Missing Bronson

You’re walking home from Jamba Juice one evening, you’re stopped by a young drifter who wants directions-and a smoke, if you have one.  You don’t.  You’re sorry, but you don’t smoke.  Okay, he says.  And as you walk away, he shoots you in the back of the head, your half-eaten, strawberry-banana smoothie with the shot of vitamin Q and your left eye spattering a young man twenty yards across the street.  Shortly thereafter, the police happen to pick up the drifter for jaywalking, and find him with the still-warm gun in his pocket and your still-cold smoothie in his hand.  He is then identified by the young man and arraigned.  But then, as you watch-perched on a fluffy cloud in heaven-the legal system starts to kill you all over again.  The gun isn’t admissible as evidence because it was found without probable cause.  After all, they had only stopped him for jaywalking at that point.  And the young man is discredited as an eyewitness because he usually wears glasses, and that dusky night he wasn’t wearing them, the truth being, he just needs them for reading.  Besides, the defense attorney reveals, he lives in a neighborhood with an abortion clinic, and what does that make him?  Plus, this fellow who shot you-his attorney will tell you he was once taken advantage of by one of the employees at Jamba Juice and you were taunting him with your smoothie.  Now, as you stand there next to Charles Bronson in the great beyond (that’s one of the first souls I hope to meet there) and watch this cruel and ironic Catch-22 unfold – this insane sequence of events that leads up to the dismissal of all charges against the drifter who ended your life on that fine summer evening-as you watch this bizarre, almost synaptic set of occurrences fall into place like a chain of perverse dominoes that has been kicked over by Eric Holder-all you can think to yourself is, “Hey, I know where I’ve seen this before!  Mouse Trap!  And if you think I am stretching it with that little parable, well just look at the newspaper this past week.  Most of the population thinks the only thing that’s happening in the world is the Trayvon Martin case, but last Tuesday, two hundred forty pounds of cocaine was disallowed as evidence in a drug case because the trooper who found it stopped the suspects’ car for failure to display a front license plate.  The case was thrown out because, legally, Pennsylvania only requires a rear plate.  Well you know something?  That’s just exquisite bologna.  And I know.  I eat a lot of bologna for lunch.  I also know that every ACLU hysteric who might be reading this is now jumping up on their desk screaming, “Rules of evidence!  Rules of evidence!”  But I think I speak for the general public when I say, “Take your nit-picking neurotic little rules of evidence and stick them up your understanding noses,” because quite frankly, I haven’t seen judgment this bad since I lost to that petite,  Meg Ryan look-a-like on “Search for America’s Funniest Person.”  Yeah, yeah, not that I dwell on that.  The frightening reality is every day this society seems to make its legal decisions in much the same way the Archies picked their vacation spots-blindfold Jughead, give him a dart, and spin the globe.  The whole system is maddening! And I know some of you are thinking, “doesn’t she usually write about the Old West?”  Hey, I mentioned Charles Bronson.