Justice is blind…

…and apparently not very good at finding an interpreter either.

The court (in my former home-town) dismissed charges last week against Mahamu Kanneh, a piece of human excrement who was accused of repeatedly molesting and raping a 7-year old girl because… they deemed that their own incompetence and inability to find someone to translate for this scumbag in the courtroom had infringed on his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

What a bunch of BS! The Washington Post reports that “A court-ordered psychiatrist determined that Kanneh, despite his functional facility with English — he originally spoke with detectives in English, needed to have Vai spoken in order to understand the proceedings against him.”

I looked up ‘Vai’ to see exactly what it is. After the initial difficulty encountered from the thousands of Google hits returned regarding Steve Vai (who really kicks some serious ass on guitar… you should really check him out) I was able to determine that Vai (the pidgin, not the kick-ass guitarist from G3) is “a member of Mande group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 75,000 people in Liberia.”

So the guy who was apparently proficient enough to address police questioning in English is a mono-tongued imbicile when it comes to trial. If this click-tongued bush-talk is merely a part of a group of languages from some tiny corner of Western Africa, and it is all this guy feels comfortable conducting himself in verbally, then what the hell did he come to America for? (since it’s pretty obvious no one speaks his language here– no one who can translate to English anyway.)

Oh but his reason for coming to America is included in the article here (and so much less amusing than the Eddie Murphy film of the same name.) He was seeking asylum! And why not, afterall he is from Liberia: a nation whose political structure is based on that of America and one that is filled with a healthy mix of former American slave descendants along with some of the continent’s more permanent residents. Two groups who do not get along to such a degree that they were able to plunge their nation into twice as many civil wars in half the time it took the real America; one where freedom and democracy were successfully toppled and replaced by the despotic warlords of the rest of Africa in virtually no time at all.

But I suppose this man’s thumbing his nose at America’s legal system should come as little surprise. Liberia is, of course, also the nation whose former President was recently captured (after fleeing from his exiled home in Nigeria) and was to be brought to trial for warcrimes at the Hague. I say ‘was to be’ because that court’s authority over President Charles Taylor’s case expired prior to them bringing him to justice. So at least the U.S. tried to bring Kanneh to trial. We just decided that we were taking up too much of this child rapist’s valuable time.

I understand that justice is blind to individual circumstances and far be it from me to start throwing our constitutional freedoms out the window but can’t we still have an impartial legal system who applies itself with some modicum of common sense still intact? If someone (especially someone who speaks English!) has been denied a ‘speedy trial’ for the mere reason that insists on using a language which seemingly no one else in the nation speaks then that is not the fault of the government. Afterall, we cannot even provide him a jury of his peers since it is rather evident that no one on the Eastern Seabord shares his socio-linguistic background to even the slightest degree.

Moreover, if this guy was given asylum in America… didn’t he fill out some forms for that? What language were they in? Liberia has not been in civil war for 4 years… how long has he been here and how has the English he learned/already knew rendered him insufficient for trial? If you come here not speaking English and several years later you are still not able to do so then you could not have contributed a whole lot in the interim and we are better off without you anyway.

This is why we have a problem with illegal immigration and violent crime in America. We do not need more cops or more laws or more cameras to watch us every minute of our waking lives- what we need is simple, accurate, and logical adjudecation of our existing laws so that filthy child-rapists like this dirtbag don’t slip through the cracks.

If we aren’t sending him to jail we need to, at the very least, put this human filth on the fastest boat back to his homeland and see how he likes molesting little girls who have AK-47s and a head full of revolutionary doctrine… then again, that’s probably why he was seeking asylum from Liberia in the first place… let’s just kill him. A bullet sounds the same in every language and I am sure he knows that sound well… well enough for government work anyway.