Sham Trials in North Korea and Accusations of the Same Around the World

Anybody who's served on jury duty knows that a predetermination of guilt against the accused already permeates even during the jury selection process. Sometimes criminals about ready to be put on trial can't help but put on a guilty mug face just because they know they're guilty or can't act when trying to look innocent. But it's when a potential jury has to sit facing the accused during the selection process that opinions can be formed the minute the judge reads the impending case. Even I admit to once forming an immediate opinion of an accused person when attending a jury selection meeting and after the judge detailed the horrific crime. Despite not being picked on the final jury, the presumption of guilt was already formed by most to all of us potential jurists in the courtroom.

And yet we'll never admit to ever conducting a sham trial in America. If there's an insinuation of it today, we just give blame to the judicial system for having inevitable jury bias as we've already seen in myriad high-profile trials. Once power and influence get in the way, we still consider it part and parcel of our legal system when judges of sometimes dubious quality give sentences either too harsh for the wrong criminals or too weak for the truly guilty. When this happens in the extreme in some place such as North Korea, we can more easily brand it as a sham trial, kangaroo court or show trial.

Whether North Korea studied the nefarious methods of Stalinist Russia or not, it's clear Kim Jong-Il studied how Stalin created what we can call the first sham trial on a grand scale other than the persecution of Jesus Christ Himself. We all know Stalin was about as brutal and defiant in running his country as Kim Jong-Il is and used sham trials during the 1930's in order to gain what he wanted politically. As with the holocaust, though, America almost didn't get word of it happening based on a misinterpretation of the insidious details Stalin was setting up to make an opposing political party look nefarious.

It was a reporter who worked for the New York Times that managed to misinterpret what was happening while working as a Moscow correspondent. The circumstances behind it might be forgivable considering that Stalin put up a front to make the trials against his rival Labor Peasant Party look legitimate. Insinuations that members of this party had committed murder or were conspiring to kill Stalin were so meticulously thought out beforehand, most of the populace outside the mysterious borders of Communist Russia wouldn't have interpreted it as fixed.

Ultimately, America didn't get the facts about it until Khrushchev revealed stunning details about how far his antecedent ruler went in predetermining guilt of innocent people for the sake of forwarding his regime. Although some evidence had already been corrected before WWII even started in Europe during the 1930's thanks to a commission set up by famous educator John Dewey, inventor of what some might call the Dewey Dismal System in libraries. What that commission found stunned the world in not only how far Stalin went, but also in how the accused were so scared for their well-being, they would have made the trials look legit had they been shown to the masses in the television era.
______

With all the high-profile trials that interrupted myriad hours of daytime soap operas here in the States in recent years, it's a wonder we haven't heard massive outcries of these trials being shams right in public view. Of course, we have heard some sideline outcries like that despite nothing coming of it due to a legal system in America being accepted as imperfect and still within the realms of fairness. However, it wasn't long after America digested the Stalin sham trials when the entire universal process of law in the free world could have had a meltdown with debate over how fair it truly was. Once we were faced dealing with war crimes by the Nazi regime in the 1940's, most of the lessons learned in the 1930's from our enemies had been forgotten.

That's a forgivable situation when war takes away everything we knew before other than preserving the value of freedom at all costs. Once we and the rest of the world started the Nuremberg Trials right after WWII ended, having a fair approach to giving members of The Third Reich the benefit of the doubt in a trial was a virtual impossible task. Other than the chance a Nazi sympathizer would be on the panel of judges, there wasn't going to be any racial bias or any other kind of bias. Nevertheless, even some of our own Supreme Court Justices at the time thought the implementation of an International Military Tribunal was a highly unfair system that would make the Nuremberg Trials close to a shambles.

Ironically, it was a British lawyer who ended up revealing this on a wider stance in the 1950's through a little-known book called "Advance to Barbarism" that's still in print today (see source link). Frederick J. Veale more or less wrote the book on understanding the core of sham trials--and his condemnation of the Nuremberg Trials still gets overlooked today for the sake of making the trials seem legally perfect. The accusation that the international tribunal had predetermination of guilt, no matter the level of crime on the part of those Nazis tried is obviously controversial, particularly through American eyes. Because the book was written by a Brit, it didn't necessarily reflect as a whole on our ally Britain either.

What the book subtly did was force future international tribunals to look more carefully at individual crimes rather than create a collective assumption of guilt, no matter what was said by war criminals. In some people's eyes, we've finally fixed international tribunals to be fairer. Others see it differently in the most recent high-profile example (the Saddam Hussein trial) as another automatic sentence to death without exploring the details further.

In the world of North Korea, we know their sham trial in incriminating Laura Ling and Euna Lee won't ever be amended as long as Kim Jong-Il is in power. There isn't a doubt, though, that they're the new equivalent to Stalin's Communist regime and political show trials of the 1930's. Their lack of care whether we see it that way makes it all the more unprecedented in its brazenness.

Should we have a war with them (which I don't see happening) and create a new tribunal for war crimes against Kim Jong-Il and his regime, would there also be an automatic assumption of guilt with immediate execution? If the rest of the world decides to avoid any comparisons to kangaroo courts, then there could be every indication some in Kim Jong-Il's regime would be let go, including the leader himself.

Lest we forget a few Nazis were still found not guilty in Nuremberg--with other chilling arguments saying many more would have been let go had the tribunal avoided presumptive guilt.

Source:

http://www.amazon.com/Advance-Barbarism-Development-Sarajevo-Hiroshima/dp/0939484455