Dear Editor,
A medical specialist has assured me that pain is a sure symptom of an injury to someone’s body. Psychologists, in like manner, determine that behavioural patterns are dictated by some emotional trauma suffered earlier by the subject under evaluation. Human rights victims have invariably been members of a minority and/or unconnected with the mainstream elite, belonging, as it were, to the shadows of society populated mainly by the vulnerable and dependent class. Democracy is no guarantee of fair play and equality of treatment and, in the real world of politics, justice becomes a chimera of moral values. The USA has from its Declaration of Independence in 1776 trumpeted its democratic values and its sense of justice. Yet, by way of example, it was President Abraham Lincoln, before his assassination, who had invited Andrew Johnson to replace his then Vice-President in his 1864 campaign, who in 1866 upon his accession to the presidency wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President it shall be a government for white men.”
It is in this context that observers ought to locate the recent deaths, if not killings, of the three African Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City by white police officers in circumstances where the justice system has been used to validate conduct which, on the surface, ought to have been subjected to a public prosecution, and not confined to the private recesses of a grand jury room. These unacceptable norms of inhuman conduct that characterize the relationship between white police officers and
