Armstronglivs wrote:
I think you may be confusing truth with justice. Truth can call for looking at an issue from different perspectives; justice, according to law, requires only that the specific ingredients of a charge are proven beyond reasonable doubt. It is an adversarial process, where the onus of proof falls on the prosecution and the defence presents arguments and evidence that will weaken the prosecutorial case. Neither side seeks to "entertain counter-narratives"; the truth - such as it is according to law - emerges from the contest between prosecution and defense. The Court - typically the jury in a criminal matter - comes to a verdict on whether the prosecution has discharged its onus of proof based on an assessment of the evidence before it.
Good point. When I speak about justice being slow, deliberative, and willing to entertain counternarratives, I'm thinking about 1) how juries work, ideally; and 2) non-jury trials where judges preside.
I've only served on a jury once. It was many years ago in NYC, and the trial concerned somebody who was supposedly a drug dealer and had been apprehended, as I recall, by an undercover sting. I remember that one or two cops testified. And I remember that when it came time to deliberate, most of us in the jury room had the uneasy sense that we weren't being told the whole truth and, in particular, that one of the cops was lying. We worked through the narrative that the prosecution and the defense each gave us, doing our damndest to see beyond each side's spin and figure out what actually happened. It was an exquisitely labor-intensive process--an obsessive process, but one that almost everybody in the room was intensely committed to.
By counter-narratives (and here I'm replying to Ward Cleaver, too), I mean stories, narratives, that diverge from whatever has become the "official" narrative--whether it be the state-sponsored story or a story offered by the victim's family that has been embraced by the general public. Counternarratives ask us to assemble the known facts into a different pattern. Sometimes they do that by weighting already-known facts in new ways; sometimes they unearth previously unknown facts and draw them into the picture. Sometimes counternarratives begin by squinting hard at the bad facts, or by asking questions that nobody has thought to ask.
One of the most potent counternarratives in American history was offered by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a crusading African American journalist, in "A Red Record," when she took on the idea--the official narrative of the segregated South--that most lynchings were the result of a white community being outraged by the rape of a white woman by the black man who was ultimately lynched. She accrued a great deal of evidence about the reasons offered for lynchings and found that relatively few lynchings occurred for that reason, and that the reasons offered were remarkably variegated, almost baroquely so. She was very blunt in the way she delivered her findings; she made clear that one of HER primary concerns was the rape of black women by white men: a form of sexual violation that didn't seem to concern lynch mobs at all. She called out the South's racial double standard. I know that armstronglivs is familiar with this history.
In any case, that's what a counternarrative is. If my experience is any guide, juries sometimes float one or more of them in an effort to see beyond the spin offered by both the prosecution and the defense and, to the greatest extent possible, figure out what actually happened.