Miscarriage of justice
by
Marcel Van Silfhout |
The Kafkaesque case of Lucia de Berk
Someone must have slandered Lucia de B, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, she was arrested. Indeed, this might not be the right thing to do, to turn such an exceptional famous and beautiful first sentence from Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) into an adapted Dutch version. And you might be right too that this is a sort of cheap easy cliché to do. So, sorry!
But still, how else can I describe the biggest miscarriages of justice in the legal history of The Netherlands? How on earth can I explain better than to quote Kafka to find at least some words for the unimaginable case of the completely innocent Dutch nurse Lucia de B who was sentenced to life?
OK, there’s one huge difference with Kafka’s trial. Lucia didn’t get the death penalty because such a thing is, rightfully – this case is the perfect proof of that – non-existent in Europe. But at the same time it’s also possible to say that the trial of Lucia outclasses Kafka’s imagination. Believe it or not, three different Dutch courts were able to sentence the innocent Lucia: the court, the higher court and the highest court. All the judges were, as finally acknowledged by a new court and the Justice Department last week, wrongfully convinced of Lucia’s guilt. Now, the question for you is, try to imagine you are Lucia: innocent, but yet convicted. A sort of horrific surrealism.
It was a controversial case right from the beginning. The trial had taken over eight years. Six years she had to spend in jail, years in which the prison staff considered her to be a serial killer due to the fact that all the judges judged her to have murdered seven patients – among them children — in the hospital she worked.
Question again: Consider yourself to be in the jail facing similar situations as she had faced. You, like in the case of Lucia, would have been treated as an animal. You would, for example, have been asked to fully undress yourself – which is totally unnecessary — while checking with a body scanner. And, when you would have a brain attack – indeed, it really happened to Lucia – the prison staff wouldn’t act. They would just think “oh, well, probably she is faking once more. Let her crawl.”
The way she was arrested couldn’t have been imagined by Franz Kafka. Lucia was sitting next to her dying grandfather and accompanying grandmother and daughter when policemen from the arrest squad took her by her hands to handcuff and take her away instantly. She’s never seen her grandparents again. They both died with the idea that their little Lucia was a serial killer.
Of course, it’s an odd thing to say, but might we perhaps think of the thrilling ash cloud as a message from above? This massive dark cloud, which is apparently over Europe these days, has been sent to us by a volcano from bankrupt Iceland. We know, it was, and still it is, wrong how bankers robbed us with their big bonuses. But think about our courtrooms putting an innocent nurse in jail for life? Who’s next? It might be I, or… YOU!
And there’s another dimension too. Lucia’s case isn’t just an exceptional case of justice going wrong. In recent years, the wrongful trials of three mayors had already shaken the country. In those cases innocent people were convicted while the real murderers were freed and they went on killing sprees. The Dutch quality paper NRC-Handelsblad wrote in its editorial: “The case of Lucia de Berk will go down in history as a blatant miscarriage of justice if there ever was one. It’s worse than some other famous trials where people were wrongfully convicted, because there was no evidence that crimes had even been committed.” Lucia’s victims just appeared to be hospital patients who died due to their bad condition. There wasn’t any proof Lucia murdered anyone of them. There was just fantasy, a sort of collective psychosis amongst judges and all the other so-called ‘scientific specialists’.
This time the Justice Department and judges at least dare to say sorry. But what about Lucia? She has already been told she will get financial compensation, but no one can give her back her lost years with her daughter, and remedy the mental trauma she had suffered.
When the final verdict was given, “Lucia de Berk is completely innocent” people in the courtroom applauded. Later, Lucia was interviewed by current news affairs programmes and newspapers. She’s proud that she will not be mentioned as ‘Lucia de B’’ anymore. From now on she’s a normal citizen again, to be named Lucia de Berk.
The case keeps reminding us of the fact that we live in a country in which such mistake can be made. As if this wasn’t enough, last week the famous Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries revealed that Holland’s worst serial child murderer, Koos H. had a sexual relationship with a high judge in The Hague. The same judge, who passed away in 2004, had protected Koos H in his first years as child murderer. With today’s forensic knowledge, one can say that the two other killings of young girls could have been prevented if Koos H had been convicted as soon as the case came up for hearing. The judge had paid Koos H for his driving lessons and had put him out of jail in a trial in which he didn’t convict his lover. Once more The Netherlands was shocked. Is this all possible in our judicial system? Perhaps we deserve a sort of volcanic ash cloud to cover it all up.
(Marcel van Silfhout is an investigative reporter working for public Dutch Television) |
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