Every once in a while, hope can be found even amid the most devastating and unlikely of circumstances.

Take the case of Cynthia Ramos, the 58-year-old Tracy woman who was brutally murdered in 2009 by Jorge and Robert Morgan.

You wouldn’t expect to find anything positive talking about the story of a mother of six who returned to her home one afternoon only to be stabbed 55 times, bludgeoned 13 times more and then strangled. Ramos was killed without cause and in horrible fashion, leaving behind shocked and stricken friends and family. No, you wouldn’t expect to find any hope there.

But read on.

One of Ramos’ relatives, Rebecca Martinez, wrote me several months ago asking that the Press continue to cover the ongoing trial of her mother-in-law’s then-accused killers, even if it meant sharing the “horrific, brutal and senseless” details of the crime.

Martinez’s motive? As she wrote in a letter to the editor published Nov. 25, “As her family, we have pledged to seek justice, continue her legacy and not let her death be in vain.”

The recent guilty plea of the Morgans and their life-without-parole sentence is that sought-for justice.

It’s a fitting end to the tragic ordeal, even if it can’t fill the hole left by Ramos’ death. This, as small as it might seem, is our glimmer of hope, the silver lining on our darkest cloud.

The fact that the two lowlifes responsible for murdering Ramos will spend the rest of their lives behind bars offers reassurance that, despite numerous and well-proven flaws, the American justice system works more times than not.

It’s why we trust our courts to try the likes of Melissa Huckaby, accused of perhaps our community’s most heinous recent crime: the alleged kidnapping, rape and killing of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu.

It’s why we have hope for a speedy conclusion to the trials of the suspected killers of Tracy’s Naim Bey and Spencer Sampson, and that eventually the killer of Clayton Riggins will be found.

It’s why we’ve abandoned the posse in favor of the jury.

These thoughts were brought to me when I read this week about the guilty plea of Najibullah Zazi.

Zazi is an Afghan immigrant who admitted to being party to a foiled al Qaida attempt to bomb the New York subway system. The plot was, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, “real,” “in motion” and potentially devastating.

But the most significant thing about the Zazi conviction was that it was reached through a civilian court — no constitutional shortcuts required. Further proof, in my mind, that the American justice system can win, even when it is confronted with monsters.

It’s true, what Rebecca Martinez wrote me long before the Morgans pleaded guilty, that “monsters live among us.” But it’s also true that our country has a proven way to deal with those monsters, even when they inflict horrible pain on our communities and threaten our security.

We can achieve justice without secret prisons, without torture, without sacrificing our dearest ideals.

In fact, our integrity demands we do so. Because in denying others the rights and fair trials we would want for ourselves — even if those others be “monsters” — we become monsters, too.

• Share your thoughts with columnist and associate editor Jon Mendelson at jmendelson@tracypress.com.