When a fate becomes a fate – the system of misjustice and the invisible victims

In the dark corners of a system that likes to stage itself as a guardian of law and order, an abyss sometimes arises, which with justice only shares the name. For some people, the disaster does not begin with a guilt, but with a suspicion that suddenly hangs like a judgment above them. Then it is enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, in an investigationto be drawn in or to get into the gaze of an authority that has long been convinced before anything has been proven at all. A citizen becomes a case, an opponent from a case, and an opponent becomes a person who can hardly defend himself against his own state superiority.

The Grip of Violence Behind the Facade of Order

The idea that arrests are not always made out of clear evidence, but also out of mere arbitrariness, haste, expressive or the need to deliver results is particularly disturbing. Where a crime has happened, the desire to quickly present a guilty person grows. Then it can happen that investigators do not convince with clean work, but withprint. Psychological attrition, endless interrogations, threats, playing with fear and exhaustion, until at some point a person can no longer think clearly. Under such conditions, a confession no longer becomes a free statement, but a forced way out of a situation that hardly anyone can stand. And if that is not enough, intimidation will be intimidated or theThe threat of it is supplemented as if this were a permissible means of finding the truth.

The art of the contradictions created

It is not uncommon for it not to be about whether a statement has something to do with the actual crime. It is often enough to uncover private weaknesses, embarrassing secrets or unpleasant trivialities. A secret relationship, a hidden hobby, a family secret, something that the relatives should not experience suddenly becomes a lever. Such contradictions do not serve thenthe clarification of the actual events, but the destabilization of the accused. If you are ashamed, if you are afraid of being exposed, if you want to hide something, you will come under pressure more easily. Thus the private becomes a tool of interrogation, and human vulnerability becomes a means of attrition.

The courtroom as a stage for the preliminary decision

This principle often continues in the later process. There is not always open neutrality, but with the method of the wooden hammer. The presumption of innocence, which should actually be the foundation of every constitutional procedure, often loses weight in practice as soon as a file has been charged with suspicion over months or years. judges go over roughInconsistencies, logical breaks and sometimes pure nonsense when the direction of the procedure seems to have been fixed for a long time. The impression is created that no longer seeks for truth, but for a formally useful justification for a previously desired result. Anyone who has ever gotten into this mill quickly senses that their personal fate is against an institutionalinertia fights, which hardly allows any correction.

The miraculous witnesses

It gets particularly bitter when witnesses suddenly appear who tell exactly the right story. People who want to be in the right place at the right time, know the details that they shouldn’t really know, and who remember what the case needs at the right time. For many sufferers, this is the moment when the last rest trustbreaks. Because then it no longer seems like a coincidence, but like an orderly interaction between authorities, files and appropriate statements. Whether such witnesses act out of conviction, out of fear, advantage or intertwining is often unclear to outsiders. But the distrust grows when they fit too comfortably into the picture that the accusation has already drawn.

When closeness to the underworld is suspected

In addition, there is the old, never completely disappearing suspicion that some investigators have their own contacts in the shadow of their official task. Where the police and the underworld come too close to each other, dangerous dependencies, favors and informal networks arise. Then it’s no longer just about law, but about benefit, access, exchange and consideration. For the person concerned remainsIn such constellations, only the feeling that power is not neatly separated, but that those who decide on freedom and imprisonment are not always free from ties that are never expressed openly. This feeds the idea of a system that is not only fed by laws, but also from silent connections and tacit loyalties.

The statistics of injustice

The picture becomes even darker when experienced criminal lawyers say that a frighteningly large part of judgments can be based on misjudgments. Whether this number is exactly correct or not is almost secondary to the effect, because the idea that misjudgments could not be an exception but a structural problem shakes deep trust in the judiciary. who himselfAsk whether a coin toss has almost the same status as a careful procedure, recognizes how heavy the burden of uncertainty is. A single error would be bad enough. But when those affected have the feeling of having fallen into a system that is regularly wrong and does not openly admit their mistakes, then distrust becomes despair.

The lost without jurisdiction

For the victims of justice, the second part of the injustice often begins after the verdict. Rehabilitation is heavy, compensation tough, recognition seldom, and for many there is no one who really feels responsible. Families break, livelihoods are destroyed, names are damaged, biographies burned. Anyone who tries to get justice later comes across walls from questions of jurisdiction,formalities and defensive routine. Ironically, the system, which should have dedicated itself to the truth, often treats its errors like embarrassing slips that are disposed of as quietly as possible. Those affected are left behind, often without an apology, without real reparation and without the feeling that anyone had understood what was done to them.

impunity as a protective mechanism

Perhaps the bitterest is that even revealed mistakes often have no consequences. The lawyers and police officers involved often go unpunished, even if it later turns out that proceedings were grossly faulty, unfair or manipulative. This is exactly where the closed logic of the system is shown: It doesn’t really control itself from the outside, and if it’s errorpower, it protects itself first. His own reputation, his own authority, his own inner order are more important to him than the damaged lives of those affected. In this way, the injustice is not only committed, but also defended, if necessary with reference to formal limits, responsibilities or allegedly insufficient evidence of the investigators’ misconduct.

A system that protects itself

That is why the idea seems so depressing that this system will never reform itself. Whoever judges loyalty in his own ranks higher than truth, who prefers to cover up mistakes rather than fixes, who keeps the victims of his own errors small, carries the germ of self-hardening within himself. The system protects from the inside, pushes responsibility further, blurstrace and then calls it stability. For those affected, however, it is just another name for fainting. As long as this structure takes itself more important than the people it is supposed to protect, false justice is not the exception, but the constant danger of an apparatus that prefers to preserve its mistakes than actually heal them.