To the editor:

America has the best legal system money can buy. I have had only one minor experience with our justice system. The experience highlighted the fact that the system exists to employ lawyers and has little to do with justice.

I used to believe the job of a judge was to dispense justice. I thought judges heard the facts in a case and determined if someone had been wronged. I was wrong.

Apparently judges are not obligated to use their knowledge of the law to seek the facts and dispense justice. Their only task is to listen to the parties and determine the best debater. The best debaters are lawyers. Not surprisingly lawyers are members of that fraternity where we get judges.

It does not matter whether you have been wronged; it only matters if you have the money to pay for a lawyer. The facts may clearly show that you have been wronged, but if you cannot put those facts into legal terms, justice will not prevail.

Why do we have to pay for a lawyer to have a chance at justice? Why don’t we have an inherent right to receive justice from a court system? It strikes me as unjust that my tax dollars go to building and maintaining a court system that is so hostile to non-lawyers.

I had a local judge tell me it was not his job to assist me in presenting my case. Why not? The facts are still the facts, and the law was still the law. If the goal of the courts was justice, then why shouldn’t the judge use his knowledge of the law to seek justice? The judge made it clear he did not appreciate a non-lawyer presenting a case in his court.

So I say America has the best legal system money can buy. What it provides is not justice. Lawyers are the only ones allowed full access to the court system. Pro se litigants are tolerated, at best. Right and wrong has been usurped by legal maneuvering.

Try to get justice in our court system without a lawyer. You will soon find that legal maneuvering takes priority over justice. Courts will not even give you their requirement to file a case.

The fact that we have to pay to even get the chance for justice should be a crime.

Chris Dove

Suffolk