Justice frees Jackson, but doesn't justify him

Welcome to the haywire world of Michael Jackson - where "sharing your bed" with helpless children is an act of kindness, where you dangle your own children over a balcony to show how much you love them, and where Bubbles the chimp is the best friend a guy can have.

It's a world where anything can happen, and probably does - a world which sickens most of us, and scares us, too.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that American justice is now just a sideshow for the man whom the tabloids call wacko Jacko.

It is not the job of American juries to convict - or courts to punish - people who are weird, unlikable, eccentric or even sick. That went out of fashion with the Salem witch trials.

What we have now is a system which allows anyone - even the rich and famous - to be charged with a crime, but it is equally a system that allows anyone - even the rats and the freaks - to be found not guilty if the evidence is unconvincing to a jury of 12 men and women.

So today, Michael Jackson is a free man.

Not because he is a good man - or an innocent man - or even a rich man. He is free because the prosecutors who tried to take away his liberty were unable to prove that it was the right thing to do. They were unable to demonstrate, in other words, that Michael Jackson had done the heinous things he was accused of.

But unfortunately, many armchair analysts are going to use the verdict as an excuse to beat up on the justice system - or even this particular jury - and to make the claim that "celebrity justice" is somehow different than justice for the rest of us.

Don't believe it. Just ask yourself and your friends if you would have given Michael Jackson a "free pass" to molest children just because he was a celebrity. Without a doubt, you would not. Nor would the members of this jury. They would have been happy to send him to jail if the charges had been proven, and they would have been terribly irresponsible if they had sent him to jail just because they had a "sneaking suspicion" that he had molested some boy sometime, somewhere.

Fortunately, our justice system does not work that way.

And now that we have seen our justice system perform so admirably, perhaps the next thing to hope for is that the reporters, pundits, talk-show hosts and miscellaneous media gurus who cover the justice system will also get down to business.

Is there any way to convince the cable channels, in particular, that we don't need 24-hour coverage of "celebrity trials"? From what we hear, there were as many as 2,200 members of the media covering Jackson's trial at the peak of the pandemonium.

It would be nice to see the networks and news magazines devote just a fraction of that coverage to such urgent matters as genocide in the Sudan, the continuing war in Iraq (you remember that, don't you?), and the growing Medicare debt crisis (yes, we said crisis).

But in the meantime, take a deep breath, be glad you don't live anywhere near Neverland, and thank God that you do live in the United States of America - where justice is meted out by your peers and not your enemies.