Blindsided Justice

Lady Justice used to be depicted as blind, a symbol that, suppossedly, all received equal representation in the courts, regadless of economic status or any other social consideration. True, some cases are so egregous it has been hard to live up to those standards, while at other times, depending on the victim, her sense of smell tends not to make up for her lack of vision.

The case of Deana Wiliams of Georgetown Kentucky is a case, one of those rare ones that might tend to fit into both categories, and yet neither.

Her case revolves around the murder of one Ashley Lyons of Georgetown, a young teenaged girl, and pregnant, whose body was discovered by her father and brother in a Georgetown Park a year or so ago. Following a brief investigation, the murderer was finally apprehended-it was Ashley's former boyfriend, and father of the unborn child named Landon, who had only reently been sonagrammed, to the excitement and delight of the unwed mother.

Eventually, the conspiracy was unravelled. Not only was the former boyfriend involved, but along with him a friend, who supplied the gun which was the murder weapon, as well as Deana, his girlfriend at the time of the murder, and Deana's father as well. They were accused of knowledge and complicity in the case.

The murder and the sonagram became a subject of further controversy, and even spilled over into the 2004 presidenial campaign, when Kerry and Edwards refused to endorse a law that would have made the murder of a pregnant woman that caused the death of the fetus applicable for a double murder charge. Ashley Lyons' mother Sue spoke out against the Democratic ticket about this issue, which in Kentucky became wrapped around a state proposal known as "Brandon's Law", named after a fetus that died as a result of a car accident caused by a drunken driver.

The case also was mentioned in the magazine National Review, in particular singling out John Edwards due to his sudden failure to hear the voices of the innocent dead, harking back to a spectacular case early in his legal career, one that in fact was instrumental in jumpstarting his legal as well as his political career.

It became, therefore, a political as well as a criminal issue, and the people of Georgetown, as well as Kentucky, understandably demanded justice for Ashley and her unborn child. Retribution in the courts was relatively swift, and for the most part appropriate. But something got lost in the shuffle, and that something was equal justice.

Not having the funds necessary to retain a high powered attorney, Deana Williams, then a mere teenaged girl herself, was appointed an attorney by way of the court, who convinced the girl that things would go much better for her were she to plead guilty. She did as her court appointed attorney said, even though she insisted that she knew nothing about the plot.

The judge in the case sentenced her to seventeen years in prison. She immediately insisted that she had been mislead, in that her lawyer had promised a relatively lenient verdict. She had, she insisted, been mislead.

Had she been, really? I don't know, nor do I mean to infer anything whatsoever about her actual guilt, or innocence. All I know is, if she was truthful about the manner of her representation, or lack thereof, while some may say she deserved it, it's not so much that she got a raw deal-justice herself was stabbed in the back.

Ashley Lyons has recently had a memorial put up in the park where she was murdered, in her honor, which is certainly appropriate. But the memorial that may be most important as just one example of the myth of equal justice that has perhaps always existed in the United States justice system is a girl by the name of Deana Williams.

She may well deserve to be where she is today. But American Jutice herself deserves better.