Here for a change is a story with at least a spec of justice in it – a highly convoluted tale of a Chassidic boy who told his father that he had been molested by a cantor (i.e. a leader in Jewish prayer service); of the boy’s father’s attempt to go to authorities; of his arrest by them for bribing the witness to testify against the cantor; and of the dismissal of the charges against him because those accusing him of bribery were themselves highly unreliable as witnesses.
This seems to be a story of judging done right (though the alleged molester apparently managed to escape charges); and yet, it points to a bizarre procedural dichotomy: while the judge did the right thing by dismissing unreliable evidence as inadmissible, judges themselves routinely engage in fabricating such unreliable (and often, patiently false) evidence out of thin air on behalf of the parties (turning themselves into parties to the case before them), which they use as clinching argument in their decision-making.
Which creates an unsertainty on whether corrupt practices are admissible in the federal court; and it looks like it depends on whose currupt practices we are talking about: if parties’, than answer is likely to be “probably not.” If judge’s own, than the answer is an emphatic, ethusiastic, extatic “yes!”
The moral of the story? Despite some instances of honest judging, judicial process lacks any coherence, any rhyme or reason, depending entirely on judge’s whim, it is bipolar, it is schizophrenic, it is irrational, it is arbitrary, it is unfair, it is undemocratic, it has nothing to do with following the “law,” it is not based on any “court rules,” for all the heavy volumes that contain them both.
In other words, it is not a “process” at all, but a record of utterly random, unpredictable, inscrutable, illogical moves on the part of a person we call “the judge.”