Cartoons are sometimes supposed to be biting, but the Plain Dealer’s Jeff Darcy vaulted over the line of common decency with his depiction of a law enforcement official serving Jimmy Dimora with a notice that he won’t be leaving the Big House since the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case and there’s nothing wrong with that image, fair game.
But the second panel of the cartoon shows the same officer (who for some reason appears to be black or at least brown … which begs the question: why does a man of color get to do the dirty work?) serving Dimora’s wife with a notice that she’ll soon be leaving her home, evicted.
Now I’ve taken some pretty hard swings, thrown some stiff uppercuts and done some lampooning in my career as a writer (indeed, some would say that on occasion I’ve been brutal) but the targets of my pen have virtually always been issues, and not people. Jimmy Dimora broke the law, his wife didn’t; why is she being ridiculed about losing her domicile? Would Darcy like to escort her to a homeless shelter?
Her husband has been effectively given what amounts to a legal death sentence — for what, some home improvements, a junket to Las Vegas, and a couple of blow jobs? — but Darcy obviously wants Mrs. Dimora to suffer right along with him. Why, because she took her wedding vows seriously and has continued to stand by her man “for better or worse”? Is she to be punished because she didn’t cut and run, as many spouses do at the first sign of trouble?
Had the case against Dimora been brought in another federal jurisdiction, say New York or San Francisco, he would be back home with his family in a couple of years … the punishment thus fitting the crime. But because he defended himself (he really didn’t have any option; rumor has it the “deal” he was offered was essentially for the same amount of time he received by going to trial), he’s now serving more time than many rapists and murderers.
Compared to Wall Street bankers who’ve been allowed to loot with impunity — after all, they’re too big to fail — the entire Cuyahoga County “scandal” was very small potatoes, and, as often the case, the new sheriff brought in to clean up the mess has deep flaws of his own. So much for the vainglorious pomp and cant of reform; in the end human frailties can be found in all of us.
But I will give Darcy credit for this: his scurrilous cartoon certainly is reflective of the American Zeitgeist as it applies to criminal justice in this country … he captured our flawed and broken system accurately. We, the citizenry, have allowed our courts to devolve into the most unnecessarily punitive and unfair system of justice the world has ever seen, and legal scholars from both the right and the left are increasingly calling for a course correction, lest we continue to lose more and more of the liberties our country was founded on.
And we, the average citizen, are cowered into silence for fear of the heavy hand of government falling on us if we dare to speak out about governmental injustice. This was not always the case in America.
Our country doesn’t exist in a vacuum; there are other nations of the world that look at us in utter bewilderment, but we’re so jingoistic we pay them no heed or mind, as our emissaries travel the globe, point fingers of opprobrium and calling out other countries and their leaders as barbarians. But until we get our own legal and moral house in order we really should just shut the fuck up.
Thanks Jeff, for holding up a mirror — if we find this cartoon funny, it simply shows us what kind of nation we have become, and who we really are as a people.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Looking in the Mirror”
P.Ballasch
Give me a break. Crime pays because it’s high risk. Jimmy & some of his gang rolled the dice & are paying the price. The damage done to the public will never be tallied up for us to get a true picture. Let’s see if the media and politicians will continue to clean up a corrupt system. Quit depending on the FBI to keep the rat population to a minimum. Can someone remind us who supported these politicals? What the hell was their motive.