On November 8, 1793, a woman dressed in cheap, coarse cloth with roughly shorn hair was ushered to a dray in a back alley. The woman was born and lived in Paris not very far from where she was imprisoned. In less than an hour hence, it would be in the same City of Lights that she would die. Her light would be extinguished. The guards helped her into the cart.
This was not the carriage that her station in life had provided her from birth. Rather, it was a creaking tumbril like the one that carried Dicken’s character Sydney Carton to his death. The woman was Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, better known as Madame Roland, the thirty-nine year old wife of Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière. As she entered the Place de la Concorde the crowd roared. The cart stopped at the foot of the guillotine. She was lead stumbling up the steps and before being forced to her knees, she cried out her last words: “Liberté ! Que de crimes sont commis en ton nom.” Translated this means “Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name?” Two days later after hearing of his wife’s execution, Jean-Marie in grief took his life. Another noble light went out. At this rate, the city would soon be dark.
Today we are reading how Abrego Garcia who our government sent to an El Salvadorean dungeon “by mistake” was a wife beater. To some, that closes the case. Let him rot. But then we fail to understand that the law laid down by our Constitution is more important than any one person or circumstance. We owe many of our freedoms to shady characters in our past. Dollree Mapp collected pornography in her home in violation of Ohio’s law. From her case we got the Exclusionary Rule. Ernesto Miranda who lived in Arizona was arrested for raping an eighteen-year-old girl and we owe our understanding of the right to counsel to his arrest. Robert O. McDonnell was a prisoner in Nebraska following a robbery conviction and from his circumstances as an incarcerated criminal we broadened our understanding of due process—the same due process that is being ignored in Garcia’s circumstances. None of these people may have been Sunday School teachers, but their lives of crime have spared countless numbers of innocent people who followed misery from a government that runs amuck. Like we see now. Abrego Garcia may or may not be a lawful resident of Maryland and he may or may not win “Father of the Year,” but he (and we) deserve due process.
Today is a good time to reflect. On Madam Roland. On Abrego Garcia. On our own liberties. On what may follow.
