Money Cannot Buy Justice

 Guyana Business Journal, Editorial

Money Cannot Buy Justice

Why Financial Settlements Fail Victims

May 03, 2025

 

Adrianna Younge died as a result of institutional negligence, and, in this case, the available evidence suggests a very high likelihood of criminal malfeasance. Some prominent Guyanese commentators have argued: “Compensation is a form of justice too. While no amount of money can bring back Adriana Younge, financial restitution can still serve as a recognition of harm done. Justice takes many forms—it isn’t always about criminal charges or imprisonment.”

Is this justice?

The answer is a categorical no.

Monetary compensation is not justice.

Monetary compensation is a transaction that evades moral reckoning, social accountability, and institutional reform. It is a transaction that commodifies grief and human dignity, a transaction that obscures systemic failure, and forestalls meaningful redress.

Justice, properly conceived, demands far more. Criminal law requires investigation, culpability, and consequence, not payoff.

Restorative justice necessitates truth-telling, acknowledgment, and institutional change, not hush money.

If no one is held accountable, no policies are reformed, and no children are made safer, then no sum of money, no matter how large, can be called justice. It is a means to close a case, not to heal a wound.

When race, poverty, and institutional indifference converge, marginalized families are often denied both due process and systemic repair. The “compensation-as-closure” model recalls the troubling practice of settlements in cases of police violence across the United States: families receive payouts, but officers keep their jobs, practices remain unchanged, and cycles of harm are left unbroken. In such cases, financial settlements serve institutions, not victims—buying silence rather than delivering change. This path inevitably leads to George Floyd.

True justice is rooted in recognition, restitution, and reform. While financial compensation can be part of justice, it is never sufficient. Financial compensation often becomes a tool to suppress outrage, deter inquiry, and avoid transformation. For Adrianna’s family, justice must begin with a public admission of failure, an independent investigation into her death, meaningful policy reform in law enforcement, and guarantees that no other child will suffer a similar fate.

In Adrianna Younge’s case, a financial settlement offers an illusion of accountability. It symbolically acknowledges harm while concealing the deeper, structural causes: police negligence, institutional indifference, and the collapse of child protection systems. This suggestion mirrors a broader Guyanese pattern where public failures are papered over with checks rather than confronted with truth and transformation. Assigning a price to Adrianna’s death reduces a profound moral loss to an actuarial exercise. It treats life as a liability and death as a ledger item.

Moral philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that humans have intrinsic worth or dignity, which cannot be traded or exchanged. Offering money instead of recognition and reform treats Adrianna’s life as a commodity. A breach of dignity cannot be settled like a contract dispute. This thinking reveals a profound misunderstanding of what justice requires when a human life has been irreparably violated.

If monetary compensation becomes our society’s default expression of “justice,” we normalize a two-tiered system in which the wealthy buy immunity, and the poor are forced to accept cash in lieu of consequences. In such a system, justice is not what is right—it is what is affordable. This is not justice. It is a moral failure.

Yes, money may help families relocate, rebuild, or recover in some small measure. But healing is not justice. If the failed structures remain intact, payment functions less as reparation and more as an incentive for silence.

To confuse compensation with justice is to mistake resolution for reckoning, payment for peace, and transaction for transformation. In the face of institutional failure and preventable death, justice must be pursued in terms of truth, accountability, dignity, and systemic change. Only when we demand these things—publicly and persistently—can we hope to build a society where justice is not merely a check, but a commitment.

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Guyana Business Journal