Judge in New York

Around here we just don’t seem able to agree on anything, not even on foreign affairs or the fight against terrorism. However, there is one thing that manages to incite hatred and adversity even more than ideological attitudes: the United States of America.

Anti-Americanism runs rampant in our parts. Aside from the natural attraction felt by the left-wing toward any dictatorship of their same ilk, Cuba also garners Spanish right-wing support for no apparent reason except to infuriate Washington.

But now I realize that the scorn must be mutual. There is no other explanation for The New York Times being impelled to defend Judge Garzón against the injustice of having to sit on the witness stand, as if over here justice were merely something used by right-wingers to put left-wingers behind bars.

That is sincerely intolerable. In Spain, there are a few things that are better than in the United States, and one of them happens to be the judicial system.

Over there, it’s always a jury that sends someone to jail. As a result, the only ones whose bones are going to rot in jail are those without enough money to pay for a good lawyer or those who don’t necessarily need to know a lot about law but for whom it is enough to be skilled in tricks for manipulating a 12-member jury.

That’s why it is outrageous that the likes of The New York Times should come out and say that Judge Garzón is a star, (“flamboyant” says the editorial) who “at times overreaches, but prosecuting him for digging into Franco-era crimes is an offense against justice and history. The Spanish Supreme Court never should have accepted this case. Now it must acquit him.”

What offends history is and should be irrelevant to the Supreme Court. That it’s an offense against justice is a flat-out falsehood. And The New York Times states exactly that when it writes that all Judge Garzón wanted to do was pass judgment on a few deceased military officials.

What would a daily New York newspaper think about a Washington D.C. judge who decided to indict Abraham Lincoln for blunders committed during the Civil War? And what opinion would said publication have about a Spanish newspaper that came out to defend him?

The editorial admits to knowing nothing about the other two cases against Garzón. Well, it’s about time they found out that one of them has to do with money that Garzón charged some Spanish businessmen who were at that time or had been previously sentenced in his court. He did so in order to finance university courses specifically in New York, for which he stood to earn a handsome fee.

For that and that alone, he would have a hard time getting off in the United States, even if the jury was made up of New York Times readers, and he was defended by the Big Apple’s most flamboyant lawyer.