Victim on Trial
November 16th 2008 10:33
Photo from Herald Sun website.
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What a sorry state our judicial system has become.
Bernard William Rolfe and his wife Janetta, who were both born in the 1920s, lived through WWII (that is World-War-2 for all the kids out there thinking I am talking about some kind of video game console), the Vietnam War & the Great Depression.
They saw the Berlin Wall go up and then come down decades later, witnessed man landing on the moon, the invention of television and wireless satellite technology…
They have no doubt lived through good times and tough times and have known a world completely different from the one we know today…
At many times life must have been amazingly hard, as values, social expectations and laws changed and evolved around them. But through it all, for 55 years, they always had each other.
This man and his wife must have shared a bond unimaginable to most of us.
They would have been one another’s rock, their sanity through bad times.
They’d have a life-time of memories, of joys shared and triumphs...
Then as they reach their twilight years, their bodies no longer capable or strong as they used to be, this man has to watch on helpless as the woman he loves loses control of her mind.
He knows her better than anyone ever could, and as she struggles to live with Dementia, could there ever be a time when she needed him more? He is her only light. The one person she can communicate with, the one person who understands her.
Imagine yourself in her position for just one moment.
Imagine her fear and utter panic when faced with the reality that she would soon be separated from her husband, and placed in care facility. Left there among strangers, her husband only able to visit.
What a miserable way to see out a life. Days and days of lonely waiting – for death.
This is not a couple who wanted to commit suicide, this is a couple who wanted to stay together – their love for one another was stronger than their physical capabilities, and meant more to either of them than life itself.
This is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, these two souls should never have been forced into such a predicament.
They were failed - failed shamefully by the system. A system which can afford to house our “representatives” in immaculate luxury, and waste millions of dollars each year on ‘God only knows what’.
It is a system that evidently can organise itself well enough to try and convict Bernard Rolfe – and afford to keep in him jail if it so decides.
And yet, it is a system that was not able (or just didn’t care enough) to offer this poor old couple a solution where they could live out their final days together!
Bernard Rolfe is already suffering the worst punishment (for want of a better word) he could ever imagine. He lives without his beloved wife … which must already be a sentence worse than death as far as he is concerned.
What good could any decent magistrate see in locking this eldery man in a prision? He is not a criminal, he is not a threat to anyone.
It is the system that should be on trial – and the administrators of that system should hang their heads in shame.
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Comment by Movie Mall
Movie Catcher
The Invisible Sky
They wanted peace, and after more than 80 years on this Earth, 55 of them together, they deserved peace, to go out in their own way, together - not this.
This is terrible.
Comment by Rachel H
Freedom in a Fishbowl