It was St. Thomas Aquinas who observed that “Justice without mercy is cruelty.” To round out the insight, he continued with, “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.”
That seems to be where we are today: the American justice system teetering on the edge of dissolution.
The drugged-out Ukrainian national who crashed into and killed seven members of the Jarheads Motorcycle Club in June 2019, has been found not guilty of all homicide charges, according to the Daily Mail. Six of the victims were former Marine Corps soldiers. Jarheads, of course, is slang for a Marine.
The exonerated Ukrainian now faces deportation. Maybe he’ll be drafted into the Ukrainian military to fight the Russians. There may be a bit of poetic justice there.
Federal crash investigators found that the now 26-year-old Volodymyr Zhukovskyy was impaired by drugs when he allegedly swerved into the oncoming motorcycle convoy. Judge Peter H. Bornstein, however, dismissed eight charges related to whether Zhukovskyy was impaired.
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Prosecutors nevertheless presented the case that Zhukovskyy was high on heroin, fentanyl and cocaine he took earlier on the day of the crash. He had repeatedly swerved back and forth before the collision. Zhukovskyy even told police he caused the wreck, according to the Daily Mail.
The then 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant was behind the wheel of a Dodge pickup truck when it crashed into the motorcyclists in New Hampshire. He already had a long list of traffic-related arrests, including one where he failed a sobriety arrest.
Zhukovskyy faced seven charges of negligent homicide in connection with the crash. But it wasn’t his first run-in with the law. In 2013, he was arrested on a drunk driving charge, leading to a year’s probation and a license suspension.
BREAKING: A jury on Tuesday acquitted Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a commercial truck driver of causing the deaths of seven motorcyclists in a horrific head-on collision in northern New Hampshire that exposed fatal flaws in the processing of license revocations across states. pic.twitter.com/PgFEkK1nqH
— BNN United States (@BNNUS) August 10, 2022
The not-guilty verdict outraged the survivors of the crash and the families of the dead bikers. The father of Albert ‘Woody’ Mazza Jr., 49 — who was first in the convoy of bikers on the day of the tragedy — said he was in disbelief over the jury’s decision, according to the Daily Mail.
After the verdict was announced, New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu said, “The Fallen Seven did not receive justice today, and that is an absolute tragedy,” according to The Hill.
In closing statements, the prosecution and the defense raised questions about who was more ‘all over the place’, according to the Mail. The truck driver was accused of swerving back and forth across the road and the eyewitnesses were accused of contradicting each other.
“Those witnesses were all over the place about what they recalled and what they claimed to have seen,” defense attorney Jay Duguay said.
An expert hired by the defense testified that the crash happened on the centerline of the road and would have occurred even if the truck was in the middle of its lane because Mazza’s motorcycle was heading in that direction.
Duguay also argued that the bikers “shaded” their accounts to protect Mazza and the club.
Prosecutor Scott Chase acknowledged the inconsistencies but asked jurors to remember the circumstances. “People were covering the dead, trying to save the barely living, comforting the dying. This wasn’t story time,” Chase said. “They were up here talking about some of the most unimaginable chaos, trauma, death and carnage that we can even imagine three years later. They were talking about hell broke open.”
Witnesses were consistent, Chase argued, in describing the truck as weaving back and forth before the crash.
“That’s what stopped him. It’s not that he made some responsible decision to start paying attention or do the right thing,” Chase continued. “The only thing that stopped him was an embankment after he tore through a group of motorcycles.”
Chase called the attempt to blame Mazza a “fanciful story” and “frivolous distraction.” He also reminded jurors that Zhukovskyy said, “Obviously, I caused the crash.”
Full stop.
Did the fact that the accused admitted to being the cause of the crash fall on a jury of deaf ears?
It’s impossible to know how the jurors came to a not guilty verdict on all homicide counts. I haven’t, of course, seen all the evidence. But the facts, in this case, seem to speak for themselves.
Zhukovskyy was on drugs when he swerved his truck into members of the Jarheads motorcycle club. Seven people died. Zhukovskyy admitted he caused the wreck. Case closed, right?
What went wrong?
In a culture that has embraced what then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called “the dictatorship of relativism,” truth is not stable. This opens the door to perpetual doubt. Maybe it happened this way, or maybe it happened that way, who knows? Best to show mercy due to all the doubt, right?
Did the jury achieve justice in this case?
Wrong. Though logic has been labeled as racist by radical leftists, it’s not. Logic is the scalpel of reason. If it was taught more widely in our schools, just maybe a jury wouldn’t fall for slick theories forwarded by oily defense attorneys. Remember the Casey Anthony case? How about the OJ Simpson fiasco?
And now this. It’s tragic. There appears to be no justice here.
A lack of logic is bringing about the dissolution of our justice system. As the justice system goes, so goes the country.
Thomas Aquinas was considered a realist. His logic was scalpel sharp.
It’s high time our justice system gets real. This can’t happen without a jury pool whose members are trained in logic.
If we keep going this route, the country will dissolve in the acid stew of relativity.
