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And This is Justice?

I don't usually read items in newspapers dealing with what appear to be beaten-up stories about court cases, celebrities, etc. etc.

BUT this morning a headline in The Sunday Age referring to Orange County [in the US] - which I have visited a number of times - drew my attention. I read the article, and as I continued, did so in disbelief about a so-called US legal system seemingly totally out of control.

This is how the article starts out....

"THERE is something about Orange County that movie and TV scriptwriters have come to love.

Something about sunshine and space and gum trees; multimillion-dollar homes perched on steeply rising hills, big white boats with engines and sails, the eternally beckoning Pacific Ocean and the golden sands that girdle it.

Third cars. Second wives. Rootless, indulged children, caught in the twilight zone between adolescence and adulthood. Laguna Beach, Corona del Mar, and Newport Beach, where this story begins on July 4, 2002, with the invitation of a 16-year-old girl — Jane Doe — and three of her soon-to-be former girlfriends to a pool party in the Spyglass Hill residential estate."

It gets much worse as one reads on....as you can here.

Heaven-help us in Australia if we even go remotely near the sort of practices in court-matters referred to in the article. All too often, regretably, in Australia we ape the bad or poor things - and not the positives - from the USA.

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