop for pretty clothes? Why doesn't she paint her toenails and make her hair nice? Why doesn't she watch reality TV, American Idol, CSI, go to movies with her boyfriend? Why doesn't she read books or play games on the computer? Why doesn't she send her mother a Mother's Day card? Why did she cry the entire time her mother was in the courtroom? Why is all her time spent getting the money to buy the next drugs so she can sell some of them to get the money to get the next drugs?

I wish I knew the answers. I wish I knew why some perfectly normal seeming kids end up under the thumb of drugs while others move into what we percieve as a "normal" life. I felt so lucky and so sad. Yes, I'd "put her away", but it didn't feel good at all.