The prosecution never rests -- from lying "Early" and often

Whenever there is an opinion piece in the mainstream media about prosecutors doing evil things, there always is the disclaimer: "The majority of prosecutors in this country are ethical and truthful, and we are just dealing with a 'few bad apples' here." Once upon a time, I believed that, too. No longer.

The "tipping point" for me was not simply the Duke Lacrosse Case, but the statements of other prosecutors around the country when the charges still were in play and the story was dominating the talk shows in 2006 and 2007. In particular, Norm Early was especially outrageous.

Early is not a bit player among prosecutors in the USA. While he no longer is a district attorney, for many years he was the elected DA in Denver, Colorado, and was a major player in Democratic politics there. He later served as media director National District Attorneys Association, an organization that serves as “the voice of America’s prosecutors and to support their efforts to protect the rights and safety of the people.”

According to the NDAA's official "mission," the organization professes "to foster and maintain the honor and integrity of the prosecuting attorneys of the United States in both large and small jurisdictions by whatever title such attorneys may be known
." Actually, given Early's conduct as the former face of the organization, perhaps its Official Mission should be "encouraging prosecutors to lie, hide exculpatory evidence, convict innocent people, and get away with it, all while hiding behind the robes of U.S. Supreme Court justices."

If you wish to get a sense of the outrageous conduct of Early in the Duke case, K.C. Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland blog had an excellent post on the man and his statements that were made while he was a major player for the NDAA. If this guy is typical of prosecutors in the USA, then there is no hope for any of us.

I would urge you to read the post if for no other reason than to understand how these people think and the lies they will tell in order to pursue innocent people. Furthermore, to get a sense of how prosecutors view the rights that Americans have to defend themselves against criminal charges, read what Early had to say about that, too. According to typical prosecutors, we should go directly from accusations to sentencing. Why bother with innocence, since prosecutors tell us there are no innocent people?

For me, the one event that seals my views has been the situation with Carola Jacobson. A prosecutorial office that will engage in the outright murderous assault against a single mother, a good woman who has done nothing to deserve this treatment, is nothing but a den of liars. But, the U.S. Supreme Court says that liars like this are special people who deserve special protection. The SCOTUS, however, does not say how we can be protected against a pack of vicious dogs as make up the Maricopa County District Attorney's office and other prosecutorial offices around the country.

Happy Easter.

In praise of strong-willed women who seek justice

A year ago today, Tonya Craft was on trial for her life, falsely accused of child molestation, with the "justice" machinery of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit attempting to railroad her by falsifying evidence and outright lying. Tonya, however, was able to fight back, and in the end she prevailed, as "judge" brian outhouse's attempts to rig the trial (with cooperative efforts from prosecutors Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and Len "The Man" Gregor) failed.

(Even after using questionable means to secure a jury, the fact was that the prosecution really believed that the Catoosa County jurors were stupid and venal and would think that they would believe every lie told to them. It never occurred to them that the jurors might be interested in the truth, not what Sandra Lamb and her rich daddy wanted them to believe.)

In the past year, much of this blog has been dedicated to dealing with cases of false accusation, including that of Tonya, but also similar situations elsewhere in this country. While each case is different, I have found one constant: the presence of strong-willed women who know how to fight back.

Tonya is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Carola Jacobson is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Becky Rasmussen is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth. Kerwyn is strong-willed, stubborn, and a stickler for the truth.

These women have made a difference, even though only one has been on trial, that being Tonya. The others have played supporting roles, and I can tell you that in each situation, the women have made a difference.

Kerwyn, of course, has not just supported the families going through the hell of false accusations. She also has supported me and kept me on an even keel and has always been the voice in my ear saying, "We get it right, period."

(By the way, Kerwyn does not automatically assume that the accused are innocent. If she comes to that conclusion, she comes to it because she understands the facts behind each case and can go with not only her instincts and intuition, but also her knowledge of how these cases actually work.)

I have found something else about each of these women, and the others whom I have not mentioned, but have been pillars of strength: they are not petty and vindictive. Look at how Tonya has handled the aftermath of her own case, including the custody battle.

She could be trying to destroy Joal and Sarah Henke, both of whom were willing to commit perjury both in Georgia and Tennessee in order to go after Tonya. Joal committed fraud in a federal home loan application, and a number of people have gone to prison for the same thing. (So far, federal and state authorities in Chattanooga are not interested, and that is fine with me, although it does tell me that they have a rather selective view of justice.)

Instead, Tonya has been as gracious as anyone could be, given what she experienced. Likewise, I have seen gracious acts from Carola and Becky.

Pettiness is not strength, and vindictiveness is not a virtue. None of these women claim to be perfect, and all have their faults -- and they would be the first to tell you they have faults and weaknesses.

I have come to understand something important about each of these women: they may have fears, but when it comes to doing right, they are fearless. And because there are so many people in authority out there who are hellbent on doing wrong, we need more women like Tonya, Carola, Becky, and Kerwyn. Lots more.

*******************************

Of course, there also are women like Crystal Mangum, the false accuser in the Duke Lacrosse Case. Mangum has graduated from prostitution and lying to murder. K.C. Johnson covers the latest news of the saga of Crystal.

What if you are falsely accused? Part I: What NOT to do

None of us believe that we ever will be falsely accused of a sex crime. After all, we have been brought up to believe that the USA has the best "justice" system in the world, and that police and prosecutors are honest people who never would try to frame an innocent person.

Unfortunately, that is not the case anymore. Police gladly will frame innocent people and prosecutors are all-too-happy to put innocent people on trial or force them to plead out to crimes they didn't commit because they cannot afford to defend themselves. THAT is the reality of law in the USA.

Most likely, the person reading this won't ever be charged in a sexual assault/child molestation case, as prosecutors cannot charge everyone. If you are falsely accused, however, there are a number of things that you should do -- and not do. I will deal with those things in this post.

After you get over the first wave of shock and anger of being falsely accused, you probably just are confused and want this nightmare to go away. You have to understand, however, that the police and the local prosecutors really are not interested in whether or not you actually did the things of which you are accused. That's right; they are not interested. They already have decided you are guilty, and their mission is to spin everything that they find into a way to get you thrown into prison for the rest of your life.

It does not matter if the accusations are a lie. Cops and prosecutors lie all the time and the honest people in that business often are intimidated and threatened by the bad guys. You are going to be dealing with people who don't care if you are innocent or guilty; they already have decided you are guilty, and they don't like to be confused with facts.

So, let us assume that you are accused. What do you do. What do you NOT do?

Don't Talk to the Police

The first thing that you DO NOT do is talk to the police without an attorney present. If you wish to have an expert tell you why, just watch this video by a law school professor telling people NOT to talk to the police.

Yes, you reply, but the police will listen. They will hear your story and then they will realize that the charges are ridiculous and the whole thing will go away. Right.

It is not going to happen. If you sit down with the police, they are not going to try to find out what occurred; no, they are going to try to find a way to twist your statements into an admission of guilt. No matter how much they tell you that they only are trying to help, it is a lie.

As Tonya Craft has told me more than once, charges of child molestation and rape are very different than, say, charges that you robbed a convenience store. Regarding the latter, you can present evidence that you were not there or that the eyewitness has engaged in mistaken identity. (Granted, cops try to find ways to work around alibis in these kinds of cases, too, but if you can prove you were not there, you have a strong case for innocence.)

In charges of child molestation or rape, however, alibis simply don't matter. For example, "judge" brian outhouse actually claimed in court that prosecutors had demonstrated that Tonya Craft molested the daughter of Sandra Lamb at her home -- before she even bought the home and moved into it. Logically, there was no way that Ms. Craft could have been at that place when prosecutors said she was (and entered no evidence at all to show she had been there before she bought the house), but it did not matter.

Why? House and the prosecutors already were of the mindset that they were going to rig a conviction, and had no interest in evidence. That is common in such cases. We have seen it not only in the Craft case, but also all of the other cases covered on this blog, including the one against Michael Rasmussen.

Look what happened when Rasmussen agreed to talk to detectives Young Austin and Kim Selkirk. They wrote down a bunch of notes and claimed that he had "confessed" to everything they had claimed. Given that Selkirk and Austin did not record this supposed momentous "confession" and given that Selkirk's notes conflicted with the state's own "evidence," it is not hard to conclude that Austin and Selkirk are lying.

A friend of mine who was a police officer in Florida for many years told me that all too often, cops reach conclusions first and then try to find "evidence" that fits their theories. A good investigator, he told me, tries to let the evidence lead to a conclusion, not the other way around.

Yet, cops also are under pressure to charge people, to close cases, and to help prosecutors get convictions. The "win at all costs" combined with the fact that the ONLY "evidence" needed in many rape and child molestation cases is an accusation. For example, it was painfully clear in the Duke Lacrosse Case that (1) Crystal Mangum was not raped, and (2) that the three lacrosse players could not have been the "rapists," anyway.

Yet, the charges stayed live for a year even though they had thoroughly been debunked by the attorneys and by outside experts who saw the "evidence" for what it was: a sham. But because of political considerations and because of the feminist ideologies driving the charges, the case very well could have gone to trial and there very well could have been a conviction.

It is very rare in these kinds of cases that police and prosecutors will look at evidence that does not fit a profile that says you are guilty. That is just the way it is. Don't talk to the police; they only will use your words against you.

Don't Assume the People in the System will be Fair

Americans like to believe that this is a country where fairness and justice reign. That is nonsense, but most people don't discover just how bad things are until they are charged with something they did not do. The American courts will go overboard to convict the innocent, and once there is a conviction, it is almost impossible to have it overturned, as the courts love "finality."

As I noted in a previous post, the immunity that government players have in the justice system also provides perverse incentives for them to lie. After all, prosecutors don't get raises and promotions for "seeking justice." They get raises and promotions for winning.

Chris Arnt believed that he could ride a conviction against Tonya Craft to much higher political office. Despite the fact that he lied in court, suborned perjury, and broke the law with impunity, he still is employed as a prosecutor, going after other people who allegedly have broken the law.

In other words, Arnt paid no legal price for his actions. Whether or not he ever can be elected to public office after his show of dishonesty depends upon how much garbage voters in North Georgia are willing to swallow.

Even though the police will accuse you of "not cooperating," you MUST invoke your Constitutional rights at this point. Trust me when I tell you that neither police nor prosecutors care about your rights and will violate them with impunity if they think they can get away with it.

You have to be responsible to protect yourself, and that means invoking your rights. Don't talk to the police, period.

In Part II, I will write about choosing an attorney. In Part III, I will point out resources you can use to help defend yourself.

NOTE: Good news from North Carolina. A federal judge has ruled that the lawsuits filed by various Duke lacrosse players against Duke University, Durham, and Mike Nifong can proceed. If Duke and Durham lose on appeal, I suspect that the defendants will settle quickly with the plaintiffs.

Crystal Mangum's New Day of Reckoning

It seems that the Duke Lacrosse Case just won't stop. Crystal Gail Mangum, the woman who lied about the original charges and set in motion an orgy of political correctness at Duke University and in the mainstream media, has been arrested on a variety of charges. It will be interesting to see if the horde of Duke faculty members, Durham racialists, feminists, and the Usual Suspects will rise up to defend the honor of Miss Crystal.

K.C. Johnson has a good and insightful post in his Durham-in-Wonderland blog, mentioning something that was overlooked during the case. Wendy Murphy, the lawyer and former prosecutor who seems to specialize in lying, claimed that there were 1,000 page in the case file that somehow would "prove" the original charges of rape, but that the attorneys were refusing to release the information. The unreleased pages were true, but Murphy's explanation was yet another lie.

The pages, which never were unsealed for public viewing by a judge but were known to both prosecution and defense, involved Mangum's mental health history. Nifong did not want the information released because he did not want the public to see just how unstable his "client" really was. At any rate, it looks as though the saga of Crystal Gail Mangum is drawing to a mad close. As they say at the end of the opera "Pagliacci," "La commedia e finite!"

The Demand to Criminalize Speech

For many of us involved in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, one of the biggest issues that came up was the attempt by many faculty members at Duke to establish a regime there akin to a Maoist re-education camp. K.C. Johnson at Durham-in-Wonderland has written a couple of eye-opening posts about the short-lived "Campus Cultural Initiative" Committees set up at Duke after Mike Nifong secured his false indictments of Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans.

What defines the radicals at Duke and at other college campuses is the attempt to suppress all speech but the speech that they favor. In fact, campus speech codes have been an unfortunate staple of college life for more than a decade and there is every indication that they are getting worse.

However, until recently, most of this kind of suppression was confined to the academic world, and while there is no excuse for it, at least the rest of us did not have to live by the rules that Karla Holloway and Houston Baker and Larry Moneta at Duke wanted to force on their students. I'm afraid that day is past and the anti-speech disease that has defined American academics now is spilling out into mainstream journalism and our body politic.

In a recent column in U.S. News, Bonnie Erbe, a mainstream journalist, called for arresting and imprisoning people who engage in speech that she declares to be "hate speech." Writing after the tragic shooting this past week at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., these are her words:

It's not enough to prosecute these murders as murders. They are hate-motivated crimes and each of these men had been under some sort of police surveillance prior to their actions. Isn't it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?

She began her column with the following:

If yesterday's Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don't know what is.

Now, she does not just deal with the three men who are charged with the murders of the museum guard, abortion doctor George Tiller, and the U.S. army recruiter. No, she also targets President Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, zeroing in on this AP news passage:

"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office," Wright told the Daily Press of Newport News following a Tuesday night sermon at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference.

Understand what she is saying. She is calling for Jeremiah Wright to be arrested and imprisoned for what he said. Notice that Wright has not called for violence against anyone; he is stating his own opinion, and the wrongness of it does not make it criminal.

Unfortunately, Erbe is not the only person out there calling for the state to suppress speech. Paul Krugman goes up to the edge in this column, but it is clear that he wants the government to shut up anyone with whom he disagrees.

Of course, hate speech to Krugman is anything that might even speak of the truth. He zeroes in on a recent statement from the Republican National Committee:

It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.”

Understand that he is including this passage in a rant against "hate speech," which means that he says any description of what Obama is doing to the economy falls into that "hate" category. Now, when the government nationalizes the mortgage industry, effectively nationalizes General Motors, take control of AIG, and determines which auto dealerships are going to be permitted to stay open, I would say that we are looking at socialism.

When government takes ownership and control of key industries -- as did Great Britain's Labor government following World War II -- that is called socialism, and at least the Brits had the truthfulness to use the "S-Word." Today, however, even using that word, according to Krugman, is hate speech, and we know that hate speech needs to be criminalized.

Of course, who can leave out Keith Olbermann on MSNBC who in his commentary on the museum murder drags in Ron Paul. Now, there most likely is no politician in the USA who is more against violence than Paul, yet according to Olbermann, Ron Paul is just another hatemonger, and because the man accused of the museum murder ranted against the Federal Reserve System, anyone who now raises any questions at all about the Fed and its inflationary policies is a promoter of "hate speech."

In a column before last year's presidential election, John Barone (also of U.S. News, interestingly) wrote that he feared the upcoming Obama regime would be "thuggish" in large part because Obama had cut his political teeth in the shadow of the modern American college campus. I hoped he was wrong, and I still do hope that the Obama administration will not listen to those who would turn speech into a crime.

Unfortunately, I don't hold out much hope, anymore. It would be one thing if those calling for suppression of speech were extremists; they are not. They are mainstream journalists (who, of course, would demand that their words be exempt from the "hate speech" laws), and now the Nobel Prize winner in economics. I fear that it only is a matter of time before words that offend our political classes and mainstream journalists will land us in prison.

Anthony Gregory had a fine column recently on Lew Rockwell's page about hate speech and collectivism, and it is worth reading. Or, at least read it while Gregory's words still are legal.

Do not forget that Great Britain now routinely imprisons people for "hate speech," as is done in Canada. The United States inherited its former love of free speech from the venerable "Rights of Englishmen" that no longer exist. And, yes, there will come a time in this country when the very words I am now writing can be enough to land me in a prison cell. That is where we are headed.

My First Post

Ladies and gentlemen, I am starting my first post on a blog. Given that K.C. Johnson and others can do it, so can I.

This blog will cover a lot of area, including my articles, thoughts on the economy, and especially my posts on the decline of law in the United States. I have to start somewhere, and here is a good place.