From Australia this morning word comes that the dead are not immune from the long arm of the law. An elderly gentleman in suburban Sydney parked in the lot of a shopping mall and then proceeded to die. A few days later the cops came by and ticketed his car. It seems the dead man didn’t have the foresight to move his car to another parking spot after his demise, so he probably broke the law and deserved the ticket.
The concern I have is that the cops didn’t roust the old dude. As a matter of fact, it was another 24 hours after they gave him the ticket before they realized he was dead.
If the guy had been here in the states, he would have been treated differently. The first thing the cops would do is to yell at the guy and mess with him. They’d want to put the ticket in his hand personally. It’s been my experience that when given an opportunity to hassle someone or boss somebody around, the cops here seem to make the most of the opportunity.
“Hey, buddy, move that thing along,” they’d tell him, here.
When he didn’t respond, they’d pull him out of the car and mess with him some more. If they didn’t realize he was dead, they’d assume he was drunk and haul him into the station house. Somewhere along the line, however, someone would make the connection and realize his incarceration was futile.
Thank God we have sophisticated justice here and not the questionable frontier justice they have down under that allows this type of travesty to occur.
No comments:
Post a Comment