I mean, look at George Washington. He admitted he cut down that nasty cherry tree, and he still is hailed as the father of our country, became President of the United States and got to sleep anywhere he wanted. Of course, his teeth all fell out, and he croaked on New Year's Eve 1799, but every American remembers that lovely parable about George, his dad, and the cherry tree.

But, of course, by the time we are old enough to pull on our own pants, we quickly learn the virtues of spinning some cock-a-mamie version of the "distorted truth," "word-parsing," or some other substitute for the way it really happened. On the other hand, our American justice system, we would like to believe, has remained a virtual bastion of the practice of "telling the the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." If you have ever had a brush with the law, be it a traffic ticket, jay-walking or you are an out-and-out criminal, you learned that lying not only really is bad like our parents told us but it will land you in the slammer every time, usually with a nasty fine to boot. Despite the wide-spread practice everywhere else of "doctoring" the truth for fun, profit and ordinary day-to-day survival, in the courtroom, at least, people have tended to continue to tell the truth. Remember those scales of justice. Of course, modern-day lawyers soon learned a "work-around;" a whole new game of courtroom "truth or dare" has evolved which has blown the shorts off old style courtroom jurisprudence. I have dubbed this legal strategy jury "doping" after the popular Olympic practice of the same name.

In the sports method the "doper" manipulates his own body chemistry, as it were, by "fooling" the blood, allowing him to win, regardless of his true ability, which is usually inferior. In jury doping, the same principle is applied. You win by fooling the jury (or the judge), by manipulating courtroom chemistry.

As we have seen all too often in recent years, the modern-day perp and his legal team have become very skilled at this jury doping strategy. From high-tech psychological profiles of prospective jurors designed to weed out the "bad actors" to media manipulation where the accused is virtually exonerated in the press before the American people; from outrageous statistical arguments sure to confound even Professor Einstein to high-profile celebrity character witnesses who mesmerize and electrify the courtroom so everybody forgets why they are really there; or, from emotional socio-political charges of gender or culture bias which seek to vitiate the crime by playing the "environmental prejudice" card to elaborately staged "performances" where the client has been coached by a team of professional "spin doctors" to play the Academy Award role of his life, we actually have come to believe from TV shows like Ally McBeal or The Practice that, even if we did it, some clever lawyer will get us off. Of course, we have to be "worthy" of this societal bleesing. And that means we are either very rich, very famous, or so dizzed-out or pitiful that even Atilla the Hun would take pity on us.

It's getting so ridiculous out there that you wonder why we bother spending such enormous resources on our legal justice system in the first place. I guess we have to pay the salaries of all those meter maids, traffic cops and ADAs, so someone has to get nailed. Of course, it's only the poor schnooks like you and me who can't land Calista Flockhart for a lawyer who will always get the bum wrap that sticks. The celebrities, pot heads and the filthy rich just seem to worm their way out of it every time.

Here's a perfect example: New Year's Day, a few years ago - my family and I arrived at National (aka Reagan) Airport late on a miserably cold, foggy night, to find someone had broken into our car in the garage and disenabled the battery. My daughter, on the way from the garage to the Terminal to call the AAA, was groped by a shuttle bus driver. Two hours later, after my car was finally fixed and I drove to the terminal to report the assault to Security, I recieved a $125 ticket for inadvertently pulling into the wrong parking space. It wouldn't surprise you to learn that some rich guy in a fancy chauffered limo pulled into the same space next and the police didn't even bat an eyelash. The security police refused to take my report ("It's the City of Alexandria, not us"). And when I showed up in Alexandria to fight the ticket and report the incident, I was assessed a $10 administrative fee for "court costs" and then they refused to take the report since "the buses belong to the Airport Authority, not the City of Alexandria." Of course, Calista was not availaable at the time. Now, that's justice, brother.