Criminal Justice Ethics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Criminal Justice Ethics - Essay Example However, from the My Lai outrage at the height of the Vietnam war in the 1970s to the Guantanamo Bay horrors more recently, American law-enforcement authorities have behaved as though they are a law unto themselves and, therefore, not subject to the laws of the land; worse, the government has often tried to get round the judiciary to help the offenders get away with their crimes. Little wonder, therefore, that our true national heroes are the likes of Hugh Thompson who, at the height of the My Lai massacre, had saved the lives of children by holding guns to the heads of his compatriot soldiers committing cold-blooded murder, and later admitted as much. But this individual act of heroism was more than neutralized by the brutality with which an uprising by inmates of Attica Correctional Facility in western New York was put down, the racial bias exhibited at the Pelican Bay prison, and the killing of Dilawar, a taxi driver, in Afghanistan as shown in the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side", and the FBI's complicity in the plot to have Joseph Salvati sentenced to imprisonment for 32 years on a false charge of murder to protect Mafia murderers in Boston who really were its own informants. Saving Grace The saving grace came as recently as on June 15, 2008, when the Supreme Court dismissed as specious the argument of the Bush administration that in wartime it should be deemed to have the right to exercise of what really were extra-judicial powers, circumventing the constitutionally established judiciary.