Here’s a fine example of how our judicial system is so far out of whack it’s ridiculous. One would think that a jurist who is expected to apply the law when necessary would have an iota of common sense and realize when the law doesn’t really fit in a particular case.
Recently a Texas honor student, who has two jobs and is doing her best to try to keep her family together on her own, was summarily tossed in jail because of truancy. Diane Tran, a 17-year-old 11th grader at Willis High near Houston, was sent to jail for 24 hours as punishment for missing more than 10 school days in a six-month period.
Now, I can understand why truancy is a bad thing if we want all our kids to be in school to maximize their learning, or even just to minimize their time on the streets so they don’t resort to drugs, running around, or just being a bad kid. But it’s hard for me to rationalize that kind of behavior with a girl who has two jobs, is an honors student, and is doing her best to take care of her younger siblings because her father works too late to do so himself.
At what point exactly do we not get that this is an exceptional person in an exceptional situation? There are times for rules and times when rules should be acknowledged and overlooked. A judge, which Lanny Moriarty apparently is by virtue of his title, needs to use more than the draconian type laws that really don’t address all situations, but might make us feel good about sticking it to people. It takes away the onus of using one’s brain to make a decision and merely tacks it on to policy, or law, or some other equally ridiculous process.
Even her teachers admit that “all she does is work and go to school.” But because some people are from that strain of human being called homo-simpleton, they don’t get it when common sense needs to intervene. If it were my kid, and he missed 20 days of school and still managed to work two jobs and be an honors student, I would be looking for a third job for him. It seems to me that Ms. Tran is doing an exemplary job in school and likely at work too.
But in this day and age we are too dumb realize that the intent of the truancy law was to keep problem children on the straighter and narrower, not kids like Tran. So what we do, when they break some incredibly stupid law, like the Zero Tolerance drug laws some schools invoke that make having aspirin in school illegal, is just apply it. Nothing can mitigate the issue. No sensible approach, like figuring out why the law is there in the first place. Nope, we just apply it where the criteria are met and who cares?
I don’t know about you, but I expect my judges to have a brain and to look at a case from all sides. That this even made it to the courts bends my mind. The schools themselves should have intervened. But that’s not the way the world works in 2012. In 2012, we apply the law without understanding its need for application or whether the case merits such application.
We move through life as little automatons, ensuring that Tab A goes into Slot B and can’t figure out what to do if there is a deviation from that. That’s why we have laws like the 10-absences laws and the Zero tolerance laws. It’s not that they are very good laws. Most often they aren’t. But they do take away the need for anyone to use their smarts in handling such cases.
So, in this case, Ms. Tran gets a day in jail to think about how she’s ruining her life, and creating a paperwork nightmare for the school and legal authorities. She is also getting a nice criminal record that will follow her around all her life. Maybe, now that she has a record, she will lose one or the other of her jobs; that ought to improve things for her and her family.
But the judge can sit back knowing that he performed his duty as required. His only comment to KHOU news, was, “If you let one run loose, what are you going to do with the rest of them? Let them go, too?”
No, we expect a judge to look at the situation. Use your brain and see that this is a special circumstance. Ben Franklin once said, “An educated blockhead is a greater blockhead than one which is ignorant.” No question that Moriarty is educated; he’s likely been a lawyer.
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