Sometimes it’s hard to accept that human beings accept a deception to govern our lives. A not too conscious belief that this is correct because it is what has always been done, without realizing that it could be done in a much better way, or even not be done. The social constructs they are generated above all with respect to the affects. Leaders are followed by attributing practically supernatural qualities to them, such as couples, or one feels part of a country without knowing it, or believes one is close to people who are ideologically related just to feel the security of being part of a group, no matter how much the group neither protects nor generates any synergy. It is what we have left of the small groups of sapiens of those of us who came and who followed the strongest or most skilled, or formed a coalition to hunt and protect themselves, or met looking at a star, a tree or a rock thinking that in this way diseases and famines would end; death. We got used to producing those metaphysical trusts in the face of uncertainties that we did not know how to control.
One of those constructs that has gone most unnoticed is the Judicial process. It all started with the decision making of the group, in assembly, in order to resolve a conflict. If the group had a leader, it was that individual who decided, taking care to convince in some way – persuasive or violent – so as not to lose his prestige. When they found a corpse of violent and intentional death and nobody knew who had killed him, they held an ordeal, which consisted of making the suspect perform some physical test of resistance – ingesting a poison, putting his hand in the coals, walking a distance to a certain speed, etc. – to see if the divinity helped him to succeed. Unable to decide the group due to lack of evidence, solved an imaginary supernatural being and no one argued. The jury it is, in fact, the synthesis of everything explained. Its members, connected to a god through an oath, with greater or lesser knowledge of the facts, dictated their verdict, observing above all the gestures and rhetoric of the witnesses who were questioned. In the end, the decision was based on the pure intuition.
And today?
Do not think that all this has changed so much. Although our judges now have deep legal knowledge and therefore have more tools to prosecute, in the end they value those interrogations too influenced by whether they feel persuaded by the “acting & rdquor; of the declarant. The sublimation of this is the Anglo-Saxon jury, in which almost everything is focused on lawyers and prosecutors cornering deponents by offering jurors a ‘show’ making those questioned seem credible or liars. In the end, as in the gatherings of the ‘realities’, wins the one who seems to express himself better, regardless of the real validity of their arguments, which has nothing to do with gestures.
Related news
Do not be surprised that this deceptive way of proceeding is accepted. For centuries, judges simply added witnesses or documents that each one of the parties contributed, without evaluating either one or the other, winning the process the one that managed to put more evidence -without evaluating- in its saucer of the balance of Justice, imitation of the Egyptian goddess Maat transmitted through Greece to Rome, that is, us. ‘Maat’ was what we now call ‘justice’, and we still don’t know what it really was. It took a long time for a wise man between the 18th and 19th centuries to propose stopping machines, denouncing the absurd and for the jurists to pay attention to him. Scientific evolution in legal matters is always very slow. There is terror of separating from tradition, albeit absurd. We have gained a lot since the judges read and interpret the documents, and since the scientists –the experts– they help the judges with their opinions, unimaginable centuries ago because they didn’t even really exist.
Where we go? What will be the justice of the future? imagine her with very few interrogations and many more scientific contributions. The judges will have reserved only the interpretation of the Law, but they will know what has happened thanks to those scientists, and not by intuition. The day it happens, one of the many dark periods of humanity will come to an end.