Does America have ‘two-tier’ justice?

Under Trumpism the old certainties no longer hold and are starting to ebb away. Do illegal aliens really have an inviolable and unlimited right of appeal against deportation? Probably not. Is America honor-bound to defend small nations against aggressors? It isn’t. People don’t really believe in the ruling pieties anymore yet they do not know what should replace them; in this sense, Trump, who has only ever presented himself as a figure of expediency, really is the man of the hour. 

One old certainty remains, however. Even when all the illegals are deported and all the troops come home, Americans will still take it more or less for granted that they will live under a system of justice and administration that’s explicitly racialized. 

In Britain, the country Donald Trump is visiting next week, the slogan of the day is “two-tier” justice. The meme spread after it was noticed that last summer’s nationalist rioters (and social media users) were treated more harshly than many violent criminals who happened to be illegal immigrants or ethnic minorities. 

In America the justice system is proudly two-tier. Judges and DAs will avow that they use sentencing and prosecutorial discretion in service of racial “equity” or to right historical wrongs. Under “disparate impact” (Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) anything but a state of perfect equality between the races can be grounds for litigation – like when the New Haven Fire Department was forced by the Supreme Court to throw out a promotional exam that not enough black employees had passed. 

There is a more than plausible link between this and the murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, allegedly at the hands of Decarlos Brown Jr, a black recidivist criminal. Brown is one of the kinds of figures that this system allows to run amok. 

In Britain the Attorney General Lord Hermer takes pains to deny that the justice system is two-tier and deems the term “offensive.” In America two-tierness is celebrated and defended. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the civil rights legislation of 1964-5 represents the moral prop of the entire social order; without it much of what we now call “wokeness” ceases to exist.

And it’s one that’s been left largely untouched – even in this profane age. Donald Trump, posting on Truth Social about Zarutska’s murder, dwelt mostly on the party-political dimension. “VOTE FOR MICHAEL WHATELY FOR UNITED STATES SENATE,” declared the President, referring to the North Carolina midterm election next year. “HE WON’T LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN!” He also spoke of the folly of cashless bail. Experience has shown that so long as this jurisprudence is in place any tough-on-crime policies are vulnerable to moral counterattack – the era of “super-predators” and broken windows theory giving way to the era of Obama and George Floyd. 

Almost every reigning piety has now come in for some deconstruction, except this one. The system that let someone like Decarlos Brown Jr. loose touches every aspect of American life. A whole political culture has grown up around it. The amoral familialism of people like Karmelo Anthony’s relatives, who raised $515,000 in donations after he was accused of killing fellow teenager Austin Metcalf. The shakedown NGOs. The nebulous and, needless to say, unelected, “community leaders.” The unquestioned moral authority of the black churches when it comes to criminal justice – this in a supposedly secular era. The hokey, sub-Dickensian narratives of how various criminals were “just about” to turn their life around before they happened to murder someone. Americans have, rightly, grown disillusioned with nearly every aspect of their society. They should now take another look at this last great redoubt of deference.