So What Now?

Normally the first post of the month is a letter to Pat Lykos, but I’ll be posting that up on Thursday. Consider todays post a letter to you.

Last Thursday’s post was an answer from SPM, addressing his appeal. It would be very easy to read it and give up; the appeal’s been rejected by almost every court in the country so there’s nothing more we can do, right?

Bullshit.

Appeals get denied. That’s how the system is set up. They want to maintain their ‘Finality of Conviction’. They want us to believe that their word is the last word.                                             

If Coy’s appeal was still active, their response to our demands for justice would be “Just wait until the appeal is done.” Why? Because they are counting on that feeling of helplessness once the ‘final’ word comes down. They are counting on the system’s ability to grind us down, to make even the strongest supporter give up in frustration.

 Please, don’t buy it. Their game has been played; now is when they should fear us most, because we can work for change without getting entangled in their red tape, without the fear of pissing off a judge and fucking up a pending appeal.

I had some doubts about posting up that last answer; I knew it would get people down, and I don’t want to do anything that might discourage you. But truth is power. Knowledge is power. Keeping a hard truth from you would be no different from when the media kept inconvenient facts about this case from the world. If it’s painful to accept, then so be it. Man the fuck up and deal with it.

Can you handle it? Can you handle the knowledge that innocent men are imprisoned? That appeals are denied, families are torn apart and dreams, potential, and lives are extinguished with the stroke of a pen? The innocent are incarcerated, even executed, and the only way to deal with it is to keep fighting no matter how hopeless it seems. Appeals lawyers deal with this shit every day of the year because they are paid; are you willing to do it because you believe in someone?

Are you willing to acknowledge that the system is broken and it can only be fixed one case at a time, one heartbreaking, bone-grinding step at a time? And then, after accepting it, putting one foot down in the first step of a long, hard journey?

You can let the corruption of the system overpower you, or you can take strength from it knowing that no matter what the government tries to force on us, they can’t make us believe they are right. They can present us with fabricated evidence, well-paid ‘experts’, and tell us that "It’s for the children", but they can’t hide the truth forever.