P.S. I think today is Howard Zinn’s birthday.
  So please allow me to recommend my favorite book,
  Howard Zinn’s autobio/memoir,
  “You Can’t Be Neutral on A Moving Train”, Boston:
  Beacon Press, 2003 edition (the introduction is
  wonderful as “stand alone” piece) - it’s a handbook
  for social change, as well as the man’s story
  told by him.  Viva Howard Zinn!

Amazing! Under the heading of “like minds”:
I saw the title and went to get the link to Howard Zinn’s column url on the Progressive Mag. before I
read the article text.  It’s still good to have the link: http://www.progressive.org/zinn

Thanks for all things Howard Zinn.  Also see the
webpage http://www.howardzinn.org

Of course, there is no such thing as, ‘Equal justice before the law, for all!’
Money and power and privilege have always trumped the system of fairness and the equal justice that is supposed to be the hallmark of the American Jurisprudence system. One need only look at the cases is which the death penalty is meted out and you will see the inequity of the system that has become what the founding fathers envisioned.
Even then, in the time of the founding fathers, women and African Slaves were not treated as having any rights whatsoever.
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti though, is one of the hallmarks of the American Injustice System. Playing upon the fears of immigrants and ‘socialists,’ the court and the trial lawyers, put on a sham of a trial. There was no true defense of these two men for the crime they were accused of, they were nowhere near the scene of the crime, yet through amazingly circumstantial evidence and a populace inflamed by the media, these two men were quite wrongly convicted of murder and kidnapping.
It seems to me, that the meting out of justice cannot and will not ever be ‘equal before the law,’ until the system of how we treat defendants is changed and must be changed. In some cases, even today, the defendant is charged on flimsy evidence and is considered guilty until proven innocent. We need only look no further than the ‘witch hunting’ trials of Salem Oregon, where practically the whole town was considered guilty of ‘molesting and killing’ children. A fever of prosecution swept through the whole area and did not stop until these supposedly traumatized children recanted their stories of molestation, baby killing, animal sacrifices and Satanism.
Are we to conclude that because this system is the only one we have that it is truly the best? Never!
Justice reform, prison reform and the reform of the ‘long arm of the law,’ must become a priority in this country or we will see the coming of more and more sham trials for crimes against the state and other seemingly innocuous offenses. A police state is what we live in now, it will become worse and worse should the ‘Far Right Wing Nuts’ have their way and this includes the ‘Blue Dog Democrats’ that were elected in the last election cycle.
These so-called Democrats are nothing more than GOP members in the guise of Progressives, using the cloak of the Democratic Party to get elected to the United States Senate and Congress.