'Justice delayed is justice denied’

There is a legal maxim dating back to at least the 17th century which states “justice delayed is justice denied.” The original intent of this phrase was that justice delayed to the defendant is justice denied, in that the defendant faces hardships the longer it takes to adjudicate a charge and clear his or her name. The concept can also cast the American public in the role of affected party – in the sense that the public, too, has the right to a speedy trial. This has been on full display during the agonizing slowness with which the many indictments of Donald Trump have unfolded. Regardless of which side of the partisan divide you are on, the American voters have a right to have the many felony charges against Trump adjudicated before they cast their ballots in November. If you are one of the many people who believe, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, that Donald Trump has done “absolutely nothing wrong,” then you, too, should want to see his many cases be settled and his name cleared before the election in November.

Donald Trump has spent a considerable amount of time in court over the years – either suing people or being sued. His main legal strategy has always been “deny and delay,” and it has worked well for him over the years. And it is working for him right now. Instead of seeing the many indictments and trials the former president now faces as a long-overdue comeuppance for an opportunistic life lived on the borders of moral and legal behavior, people view the events through their partisan lenses with one side calling the charges partisan election interference and the other side seeing them as a slow-moving justice system finally catching up with an indulgent lifetime of bad behavior.

It is said that Americans have short memories. This has often been referred to as the American Memory Hole. The phrase “memory hole” comes from Orwell’s “1984,” and refers to incinerator chutes that government bureaucrats used to destroy anything that “the party” wanted censored or hidden. In this time of hyper-partisanship, there is very little collective memory that we seem able to agree upon. And this is even true about events like the Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol that played out on television in real time for all to see. On that day, people were quite rightly shocked and outraged. Members of both parties remember hunkering down in fear inside the Capitol. However, their outrage was often short-lived. Time eventually dulls the sharp edges of memory, political calculations are made. Issues of right and wrong take a backseat to self-interest and partisanship. Then, when enough time passes, people no longer remember — or at least they don’t remember with the same clarity. They have made conscious decisions about what they believe happened, and that becomes their actual memory. And if you remind them, you find that they have moved on. The events no longer have the moral clarity that they initially had. People wonder why we’re still talking about it. “Oh, is that still a thing? Are we still talking about that?”

Take Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s scathing rebuke of Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, for example. He was, quite rightly, shocked at Trump’s behavior – both before the attack on the Capitol, as well as his refusal to defuse the violence during the event. “There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day," McConnell said shortly after the 57-43 Senate vote that ended in the former president's acquittal. "The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president," he said, "and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. McConnell could easily have used his influence to gather 10 more votes from the Republican side to join the 50 Democrats and seven Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment, but he did not.

“We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said in a floor speech at the time. “We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.“ It is now clear that the American justice system has moved too slowly to provide the criminal or civil backstop to which Senator McConnell referred. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the American people will be denied the opportunity to have the former president’s responsibility for the many of the things he has been indicted for adjudicated in advance of the upcoming elections. Until these allegations are all adjudicated in a court of law, we will all have to decide for ourselves whether Trump’s many assurances that he did “absolutely nothing wrong” are adequate to give him another four years as the leader of the free world.

Chuck Oliva was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has worked in market research for most of his adult life, using verbatim text analysis to report on social and consumer trends for some of the largest companies in the world. He started his own company, Flatiron Data, in 2006 where he employed over 25 people. He and his wife retired to Fernandina Beach in 2016, where they spend most of their time reading on the beach. He is also a banjo and trumpet owner – though he can play neither.

Chuck Oliva can be contacted at chuckoliva7@gmail.com.