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| |  angry | ] | I was watching Law and Order again tonight during dinner and the case maddened me because it was one of those ones that was vague and not exactly taken care of by the end of the show.
The original case was taken care of in the first fifteen minutes of the show. Two parents come back from a weekend in England to find a bunch of hungover teens sleeping in their living room and their daughter shot on her bed. After a bit of research, it is determined that around 11:30 the night before, she went into her bedroom hysterical. Her boyfriend and a friend of his were looking at a gun they had found (one of the other guys at the party had brought it). The girl tells them that she received a letter and found out she had AIDS -- and in the confusion, she is shot. It was an accident, one that the friend of the boyfriend confirms.
The police officers find the letter, from a girl named Lana, asking the dead girl to talk to her. They find Lana and ask her about the letter. She confirms the story. Says they had both shared a boyfriend, as had another girl named Grace, one after the other. The boy, 'Twist' had told her about two weeks beforehand that he had AIDS, and Lana said he laughed. That he wanted to take as many girls with him as possible. Lana thought it was a sick joke until she got tested and found out he was serious. The girl, Grace, had already died.
They wanted to prosecute him on attempted murder.
It took a while to find him, and as the officers opened the door to the room he was in, they heard him say, "No, girl, it's better bareback." He is then taken into custody.
Twist's lawyer is a friend of his parents and does everything she can to get the case thrown out, dismissed, information suppressed, etc. It does get thrown out near the end of the show but McCoy gets some information that proved intent.
The path of the investigation was obstructed by politics, gay activists, etc. People want the case dropped because it'll make someone or other look bad. Gay activists are afraid it will make the gay communitiy look bad because when people hear AIDs they think gays. Nevermind the fact that the boy was infecting women, not men.
In the end, the dismissal was overturned and a deal was made. They bumped the charge from attempted murder to attempted manslaughter and got Twist 3 to 9 in jail. However, to make things all nice and neat, Twist was admitted to the hospital the night before the dismissal was overturned with pneumonia and had, at most, two weeks to live.
People with AIDS are not criminals for being sick. But if they knowingly have sex without the use of condoms, that is no better than spreading a plague by contaminating a water supply.
When I was younger, my grandfather wanted me to become a lawyer because I was a very logical and fair child. Looking at life now as a twenty year old, I wonder how people can bring themselves to defend certain cases, especially ones similiar to the case tonight on Law and Order. How can your moral barometer not go off repeatedly in this instance? A young man, running around, infecting others because he's angry at his own misfortune. Yes, he still has the right to whatever sexual endeavors he chooses, but his partners have a right to know, not to mention a right to life. And if you know you have AIDS (which he had for a year and a half before being brought up on charges) and still have unprotected sex, then you might as well be gunning people down in the streets. Instead he's ruining people's lives slowly. One girl nearly had a breakdown because she was never going to be able to have children, and most likely never going to get married. In her mind, her life was over. Because no matter what sexual preference you lean towards, when you have AIDS you often are treated romantically as a pariah because no one wants to risk contracting the disease themselves.
I guess I'm somewhat angry about how the show played out. I'm also angry that we live in a world with diseases like AIDS. We live in a world where people will infect others knowingly out of spite. And I want one day to bring my own children into this world. We wonder sometimes why parents are so overprotective of some children. How can we wonder when there are spiteful people out there willing to treat the lives of others with such disdain?
And that is why so often I find myself unable to live with the fact that I cannot trust people. Because so many people disregard the basic principles of right and wrong just to feel better about some poor choice(s) they have made in their lifetime.
Times like this make me wonder the point in being around, if this is the world we live in. Such hopelessness. |
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