Several years ago, someone placed a bumper sticker on a light pole in the parking lot of my family's favorite pizzeria. The sticker reads: "Boycott Aruba – Justice for Natalee". After years of weathering the elements the letters on the sticker are somewhat faded, but the message they convey is still crystal clear in our minds and we chant the words aloud every time we park in front of them. It's a mantra of sorts, or maybe it's just our way of saying that we'll never forget what happened to Natalee or the need to seek justice on her behalf.
Two events occurred this week that were related to the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, that Alabama teenager who went missing in 2005 on the last night of a high school graduation trip to Aruba. The first was that a judge in Alabama signed an order legally declaring Natalee dead. The second was that the man widely believed to be Natalee's killer, Joran van der Sloot, was sentenced by a Peruvian court to served 28 years in prison for the May, 2010 killing of another young lady, Stephany Flores, in Peru.
I've heard and read a fair amount of commentary following the van der Sloot sentencing on whether justice has finally been served for Natalee's death. So far, the opinions have been mixed. Americans tend to think that it hasn't and espouse the belief that only with van der Sloot languishing in an American jail can true justice be achieved. Many foreign commentators see things differently. Although they lament the fact that van der Sloot was never brought to trial for Natalee's death, they see the Peruvian sentence imposed, harsher than normal for murder in that country, as having taken into account the fact that van der Sloot escaped punishment for Natalee's death. Those divergent views on punishment serve as a reminder that justice, like beauty, is something frequently judged in the eye of the beholder.
Since the introduction of Babylonian King Hammurabi's Code in 1772 BC, in which the 'eye for an eye' punishment maxim was first recorded [not in the Old Testament as erroneously believed by many Americans], people have struggled to define justice and how it might truly be served. Nineteenth century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli once stated, "Justice is truth in action." Anatole France, a French poet with a more jaded view wrote, "Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned." Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted during his time in a Russian gulag, "Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity". Columbian novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez issued a practical take on justice when he penned, "Justice…limps along, but it gets there all the same."
The other day I watched a tape of van der Sloot's sentencing hearing held in Peru. A very nervous-looking young man stood before a three-justice panel of female judges, protected to his rear by bullet-proof glass, but fully exposed in front to the wrath of the court. He frequently fidgeted and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Maybe those beads were produced by fear, or maybe from the TV lights. Who knows? What is known is that the court imposed an unusually harsh sentence for murder in Peru – 28 years in jail, and as van der Sloot was lead away, he could be heard shouting obscenities at the women who sentenced him.
I don't know whether justice was served for Natalee or not. I do know that receiving a 28 year sentence for killing of Stephany Flores - that was due punishment. Having his sentence imposed by an all-female panel of judges; now that was justice!
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