A Call for Truth, Reconciliation, Grand Juries and the Bill of Rights
If you do a Google search for the words, Truth and Reconciliation, you find sites from around the world with stories of people seeking justice. Those stories can be ugly, telling of violence stretching back in time, carrying the suffering of people long dead. When you read the words on a site it is just words. You do not see the dead body of a small girl clutching her doll in the doorway of her family's broken home. You do not hear her mother crying. But each of those heinous acts is present in the minds of the people who survived, in the mind of the girl's grieving mother the girl is still present. Through the process of Truth and Reconciliation that child is remembered and her death solemnized, mourned, her human value and dignity affirmed. Those who loved her find healing.
To demand truth affirms our humanity.
As people, each of us is born with the need for truth; that transparency that makes sense from the events of our lives. Each of us has that same need. Without that we live in fear, unable to trust each other or the future. Truth and justice touch us as a laying on of hands, bringing the easing of spirit we need as the water that we drink and the air we breathe. Food, air and water nourish and sustain our bodies; the truth and justice nourish and sustain our souls.
This is justice, the precondition for reconciliation.
Truth and Reconciliation are words that have come to mean exposing predatory acts and hate to the light of day. That process has provided a cleansing that brings forth a new growth of community. Done with compassion and love the process gives birth to renew strength in those who pass through anguish, finding the courage to take up lives that have been shattered.
From the violence of Apartheid in South Africa, to Palestine and Russia, to the American South, to the Disappeared in Argentina, the anguish of individuals has driven a search for peace through process. Every day more Americans confront the unpalatable fact that those in power have deceived us, used us, destroyed those we love. The need for truth and justice are with us in America today.
Our Founders gave us a Constitution. That document was succinctly framed so that the people could govern themselves. Government was to be a part time job for a few. No one was to become wealthy in government.
How did we arrive at now, then children are kidnapped to enrich the state, each child taken bringing $400,000 to various agencies. Could Thomas Jefferson have imagined a Amish farmer, Mark Nolte, who still produces raw milk, exactly like that consumed by all of our ancestors, being jailed? What would George Washington have said to a Congress that forces parents to allow their newborn babies to be mined for DNA?
Those sitting on the bench and in Congress today profit from the gushing stream of stolen money, our money, that fills their pockets. The slow realization that we and our children are nothing more than cattle to those stealing from us is now puddling around our feet.
If any nation on the face of the earth needs truth and reconciliation it is America. And Americans, unlike so many people across the world, have at their disposal the means to get the truth and enact the justice that, empowering them, can lead to reconciliation.
We have a Constitution and it is time we used it.
The Constitution has the 5th and 7th Amendments. The Constitution disallows those entrusted with government from hiding from the consequences of their actions and refers to the body of law then existing in practice, what we know as Common Law. This is a call for transparency, truth, by those who framed the Constitution.
When you hear the 5th Amendment in a movie or on television cited it is generally by someone you know is guilty. But the small section that reads, “ nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” is only a small part of the text and for the purposes of establishing justice not the most significant.
“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Held means arrested.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
The judge may not instruct the jury, they are free to rule on both the law and on facts.
It takes a Grand Jury to legally accuse any person of what is in Common Law called, 'a capital or infamous crime,' or in today's terms, a felony. Such a crime must have three elements present. Those are Act, Intent, Damage and a 'verified criminal complaint.' That means that for a felony to have taken place the harm done must have been intentional and damage have resulted. Additionally, there must be a statement complaining and sworn to by a real person, not the government or its agent.
A Grand Jury is comprised of 11 – 23 people who come together in a county to hear charges and determine whether or not there is enough evidence for a trial.
An indictment determined by the Grand Jury is then served on the accused, who may be taken into custody and the trial scheduled.
Felonies have taken place in unimaginable numbers. The perpetrators are those in power. They have profited from acts of murder, torture, theft, and deceit.
Tonight hundreds of children are frightened, laying awake aching to be held by the mothers who love them. Their mothers, separated from them, are lying awake, too. Those children may never see their mothers again, that is the fate of many such children who are routinely sold into pornography and slavery through the agencies Americans pay to support.
Ask yourself why a man must risk arrest to sell a product he honestly produces and others want to buy? What gives Congress the right to touch our children? The answer is no right at all. In each instance their acts violate the Constitution and are done for profit under color of law. Criminals walk through the halls of Congress, sit in the Oval Office, occupy boardrooms and think tanks. And they know it, they understand their guilt and vulnerability. They also need justice.
For reconciliation to take place a process must take place. First a call for truth, the admission of guilt, judgment, reparations and then, only then, forgiveness. Those that suffered deserve no less than this from us.
The Constitution was written by men who wanted our country to fulfill the vision they glimpsed. They saw a world of infinite possibility, of peace, prosperity and hope. That is our future, if we have the fortitude to do what is right with the tools they left us.