Letter: Where is the justice?

Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2001 | 9:54 a.m.

Thank you for Susan Snyder's Aug. 12 column, "Woman seeks blind justice from courts." I became familiar with Anya Duke's struggle with the Clark County court system last year.

I thought Snyder's column was excellent in reflecting Anya's endurance and strength, her determination to have her case heard in spite of insurmountable obstacles aligned against her. As a citizen, I would have liked to hear more about these obstacles, who and what they are.

We're now in the new millennium, we're supposedly the strongest country in the world, and are said to enjoy the greatest freedoms and rights of any other people on Earth. We have more lawyers per capita than any other nation. We have the ACLU! Who could ask for more?

So why, then, does a blind woman have to spend her life savings, write over 300 pleadings herself, struggle bitterly like Sisyphus for over seven years in an uphill battle, expending all her energy against a system that punishes her for trying to be heard. And this is called a "justice" system.

Where is the outrage? How has this happened? How could we have let the system of law deteriorate into such a mockery of citizenship? Have lawyers and judges no conscience?

Why should any citizen in this country have to go through what Anya Duke has gone through just to have her case heard? What kind of a sick system is this and who is going to fix it?

BETTY J. BUTLER