Justice: The Case Of Kitty Genovese

It is often said that bad things happen to good people. Throughout history and personal life experience, we witness epic tragedies affect innocent victims. In that realm, justice is an illusion rarely served throughout life. People who deserve consequences for their wrongdoings live carelessly and unaffected; generous and decent people experience unnecessary consequences. In short, life is unfair and justice doesn’t actually exist in our world. Thus bears the questions, is justice really served; what is the definition of justice; what are the ethics behind justice. Different philosophers and authors have argued that ethics and morals have a direct correlation, leading to specific decisions being made based off the combination of both in hopes …show more content…
In the case of Kitty Genovese, her murder was able to brutally assault and ultimately murder Genovese in cold blood. While all of this was happening in her own apartment, it was reported that over a dozen residents heard the noises and screams from the women but believed someone else was bound to call the police, and they didn’t have to be the one’s who do it. This puts Genovese’s situation at question, and explains the bystander effect, which inevitably killed her. The bystander, by definition, is, “In ambiguous situations, each bystander may look to others for guidance before acting, misinterpret their apparent lack of concern, and decide the situation is not serious”(Latantë, 1998) People are supposedly bound by a code of morals and ethics, but seem to have issues finding justice or issuing help in these situations. Thomson’s proposed Trolley Problem exhibits the theory of justice and its role in moral decisions, such as those never made in Kitty’s case. Thomson writes about a Trolley Problem, offering a theoretical circumstance in which a trolley is on its way to hit five standing bystanders on the track. A bystander watching this in action has the option to pull a lever that directs the trolley to one single person; rather than killing five people, the trolley would only kill one, by the hands of the bystander, as the other four people remained …show more content…
Within our society there is an obvious racial disparity in our prison systems. People of color, primarily adolescent people of color are more than ten times as likely to be imprisoned than the majority. Statistics from the Department of Justice prove that these minority groups are being over-policed and treated differently within the justice system. In fact, one journal argues that one in every three black men between the ages of 16 and 25 are more likely to become imprisoned than they are to get married, but are 9 times as likely to be imprisoned for non-violent crimes (Bonczar). If that isn’t enough, our justice system uses an extremely biased courtroom, which allows twelve different strangers to make their own moral decisions, deciding the fate of the person at hand. It is often repeated that if one is looking for justice, our justice system is not the place to look for it. Our system is built to protect the health and welfare of the citizens. Still, there are different crimes committed each day, terribly, without ever being brought to justice. In LeGuin’s piece about the Omela’s, LeGuin describes the situation of a utopian society in which all equality, fairness, happiness, and stability stem from the abuse of the minority (children deemed useless to society, such as cripples, misbehaved individuals, and others). LeGuin challenges the idea of whether or not the well being of the