The answer to this question cannot be found in studies or statistics. The essence of a culture is in its performance, not its proclamations.

Only behavior reveals truth. And where can this truth be found? We have one certain way to measure the importance of any subject: simply observe how it is addressed—or ignored—by those running for office.

In any major electoral race, the candidates are forced to take a position on every issue for which there is a constituency. This is a fact of American politics: one cannot run for national office without an unambiguous stance on abortion, gun control, the environment, capital punishment, and many other issues of deep concern to clearly identifiable groups. And such groups cannot be placated with nebulous generalities. They demand the details: what legislation will be passed? What programs will be funded?

Soon, the presidential candidates will meet to debate. But we know from past experience that child protection will not be on the agenda. All we ever ask of the candidates is a declaration that they “love children,” and “support the American family.” The candidates tacitly agree to a mutual non-aggression pact, never challenging their opponent’s pro forma platitudes. So the question, “What are you going to do about child abuse?” never gets asked, much less answered.

Politicians get away with this because the public demands nothing more. Any catchy-sounding phrase will suffice. Does anyone really believe that “no child is left behind” in America? Has anyone ever actually visited that mythical “village” that is raising our children?

Supposedly, debates are aimed at that special constituency which eludes the pollsters: the undecided. But any honest person will readily admit that, when it comes to hot-button issues that divide America, the undecided are a micro-minority … if they exist at all. The voters already have made up their minds on issues like abortion or gun control—all that remains is for the individual candidates to declare themselves, pro or con.

Despite all the pious rhetoric, there is no identifiable constituency whose vote is directly tied to child protection. Children may be important to us all, but child protection has never been a make-or-break issue when we vote for our leaders.

“You know what that means, being a Registered Sex Offender? I maxed out, but I still got to keep an address, let them know when I move, stuff like that.”

“Cramps your style, does it?”

“No, that’s not it. They don’t actually do anything. It’s just a stupid Web site. And you know who uses it the most?”

“Uses what the most?”

“This ‘registry’ thing. The people who use it most are those … ‘pedophiles,’ they call them. See, what they do, when they’re trying to worm their way in someplace, like with a mother who’s living with her little daughter, they tell her to check them out. On this Web site, I mean. When that comes up empty, it’s like the government is saying, ‘This guy, he’s all right,’ see?”

“How come you know this?” Woods asked me. He was way too casual—I could see he really wanted to know.

“When I first went in, on the last bit, I mean, they put me in this group. For sex offenders. It was supposed to be voluntary, but all of them know, if they don’t go, the parole board’s gonna nail them.”

“And you didn’t want to call attention to yourself, so you played along?”

“On the nose. I didn’t last long—they threw me out—but that was one of the things they talked about in ‘group.’ They talked about this registry a lot. Some of them, they were all … outraged, like. It was a violation of their rights, they were branded for life, blah-blah. But a couple of them said the truth: That was one scam they could never use again, which was a shame because it always worked.”

This boy’s mother was herself only twelve years old when she gave birth to him. And what became of her? She is in jail facing manslaughter charges for leaving the 2 year-old in Cristian’s “care,” and for concealing previous injuries to the toddler. In contrast, the human who sexually assaulted her was hit with the staggering sentence of … probation!

That child rapist not only avoided any prison time, but is described as an “absentee father” in news reports that also referred to him as “Dad.”

What was Florida’s first clue that a little more intensive supervision of Cristian’s “home” might be required? That the “dad” didn’t pay child support? That the “dad” didn’t defend his son? That instead of reporting the abusive human his former child-victim moved in with—after all, she was an adult herself by then, and entitled to make such choices—the “dad” just moved on? Didn’t Florida even consider the obvious danger of using a 12 year-old boy as a “babysitter” for a toddler? Didn’t they think that toddler might be “at risk?”

So, a female child is sexually assaulted. That child gives birth at twelve(!) The magic of “family reunification” puts her baby back together with the child who gave birth to him. And the result is … another dead baby.

At least this time, Cristian will have a lawyer. The state of Florida doesn’t appoint attorneys for children in abuse/neglect proceedings, but only non-lawyer volunteers. Of course, Florida doesn’t have to worry about providing one for Cristian’s little brother—he doesn’t need one, not anymore. And the next time some Florida senatorial candidate runs on a platform to make America a “Christian country,” the Devil might just die laughing.

I didn’t react. Why would I want to see? This was coming too quick, secrets piled on secrets. When that happens, there’s always a trade lurking close. She got to her feet, walked out of the room. She was back in a minute, holding a slick–paper magazine with a black and white photo of a woman bending over on the cover—there was another person in the photo, but all you could see was the paddle in their hand. I stood up, joined her under the light. She thumbed through rapidly, looking for the ad. It was marked with a red ink star, hand–drawn. I held it close to read the small type:

Proverbs 13:24(!) Next time your kid
has a good one coming, make a
full–size cassette of the chastisement
and send it to me. I pay $50 for
fifteen minutes, more for longer.
Good sound quality a must. I travel
frequently, with my own equipment.
Write to make arrangements.

Only a P.O. box was listed, no name. A new kind of kiddie porn, legal too—I’d never heard of it before. Freaks carefully recording their own children getting whipped. To entertain other maggots. For money. I felt ice–picks of fire in my chest.

“Why did you show me this?” I asked her, my voice flat and level.

“Cherry told me. A long time ago. She said that’s what you do.”

“*That*?”

“No. She said you … hunt people like that.”

Another dead child. Another desperate search for solace and solutions.

As public outrage builds, politicians remain calm—they know (from long experience) that the public is easily appeased by naming still another hollow law after still another dead child. Remember the “Little Lisa” law? If you don’t, I rest my case. And if you do, tell me what impact it has had on child abuse. The law, named after Lisa Steinberg, attacked bogus adoptions, rather than the child abuse that led to her death.

Absent the cash-oiled machinery of a special-interest group, no politician ever feels that much pressure to actually perform. There is one exception to this rule: When the media adopt a cause, the cries for change echo immediately throughout the back rooms where politics is actually practiced. Soon, there will be “action.” Let no citizen sleep easy at this prospect … Politicians are counting on the public’s anger to subside—until the next child’s death.

Despite what the media have led us to believe, the hallowed phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not self-explanatory. Jurors, charged with the responsibility of making life-and-death decisions, are told to apply this legalese-larded “standard.” But not only is this “standard” purely adjectival, movies and television have morphed it into a Rashomon-style point-of-view. The interpretation of “reasonable doubt” is as unstable (and as potentially explosive) as nitroglycerin in a cocktail shaker.

History has taught that if we allow interpretations to control reality, truth is the first victim of the chaos to follow. A simple illustration will suffice: we all agree that “evil” is a bad thing. Therefore, whoever has the power to define which acts (or individuals) are “evil” also has the power to control our conduct. When we anoint such an interpreter, we walk a smoother path. But we walk it blindfolded.

If we refuse to grant such god-like power to others, we have to do the work ourselves. To ensure a uniform standard for “reasonable doubt,” we must subject the term itself to dispassionate dissection.

Unless we separately analyze “reasonable” and “doubt” in the context of a criminal trial, the term will degenerate to cliché status: endlessly repeated, but devoid of any actual meaning. That is, “reasonable doubt” will mean whatever an individual chooses it to mean, as open to interpretation as the Bible or the Koran. The horrific consequences of allowing those with an agenda to exercise the power of “interpretation” are beyond dispute. See, e.g., Nuremberg.

There is always some doubt. “Beyond the shadow of a doubt” ignores the penumbra of that shadow. And “beyond any doubt” is as much a logical impossibility as the term “foolproof.”

Confessions may be the product of a disordered mind, or of outright torture. Evidence can be planted. Lab analysis can be fatally flawed, which is why capital punishment is inherently wrong. Sociopaths can make the polygraph needles dance to their tune. Eyewitnesses can make mistakes. Jailhouse snitches can custom-tailor their testimony to serve their own interests. Jurors can be bribed. And all of this has happened.

The Perry Mason TV series resonated so deeply within us because it expressed our collective wish that “the truth always comes out.” But anyone who wants to hold on to that dream should stick to Hollywood garbage and avoid reading trial transcripts.

Any jury analyst knows that facts are cut to fit the cloth of beliefs. Who could believe that the Scopes trial “proved” evolution to everyone’s satisfaction? Or that Brown v. Board of Education motivated the Klan to burn its robes instead of crosses? Who among us is sufficiently naive enough to believe that all potential jurors answer the voir dire questions honestly?

And there is still another form of belief-based “doubt”—the kind I have had to constantly overcome throughout my career. How could such a wealthy, successful pillar of the community actually be a child molester? How could a nice, polite, soft-spoken individual have raped his own little daughter … especially when “experts” testified that “he didn’t fit the profile”? How could a PTA-officer, charity-volunteer mother shake her infant son into permanent brain damage?

Even when such “doubts” are eviscerated with overwhelming proof, still another belief system then emerges: if the perpetrator really did such horrible, sadistic, brutal things to innocent little children, doesn’t that prove he’s “sick”? Doesn’t that mean he needs “treatment,” not prison?

All these—and too many more to list in anything short of a textbook—are life-threatening clots in the arteries of justice.

Such clots can be dissolved … and must be, if we want to save the patient.

A trial is a war. As in all wars, there are both combatants and collaborators. If fighting is what you do, and you train hard enough to be good at it, you’ll learn some advanced techniques.

Focus is one of those techniques. In the type of cases I handle, what you focus on is the stakes. While death-penalty cases grab the headlines, how many know the closed-to-the-public arena of the Family Court? How many know that court actually holds trials in which, if the wrong result is reached, the perpetrator gets to take the victim home as a prize?

Doubt? I don’t have room for that in my work. Despite what media morons may tell you, a trial isn’t a “search for truth,” it’s a high-stakes game … one with winners and losers. But when you’re representing a child, only the truth will serve your client’s interests. That’s why I always conduct my own independent investigations. If a parent is falsely accused of child abuse, and I, representing the child, “win” by obtaining a verdict proving that parent’s guilt, the child loses. To do my work effectively and ethically, I have to find the truth … even if neither the State nor the accused agrees with what I find.

Exposing the heart of truth requires chips-fall-where-they-may dissection. We question potential jurors (in some systems, the lawyers do this; in others, the judge does) on everything, from what magazines they read to whether they could bring themselves to pronounce a sentence of death, even if personally opposed to capital punishment. But we have yet to develop, much less test, a scientifically-validated, peer-reviewed questionnaire that would reveal each juror’s personal definition of “reasonable.”

Even if we could rule out individual prejudices, we will never have the uniformity that true justice demands, because individual definitions of “reasonable” are as varied as … well, as individuals.

Some wear their beliefs openly. If you want to avoid jury duty in a gay-bashing case, show up wearing a “God Hates Fags!” T-shirt. But cultural pressures usually result in jurors who present themselves as being totally without bias and having formed no prior opinion of the case.

Who among us truly believes that if asked, “Do you think it’s reasonable for a husband to slap his wife if she nags him constantly and makes his life miserable,” every prospective juror would answer truthfully?

What about questions such as, “Do you believe some of these young girls today are ‘13 going on 30?’” Or, “Don’t you think a woman who dresses like a slut, has too much to drink, and brings a stranger home with her is really asking for it?”

Not a chance. Instead, we’d get Oprah-certified answers across the board. Everybody knows the right thing to say, even if they don’t believe (or mean) a word of it.

Years ago, I tried a case in which an infant had been so viciously beaten that I asked the ER pediatrician to list all the bones in the baby’s body which had not been broken. The defense claimed that the child had been gently placed on a coffee table, and rolled off onto a (very expensively handcrafted) hardwood floor.

Their well-paid expert calmly told the court that such a scenario was “possible.” On my cross-examination, the expert repeated the statement. I held a pencil in my hand, raised my hand above my head, and asked, “Doctor, if I open my hand, is it ‘possible’ that this pencil could fall up?”

I got the expected sarcasm. “That would be highly unlikely, counselor.”

“But it is ‘possible,’ under your definition of ‘possible,’ isn’t it, Doctor?”

When he reluctantly agreed that it was, I opened my hand, and the pencil fell to the floor. The trial went on for days, but the jury decided the verdict right at that moment.

What if I hadn’t asked that question? If you think the same result would have been reached, you probably think Law and Order is reality TV.

What is “reasonable” when, in the bitterly contested, no-limit poker games we call custody trials, one party produces a long train of mental health experts—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers—each testifying that “significant personality disorders” make the other party unfit to act as the custodial parent? What is “reasonable” when the experts for the other side virtually replicate that exact same testimony … only now, amazingly enough, the diagnoses fit the first party?

Every judge knows the likelihood that expert testimony will favor the party who hired the “expert” exceeds all mathematical probability. So my position in such cases is to ask the court to disregard all the expert testimony.

That almost never works. Instead, I get the standard judicial bilge: “The evidence is deemed admissible; the weight of said evidence will be determined by the finder of fact.”

I reasonably expect that some experts will, charitably speaking, not be blessed with a lot of expertise. I reasonably expect some experts to be outright whores. That doesn’t mean all (or even most) experts fit such a description. I know experts whose findings are not only remarkably insightful, but also would not vary no matter who paid them … or how much.

So my next application is for the appointment of an independent expert. An expert to be selected by me, in my capacity as the child’s lawyer, the cost to be paid for by the parties, apportioned based on their ability to do so.

That application is routinely opposed by both parties … and routinely granted.

So while I have a “reasonable doubt” about much expert testimony, it is a doubt that can be resolved in many observable ways. It isn’t the doubt; it’s the reasonableness of that doubt which makes all the difference. To mean anything at all, reasonableness must vary on a case-by-case basis, and must never be driven by any faith-based belief system.

Many could wax philosophical about the deeper meanings of “reasonable doubt.” I suspect law professors might differ from trial lawyers on the subject. I’m sure there are even people who actually believe judges are apolitical, that District Attorneys treat all defendants equally, without regard to the name-recognition factor of either defendant or alleged victim. Perhaps some even believe that defense attorneys only take cases when they are personally convinced of their client’s innocence.

I can be sure because I know that there are people who believe the earth is flat, that evolution never happened, and that most children abused in this country are victimized by strangers who jump out of vans wearing ski masks. I can be sure because I know people who believe “no child ever lies about being sexually abused.” I can be sure because I know people who believe that incest is “consensual.” And every one of them can easily find groups of like-minded individuals, solicit funds, and hire lobbyists.

And I am certain beyond any doubt that all those I just described would base their decision as jurors not on the proof presented at trial, but on their own personal belief systems. In such cases, the trial is over as soon as the jury is seated.

As a lawyer who represents children in cases where maltreatment by a parent is the issue, “reasonable doubt” is all about what is “reasonable” to whoever gets to make the final decision in a given case, be it a jury or a judge.

But we all have a stake in the outcome of trials. All trials. So the most reasonable of all doubts is the doubt that judges and juries will not allow their personal belief systems to cloud and even corrupt their decisions.

So long as “reasonable doubt” varies with the interpretation of each individual judge or juror, I have a reasonable doubt that our criminal justice system can deliver on its promise to find the truth.

Every such broken promise is another crack in the foundation of justice. About that, I have no doubt.

There’s already four million slaughtered in the Congo, and blue helmets on the ground are about as effective as Tom Cruise working a suicide hotline. Joseph Kony was a witch doctor-turned-warlord who ran the Lord’s Resistance Army, a gang of rape-for-fun, kill-for-kicks zombies. Basic training was simple in that army. They kidnapped children, made them watch a few torture-mutilations, pointed at the bodies, and gave the children a choice: Join us, or join them. Kony started in Uganda, but was now based in the south of Sudan, where he was getting paid to make sure the region stayed destabilized.

The World Court issued a warrant for his arrest. They didn’t say who was going to serve it on him.

It sure wasn’t going to be the UN—they probably figured their “condemnation” of the use of child soldiers would fix everything. Just like their “oil for food” program had in Iraq. That monument to impotence still thinks that you can hand out food to warlords, and count on them to distribute it … after the boss’s son gets his cut, of course. Or that a good, stern admonition will deter missile launches. What’s their next move: calling for a boycott of genocide?

Besides, Kony can always make a deal. Call off his army of psychotic children, hand over some weapons, go in front of some “Truth and Reconciliation” committee, admit every crime known to humanity, be told he did bad things … and be forgiven. Just like going on Oprah. Only, instead of some door prize, you get to keep the fortune you’ve stashed away in a nice “safe” country.

You don’t run across straight blackmail much anymore. Why risk doing time when you can make a bigger score from selling secrets to the media? Treason is fashionable today. You have an affair with someone famous, there’s a cash market for letters. For tapes, whatever. It helps if you’re willing to pose nude later—show the people what the famous man wanted so bad. The important thing is to do it for the right reasons—because you got this desperate need for the public to know the truth—the media likes its whores better when they dress up.