Lady Justice
Before leaving the courthouse,
I passed a statue of Lady Justice.
She stood high above.
A sword in one hand.
A scale in the other.
Her eyes covered by a strip of cloth.
Only later did I learn
what those three things represented:
The sword — the power of the law to punish wrongdoing.
The scale — the objective weighing of evidence from both sides.
The blindfold — the idea that justice should not be influenced by power, money, or status.
I stood there, looking at her.
And suddenly,
I wanted to cry.
Because in that moment,
I had only one thought:
She was not “blindfolded in fairness.”
She truly
could not see.
Because I had seen with my own eyes
that some evidence
could never even be placed on the scale.
Throughout the entire lawsuit,
there was a large amount of evidence
the jury was never allowed to see.
My attorney stood up again and again.
Again and again, he tried to introduce evidence.
And almost every time,
the judge immediately cut him off:
“Overruled.”
Day after day.
Later,
even my lawyer said with a bitter smile:
“Fighting this case made me realize how many organs I have in my body.
Because every overruled felt like a heavy blow landing somewhere different.”
The only exception
was the day we brought in a highly respected senior attorney
to testify as an expert witness.
That day,
the judge finally became quiet.
Even many years later,
I still remember that feeling.
You know something is wrong.
But the entire system
feels like a massive wall.
And you stand before it,
completely powerless.
That was when I finally began to understand:
“Law” and “justice”
are not always the same thing.
Especially when you have:
no power,
no money,
no connections,
and you are not even local.
I came from California.
I was not born and raised in Dallas.
I had an Asian accent.
I did not belong to that circle.
And on the other side
were insurance companies.
People who had spent years golfing with judges.
People who understood the entire system.
For the first time in my life,
I truly understood
what powerless meant.
Later, someone even told me privately:
“If Alice Lin wins,
the judge will overturn it in the end anyway.”
At the time,
I did not want to believe it.
But in the end,
that is exactly what happened.
And the most ironic part was this:
Right before the verdict was about to come out,
the situation had actually begun to turn strongly in our favor.
In fact,
the attorney who had handled the motel transaction
even offered to settle.
He was willing to pay us fifty thousand dollars.
He even said
he would later help us pursue responsibility from the others involved.
Later, my lawyer discovered
that the insurance company feared losing the case
and facing massive punitive damages.
So in the end,
they gave that attorney money
to personally assume responsibility
in order to protect the insurance company itself.
But in the end,
we still lost.
We appealed.
But the appeal was quickly denied.
And what became even stranger was this:
Later, the judge actually ordered
the entire case to be sealed.
Meaning:
it was not allowed to be made public.
Even many years later,
I still cannot understand:
If everything had truly been completely fair,
why was there a need to seal the case?
And what was even more thought-provoking was this:
About a year later,
I suddenly received a phone call from the Internal Revenue Service —
the IRS.
The IRS officer asked me:
“Did you ever pay that attorney any money?”
I was shocked.
Because during the lawsuit,
the attorney involved in the motel transaction
had countersued us.
And the court ultimately ruled
that I owed him fifty thousand dollars.
But at the time,
I simply had no extra money.
And beyond that,
I believed the entire judgment was deeply unjust.
So I never paid him.
I told the IRS officer:
“If I had extra money,
I would rather throw it into the ocean
than give it to him.”
Only later did I realize:
The IRS already knew certain things.
They knew that attorney
had received money from the insurance company.
And apparently,
he had not fully reported it.
That was why they called me —
to confirm whether I had separately paid him
that additional fifty thousand dollars.
That phone call reminded me of something else.
According to the court’s final judgment,
I was still legally supposed to pay that attorney fifty thousand dollars.
But strangely enough:
After that,
he never truly tried to collect the money from me.
No pressure.
No demands.
No further action.
Many years later,
I still sometimes wonder:
Perhaps deep inside,
he also knew
that some of the things he had done were wrong.
I do not know.
Maybe only he himself knows the answer.
That phone call
made me realize something for the first time:
Maybe
we had not truly lost back then.
Maybe it was simply this:
Even when many people know the truth in their hearts,
that does not mean
the truth will ever truly be revealed.
As I left the courthouse,
I turned back once more to look at Lady Justice.
She was still standing there.
Holding the sword.
Holding the scale.
Blindfolded.
And suddenly I felt:
Perhaps the truly frightening thing
is not that justice cannot see.
But that sometimes,
even when people do see,
they still choose
not to look.
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