Cross Talk
No place for innocence
English jurist William Blackstone has famously said that it's better to let ten guilty persons go, than have one innocent suffer. Known as the ratio 10:1 or the "Blackstone ratio," it now appears that the investigation of the bomb attack on a political rally on August 21, 2004, stood that maxim on its ears. For over two and a half years, an innocent man rotted in jail, while 22 offenders walked free like birds.
Not a surprise in this magical land, where the police always come after the crime. But let us give some credit to them. At long last, nearly four years after the deadly attack, they have arrived to press charges against the real culprits of that heinous crime. If we were to ponder the benefits of 1/11, we should count that it has saved one innocent man, who was doing time for the sins of others.
There is a surrealistic underpinning of the butterfly effect, albeit in the reverse order. A butterfly flaps its wings, and causes a hurricane half way across the world. Here the game turned on its head. A hurricane occurred in the nation's capital and sent shockwaves to a remote village in Noakhali to strike an innocent butterfly sitting inside a shop. The police have recently cleared the name of Judge Miah, who was picked up in connection with that remote offense. It's now evident that he hadn't flapped his wings.
John F Kennedy told us: "Life isn't fair, but government should be." The statement had the flavour of Kennedy's own experience -- his lifelong back problems made worse by war wounds and other tragedies. But the tragedy is even more tragic when it comes to governments which ruthlessly destroy millions of innocent men, women, and children for no fault of their own.
For example, more than 700,000 people have been killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches during the Inquisition in medieval Europe. Sultan Mahmud killed 50,000 Hindus in just one of his 17 attacks at Somnath, and the highly cultured daughters of the noble Hindu families were auctioned to Afghan invaders. The big hits were taken in the two World Wars; some 37.5 million lives perished in the first and 61 million in the second.
Throughout history, innocent lives have been sacrificed as clever contrivance to push the agenda of unscrupulous men. The misfortune of Joj Miah came in the long tradition of that ontological despair, where the chili gets crushed between the mortar and the pestle. It's scary how the government apparatus was geared up in the case of this young man, ready to waste him so that it could score against its opponents.
And it didn't show the slightest consideration. The man was the sole earning member of his family. His aged mother and sister were starving without his income, not to speak of the immense grief they suffered knowing that the life of their loved one was at grave risk. What about the man himself, the prisoner of fate who must have died many times before his death, not in fear but in his fumbling to reconcile what he had done with what he had deserved?
There are many instances of miscarriage of justice. In this country, a man was sentenced because he had the same name as the perpetrator of a crime. In Sweden, a man of Bangladeshi origin was convicted to life imprisonment in 1994 for the murder of an elderly lady. After almost nine years in prison, he was freed by the higher court of appeal, and later awarded $1.7 million for wrongful conviction.
To err is human, but to make amends is justice. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Jewish background. French intelligence officials fabricated evidence to secure Dreyfus' conviction as a German spy.
The conspirators were eventually exposed, in large part due to a resounding public intervention by Emile Zola, then the most celebrated writer in France. The accusations against Alfred Dreyfus were proven to be entirely baseless. Dreyfus was fully vindicated and reinstated in the French army.
What will happen to Joj Miah now that the charges against him have been proven false? Will he be compensated for the slice of his life lost in prison? How will he be reinstated in normal life which was already abnormally hard? How will he remove the scars of abuse experienced in jail in the last thirty months? Will he find peace again after the turmoil of injustice done to him?
In the movie The Silence of the Lamb, agent Clarence Sterling tells Hannibal Lecter that she woke up one morning to the screaming of spring lambs being slaughtered in the barn on a ranch in Montana. Hannibal responded by asking her a loaded question. He asked if the lambs had stopped screaming and whether she believed that she was never going hear the screaming of the lambs if she could save the victim of a serial killer.
In the coming days, Joj Miah will be released, pay (hope not) his way through the paper work and step out of jailgate to face a world which has surpassed him. He will go back to his village, unite with his family and try to piece together his shattered life. But the lambs won't stop screaming inside him. They will breed and multiply in the dark recess of his mind, holding him in a perpetual slaughter.
An eye for an eye, Joj Miah has the right to torment his tormentors. Yet he can't touch them for the same reason he couldn't stop them either. That explains why the lambs always scream in the face of imminent slaughter. In their wounded sense of betrayal, they try to caution rest of us. The nature, which makes them innocent, has no place for innocence.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments