The Biggest “Dirty Little Secret” that Leads to Injustice in U.S. Courts Every Single Day in the USA
Ruth Bader Ginsburg continues to fight to maintain her position in the U.S. Supreme Court in spite of all of the treatments and medications she has received and the well known negative side effects that are certain to impair her mental ability to perform her job, from short term memory loss to many other negative effects on cognitive thinking. Her efforts to hang on to her position by her finger nails is being lauded by many people as an admirable. I think that this is a teachable moment. I’ve directly experience the horrific results that occur and the destruction of peoples lives that occur when a Federal Judge’s decisions are negatively effected by health conditions, including old age and adverse effects from medication that impairs their judgement, even to the objection of both defendants and prosecutors. This is a serious problem that is painfully prevalent in the United States Judiciary where some elderly judges fall asleep in court and routinely forget which case they are hearing and passing judgement.
We don’t let Pilots fly aircraft without passing stringent medical examinations and they are routinely grounded because of the effects of various medications and medical procedures that in can negatively impact their ability to think clearly. We ground pilots whose thinking can be impaired by medical conditions and prescription drugs, including certain chemo therapy that effect their thinking. We ground medically unfit pilots because of the risk of direct damage that can be caused to passengers and people on the ground and in other planes if a pilot crashes a plane because they were mentally of physically impaired.
Like airline Pilots, Judges, also have immense responsibility over the lives of people including the authority to imprison people, take money and property form people and corporations and even prevent Presidential directives designed to protect lives and safety. Medically and mentally impaired judges whose thinking is impaired by medical procedures, prescription drugs and old age also pose a substantial negative risk on society and the people and their respective families and employees upon whom they pass judgement and yet there is little or nothing done about this fact.
There are laws that are designed to allow for redress of cases and removal of judges whose mental faculties can be called into question, yet these laws are almost never used by defendants or prosecutors even in cases where Judges are obviously impaired even according to the standards of any causal observer.
When are we going to stop lauding Ginsburg as a hero for putting our Supreme Court at risk and instead of use this as a teachable moment and address the elephant in our court systems in the USA that constitutes one of the Biggest Dirty Little Secret’s that undermines the U.S. Courts every day and leads to unnecessary destruction of peoples lives by too many Judges who are mentally unfit for service. Pundits of all political parties should be concerned about this issue and encourage Ms. Ginsburg to do the right thing and resign rather than fight to do the wrong thing for political reasons.
General
