I really think Americans are bred to deal with tough times when we have to.  Its just the inequities of those tough times that drive most of us through the roof.

Things like taxpayer funded Wall Street bonuses and preferential treatment in the pending health care legislation for individual states to win their Senator’s votes.  And what happened to Colorado resident Christina FourHorn as described in this CNN story:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/15/colorado.mistaken.identity.arrest/

Amidst this brutal economic backdrop it must be infuriating beyond words to experience the abuse and mistreatment by law enforcement authorities as Ms. FourHorn did.  Arrested without cause and jailed for five days all because local police confused her with someone else.

Alright, mistakes happen in every job and police are bound at some point to get the wrong person.  A similar name, car, address, description whatever, we’re all human I get it.  But that’s not the inequity here.  The inequity comes after the mistake is made. After the wrong person is actually jailed for days, had their legal record and social reputation maligned irreversibly and there appears to be no amends made by enforcement officials whatsoever.  Not even an apology.  Its like they say “My bad, but your problem.”

In the case reported above regarding Christina FourHorn, mistaken for armed robbery suspect Chiristian Fourhorn based on a similar name only, she was jailed for five days and is still yet to be repaid the $3,500 her husband had to borrow for bail to get her released.  It took her nearly two years to get the bogus arrest expunged from her record and she nearly lost her job because of it.  That’s one hell of a price to pay because the local cops didn’t bother to run spellcheck.

There was a great Seinfeld episode back in the day in which Jerry and George were pitching a pilot series to NBC.  In this classic, George’s idea for the plot entails two people who get in an auto accident and the judge sentences the one at fault to be the other’s butler.  I think that’s where we need to go here.

If cops show up at your house and arrest you without cause, like they did to poor Ms. FourHorn, based solely on a mistaken identity, well they need to not only make everything right again legally and financially in short order, but they should provide free labor to her.  They should be her butlers.  The term of that indebted labor can be discretionary and based upon the severity of the mistaken identity.

So in this case, Ms. Fourhorn should be given five days of free cop labor to use as she pleases.  Car repair, yard work, errands, dog walking, baby sitting or body guards for her kids at school if she wants.  And one big catch, the cops can’t outsource this, it has to be the very ones who swept into her house and treated her like a common criminal due to their own carelessness.  That’s right, the actual ones who didn’t bother to check the spelling of her name and the hundreds of other pieces of info that didn’t match up including the fact that the suspect resided in Oklahoma and not Colorado.

Call it the George Costanza Butler Sentence if you want.

America is a great country and we’ve sucked it up on many an occasion from the Civil War to the Great Depression and made our way through to better days like great countries do.  But its got to be fair.  When you take from Main Street and give to Wall Street, when you give Nebraska or Louisiana a better health care deal than the other 48 states just to get their Senator’s vote, or in this case when a law abiding citizen gets tossed in the slammer for a week and nobody bothers to pay back her bail or straighten out the legal mess or even say those two simple words ‘I’m Sorry”, well that my friends, is when all hell can break loose.  

And that’s when we need butlers to step in to balance the inequity.