I don’t talk about the profession of a lawyer with my friends anymore.
I know they are bound to sneer: “That’s just a man who points to a black sheep and tries to persuade people it is white. That’s just a man who would prove a homicidal maniac to be an innocent little boy as long as you feed him with enough money. ”
And every time the conversation ended in an ugly argument. I would blurt out in an indignant tone that “Lawyer just represents another point of view in the court. A judgement made without the accused being given a chance to be defensed can never be fair judgment. Within any occupation there are the despicable players who are just plainly snobs with no sense of righteousness. You cannot make such hasty generalisations. ”
I believe my thinking above is not flawed. But I would usually add one more sentence to myself: besides, isn’t ‘justice’itself a rather shady concept?
Possibly based on a misinterpretation of a Taoism creed “There are always two sides to one thing and the two sides can be interchanged”, I thought, good and evil should somehow be the same as well.
But I was wrong.
They are not.
Kindness is kindness. Wickedness is wickedness. People can be selfless, like Liu Feng in Fang Hua, and it would be a disgrace to claim that hostility is hidden beneath his generous acts. Conversely, people can be utterly depraved, too, with no trace of empathy in them. Like Bob Ewell in To Kill A Mocking Bird, who, after beating and raping his own daughter Mayella, manipulated the prejudices of the jury and pointed his finger to a kind-hearted black man Tom. He had the nerve to accuse an innocent man to death, but none to confront Tom’s attorney Atticus directly, only deploying underhand tactics to attack his young, defenseless children. If he were to be tried in court, wouldn’t that be a physical representation of ‘evil’itself ? Yes, he ought to be defended, but does that alter his guilty state?
Can I say that somehow there is a trace of good in him in this case? Some may argue that perhaps he used to be an empathetic guy, too. An unexpected event? Societal influence? Or other unspoken trauma that had caused him to be who he was today? But the court doesn’t judge a person according to whatever he has gone through in his life. The court judges according to his behaviour in an event that has altered someone else’s life, or his own life, completely.
In carrying out a certain act, you committed a crime out of whatever reason. You were announced guilty. That is justice done.
Although people may have varying degrees of ‘being guilty’, something remains unchanged. In And There Were None, I thought Anthony, who knocked down and milled over two schoolchildren in his car and dismissed it as ‘an accident’, should have been tormented the most and killed last. I thought Vera, who knowingly let a child swim into the sea and be drowned, yet was tortured constantly with the relentless tides of guilt, should have been let off the first. The killer——the ultimate ‘judge’——did not think so. Isn’t a person born with no sense of right or wrong more dangerous than a person who commits a crime knowing it was wrong? It remains a topic at debate.
But does that alter their common state of being guilty? No.
There might not always be absolute good and evil, but there can be. And when someone, empowered by the people’s unanimous trust in the legal institution, assesses the good and evil and metes out justice, it is all the same. There might not always be absolute justice, but there can be, and that ‘someone’ought to try to ensure that ‘there must be’.
