ENEMY OF JUSTICE
James Karuga
Lieutenant Sean Benton is a decorated US Marine who is a genius, tough-talking nuclear scientist. One rainy, dark night, after working on the centrifuges until one a.m. in a San Francisco government laboratory, he drives home to find his wife, Natasha, raped and killed. None of his neighbors were awake to intervene. It was a dark, horrific night.
The morning breaks. He reports the crime. To his surprise he is taken as the first suspect. Then there’s a court case. A highly corrupt jury makes a hasty decision and sentences him to life in prison with no parole, even though the evidence presented is questionable and not enough to sustain the murder charges against him.
This all seems like a nasty nightmare to Sean. He is dishonorably discharged from the military. Hello! The guy never killed anyone; it was the corrupt investigators who did a shoddy job. They’d been hired by some of Sean’s jealous rogue former army colleagues who wanted to get him out of the way so they could work in the military laboratory, so they could sell the nuclear technology for huge cash to terrorists. The rogue colleagues celebrate while Sean rots in jail. He is also vilified by the media and the public alike. In jail, anger rises up within him after years of dedicated honest service to the government. He cannot reconcile with himself that the government and the law turned their back on him.
Major Dawn Wayne is a black, forty-three year-old former Marine, held in the same jail as Sean for thirty years for murder by arson—a crime he never committed. His alleged victim was Chris, a cocaine addict, whose house caught fire when he dropped the glowing splint of a matchstick on flammable fuel and got “roasted.” Even after the firemen ruled against deliberate arson by an outside party, the more influential and decorated SWAT team investigators contradicted them, ignoring the firemen’s report and deeming it arson. The suspect was Major Dawn Wayne, whose case was shoddily handled and hastily ruled on. Before he could say “appeal,” he was sentenced to thirty years. He is one bitter ex-soldier, for the freedom of law he had sworn to protect and defend was abused by corrupt cliques, and he was the resultant innocent victim.
Major Wayne’s cell is next to Sean’s, who is all deranged and cursing at the judicial system that imprisoned him wrongly like a murderer. His anger towards the judicial system becomes an addictive obsession. Sean never sleeps. Then one night in one of his habitual rants, Sean, within Wayne’s earshot, promises to escape the cell and gas all the California courts to avenge his wrong imprisonment. Wayne dismisses it as an out-of-the-blue gimmick and ignores even the threat factor behind it. After two days, Wayne realizes Sean is missing, but then he concludes it is none of his business to know who stays in the cells and who doesn’t. But it becomes his business, when, three days after Sean’s low-key escape, there is a TV report of a fatal gas attack at a downtown court in San Francisco, with seven casualties. When Wayne tries to confide to the prison authority about the heinous acts Sean had planned, he is dismissed as an attention-seeker and sent to the hole for two weeks as punishment.
When prison authorities fail to track down Sean, they quickly cover up the case to avoid being fired. But then, after finding Sean’s bloodied prison clothing in a nearby forest, the prison authorities are quick to cover their security inadequacies by suggesting Sean might have been mauled by crocodiles. His case is forgotten, and only Wayne knows too well that Sean is alive and breathing deadly revenge on courts. An instinctive sense of duty rises up within Wayne when he remembers his younger brother, Richard Wayne, practices law in one of the San Francisco courts that Sean might sporadically target. Wayne realizes he has to stop Sean at all costs. One of the nights he’s in the hole, Wayne chokes one of the guards with door grills and his arms, then takes the keys and manages to escape through rotten food effluent pipes near the hole.
Well, Sean’s escape might have been low-key, but Wayne’s is not. He is labeled a dangerous fugitive. And by some strange twist of investigative inadequacies, the authorities start linking him with the deadly gas attacks deranged Sean is orchestrating, even without the authorities considering some of these attacks took place before Wayne escaped. Used as a perfect scapegoat, the authorities label Wayne dangerous enough to be shot on sight. Meanwhile, Wayne’s mission to stop sadistic Sean becomes more complex and dangerous. He has to evade authorities and catch Sean first, expose his sadistic plans, then hopefully clear his own name from the gas attacks and the arson case that made him be jailed wrongly in the first place.
Wayne’s task becomes Herculean as, by now, Sean has realized Wayne is out to stop him. So Sean also starts targeting Wayne to kill him and to destroy the evidence. The money-hungry bounty hunters are after him also (Wayne). With his time running out fast and his life in danger, Wayne pieces all dots and evidences together, and hands it to his lawyer brother, Richard, to use in Wayne’s defense when the truth finally comes out. Richard operates hiding in Seattle, since he is also Sean’s target. He pieces all the evidence detailing the rot and corruption and the poor, biased, investigative procedures in San Francisco courts and police departments. Richard presents his brother’s case to the Supreme Court. Then, when Wayne, in his investigative jaunts, uncovers the army guys who killed Sean’s wife to get him jailed, it is the perfect evidence he needs to have Sean spare his life and Richard’s. Then, in some twist of fate, he is confronted and held hostage by a livid, demented Sean who almost blows his brains out, but for the evidence clearing Sean from his wife’s murder. Around the time Sean holds Wayne hostage, they are both near a TV which brings breaking news that Sean has been cleared of murdering his wife after Richard presents the evidence to the Supreme Court.
When Richard exposes the corruption in the army and the courts in San Francisco to the Supreme Courts, plus the poor investigative processes, Wayne is cleared of murder by arson while Sean is cleared of his wife’s murder, but not the gas attacks. Sean is sentenced to twenty years for gas attacks, but a psychiatrist report clears him of his erratic behavior caused by mental anguish of being jailed wrongly. His sentence is cut to five years, and finally the real culprits are put behind bars—the culprits who created a monster out of Sean that he never was. Well, there is redemption at last: what goes around comes around.
