America as South Park Nation: Where Life is a Bad Cartoon, Part II

Even though at our house we don't have television reception, we do have a TV and watch videos. My kids like to watch reruns of shows like "Bones" and "Castle," and I admit to enjoying the old "Nash Bridges" episodes.

All of these shows involve cops and other government officials "solving" crimes, and while the methods used at times might not exactly be constitutional, nonetheless they always get it right. Furthermore, the cops in these shows care about getting it right.

Once again, we see how Hollywood fantasy collides with reality. The "superdetective" who uses deduction and intelligence to solve a crime simply does not exist, anymore, or if in existence, is a very rare species. Instead, police today depend heavily upon preconceived "narratives" in which they decide at the beginning who is "guilty," and how to construct "evidence" to prove that guilt. If the evidence does not fit the narrative, then police either ignore it or get prosecutors to do the legal version of pounding square pegs into round holes.

I make this point because American law increasingly has moved in the direction where evidence no longer matters when it comes to determining who has committed a crime. For that matter, it does not even matter if someone actually has committed a crime; the only thing that is important is whether or not the authorities claim there has been a crime and that the "guilty" party will be punished.

Nowhere are "imaginary crimes" more prevalent in this country than in so-called sex crimes, be they rape, sexual assault, or child molestation, and no other set of "crimes" requires less proof for conviction. For all of the wistful talk of "revolution," Americans need to understand that a legal revolution already has occurred, as Congress, the courts, and the executive branch have teamed up to wipe out what once was called "due process of law."

While "due process" exists in form, it no longer means anything in substance, and the Mondale Act and the Violence Against Women Act have further eviscerated what have been called "the rights of the accused." Being that the main purpose of the VAWA was to get more convictions of assault, sexual assault, and rape against men, the law has been very successful, but only by spreading the net very wide (on the assumption that all men are rapists and women always tell the truth they when accuse men of rape) and eliminating requirements that the prosecution bring corroborating evidence.

It is important to remember that"sex crimes" in this era have become intensely political. Passage of the VAWA, just like the Mondale passage some 20 years earlier, had been preceded by huge amounts of propaganda claiming that rape and sexual assault were "epidemic," and that only the federal government could save the day, and the way to do that was to destroy due process, rules of evidence, and any sense of "fair play" when "sex offender" accusations were made.

For example, the so-called "rape shield" laws that exist under the VAWA umbrella prevent defendants from entering a lot of exculpatory evidence in the name of "protecting the victims' privacy." When combined with the "no drop" policy that the VAWA has encouraged, it becomes extremely difficult even for falsely-accused me to be able to avoid going to prison. (The assumption behind "no drop" is that a recantation of the charges by the original accuser always comes about because of "sexist" pressure placed by the male accusers. In reality, because prosecutors have so many legal weapons, "no drop" pretty much means that even innocent people are going to plead out to something even if there is no evidence except for the original accusation.)

Federal authorities were able to entice states to end due process in so-called sex crimes by offering huge amounts of money to state and local governments which not only can be used to prosecute such cases, but also for a number of other programs, such as battered women's shelters and the like. (Yes, rape and domestic violence exist, although the kinds of numbers that are thrown about such as more than a quarter of women attending college are raped are based upon very shaky numbers and methodologies.)

To put it another way, when crimes such as rape, sexual assault, and child molestation are alleged, innocence  really is not a defense at all. Thus, there is no need for government investigators to do an accurate of thorough job, as such work might uncover evidence that the charges are false, and police and prosecutors are loathe ever to admitting any kind of wrongdoing no matter how outrageous their actions.

The Duke Lacrosse Case and the VAWA

The infamous "rape" charges by a prostitute against three Duke University lacrosse players is a study in the injustices spawned by the VAWA, although most people do not understand the role this law played in the prosecution of what turned out to be a non-crime. Indeed, while the facts of the case are most telling, the VAWA provided the bedrock for prosecutor Michael Nifong's baseless charges. The account in Wikipedia explains the basic outline:

In March 2006 Crystal Gail Mangum, an African American student at North Carolina Central University who worked as a stripper, dancer and escort, falsely accused three white Duke University students, members of the Duke Blue Devils men's lacrosse team, of raping her at a party held at the house of two of the team's captains in Durham, North Carolina on March 13, 2006. Many people involved in, or commenting on, the case, including prosecutor Mike Nifong, called the alleged assault a hate crime or suggested it might be one.

In response to the allegations Duke University suspended the lacrosse team for two games on March 28, 2006. On April 5, 2006, Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler was forced to resign under threat by athletics director Joe Alleva and Duke President Richard Brodhead canceled the remainder of the 2006 season.

On April 11, 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players innocent. Cooper stated that the charged players – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans – were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse." The initial prosecutor for the case, Durham County's District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was labeled a "rogue prosecutor" by Cooper, withdrew from the case in January 2007 after the North Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against him. That June, Nifong was disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation", making Nifong the first prosecutor in North Carolina history to lose his law license based on actions in a case. Nifong was found guilty of criminal contempt and served one day in jail. Mangum never faced any charges for her false accusations as Cooper declined to prosecute her.

While this does explain what happened, nonetheless it does not tell how the case got as far as it did. People tend to blame Nifong's "rush to judgment" and the explosive response from the local community and the Duke University administration and faculty, but perhaps the most important element is left out: the influence of the VAWA which enabled Nifong to push what he and others knew to be baseless charges.

Following the party during which two strippers (actually prostitutes) left in a huff after it became clear that none of the players present were willing to pay for sex, especially after the two women literally had grossed everyone out with their antics during their "exotic dance," the women left in a car. After Mangum refused to leave the car driven by her partner for the night, Kim Roberts, Roberts called the police and an officer brought the drunken Mangum to a mental health facility called Durham Access.

While an intake nurse was examining Mangum, she asked the disheveled woman, "Were you raped?" Mangum said she had been, and from that point, the provisions of the VAWA took hold. If a woman claims to have been raped, a set of procedures then must be followed, and the first is for the alleged victim to be examined either by a physician or a certified Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner or SANE.

Many SANEs are professional nurses who perform their duties admirably, but others simply are feminist zealots who see themselves as "anti-rape" crusaders and the SANE who helped in Mangum's examination, Tara Levicy, fell into the second category. While Levicy did not do the actual exam, nonetheless she signed the examination sheet (illegally, I would add), and then became the point person from Duke University Medical Center.

Levicy's role in this case was huge if for no other reason than she was a hook onto which Nifong and his supporters in the news media and at Duke University could hang their accusations. Even after word came from the state crime lab that there absolutely was no DNA that matched any of the players to Mangum, Nifong confidently went on with the case, knowing that North Carolina had done away with any requirement of corroborating evidence, thanks to the VAWA, and all it would take would be an accusation. Furthermore, as he told the media, a lot of the information that would discredit Mangum would not be permitted to be heard in court because of "rape shield" laws, another VAWA provision.

It could be said of the Duke case that there was no "there" there. It was a hoax, albeit a hoax kept alive by the VAWA, a dishonest prosecutor, the academic community, and a news media that never learns. By setting a required investigation into motion, one that came about even though Mangum recanted her charges while in the DUMC emergency room (although she revived them later), the VAWA did what it always does: establish a pro-prosecution bias from the start.

To get a sense of just how ridiculous the whole thing is, take the situation of Reade Seligmann. He was at the party, but left during the "dance" because he was disgusted with the whole thing. He called a cab, went to an automatic teller at a bank (where he was recorded by the bank's camera), went to a restaurant where he got something to eat, and then went to his dorm.

According to the clock at the bank, Seligmann was withdrawing money at the same time he supposedly was beating and raping Mangum. Ordinarily, not being present at the scene of the supposed crime while the "crime" was being committed at one time might have been seen as a strong alibi. However, the VAWA, along with other federal policies in cases of alleged sexual assault or rape, go by the ironclad premise that once an accusation of this kind is made, the authorities must pursue the charges as though they were true.

(Nifong, after being faced with this hard evidence, decided to change the timeline arbitrarily in order to pound the square evidence peg into the round hole of truth. Not surprisingly, the New York Times swallowed the whole thing, which is typical in these kinds of racially and politically-charged cases.)

Even when prosecutors find exculpatory evidence or it becomes clear that their star accuser is lying, for the most part they ignore the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner because of "no drop" policies. Even though North Carolina does not have such a policy, nonetheless once prosecutors in that state levy charges, they are loathe to give up stalking their "prey," no matter how specious the evidence.

One has to understand how close the Duke students came to being convicted for something that never happened. Although much of the national media (except the NY Times) turned against Nifong after defense attorneys revealed in a December 15, 2006, hearing that Nifong had hidden DNA evidence from the lawyers and had lied to judges during earlier proceedings, Nifong still had the "law" on his side.

First, much of the DNA evidence (that Mangum had the recent DNA of a number of unidentified males in her underwear -- none of it belonging to any lacrosse players, despite her description of the alleged attack)  fell into the category that Nifong believed would be withheld due to "rape shield" laws. Thus, to him, it was irrelevant even if it did impeach the "victim's" entire testimony.

Second, because the VAWA did away with the "corroborating evidence," the fact that there was no DNA evidence to fit Mangum's original claims was irrelevant; all that was needed for a conviction was tearful testimony from Mangum that Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans brutally assaulted and raped her, and had the trial been held in Durham, North Carolina, where there still exist a large number of "true believers" in Nifong's non-evidence, most likely the jurors would have felt the community pressure for a conviction.

For that matter, Mangum and Nifong already colluded in late December to change her testimony and timeline in order to do away with both DNA and Seligmann's rock-hard evidence that he was not at the scene when the alleged attack occurred. That Nifong's credibility was shot did not prevent the media (and especially Sports Illustrated) from heaping praise on Nifong for doing a 180. The mentality behind the VAWA and its supporters is such that prosecutors and their witnesses always are assumed to be telling the truth -- even when it is obvious that they are not.

Third, the State of North Carolina dropped charges in the case only after an exhaustive investigation by two seasoned prosecutors who, unlike Nifong, actually wanted to know what happened, not a fictional version of the event. Nifong was out of the case because the North Carolina State Bar did something that was unprecedented in state history: it filed misconduct charges against a sitting prosecutor before a criminal case had been fully adjudicated. The decision to charge Nifong came from a majority of one vote from the committee that fashioned the charges.

The investigators were stunned by not only the lack of evidence, but the dishonesty of the entire process, and  the two special prosecutors made it clear to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper that he should choose words that made it utterly transparent that the case had been a fraud. Yet, because of the VAWA, had the NC State Bar voted not to charge Nifong, most likely a jury in Durham would have convicted the three young men, and they still would be in a North Carolina prison.

Like the Mondale Act, the VAWA is able to enable more criminal convictions because the "rights of the accused" have been replaced with "the rights of the victims" (even if there are no real "victims"). Hearsay "evidence," once rejected by Anglo-American courts as being unreliable, is standard fare in "sex crime" cases. For a while, the courts even permitted children to testify on closed-circuit television from the judges' chambers so that the Sixth Amendment right of being able to "face one's accuser" could be ignored in the name of garnering more jury convictions.

While the VAWA has not been successful in doing away with the "facing one's accuser" provision of the U.S. Constitution, nonetheless by destroying "corroborating evidence" standards and by setting in motion a guilt-assuming process of non-investigation, any man is vulnerable to accusations from anyone who wants to make an accusation of rape or sexual assault, since the accusation itself is the "conclusive" evidence. Lest anyone doubt what I have written, the bizarre and utterly dishonest case against Harold Allen of Narragansett, Rhode Island, should give one much pause.

Patrick Lynch and Rape Charges against Harold Allen

In June 2007, Patrick Lynch, then the attorney general of Rhode Island, announced his office had charged Harold Allen of Narragansett with raping a woman 32 years before. Lynch, who then had aspirations of being the state's governor (his 2010 Democratic primary bid was unsuccessful), declared that Allen had raped a woman when both were 16 years old, and that the woman had "just remembered" via "recovered memory" therapy. (Lynch pointed ignored that "recovered memory" techniques had long been discredited, but like everything else in government and especially criminal law, what is discredited in the real world becomes standard fare when the state is involved.)

At least Nifong had an actual place and (sort of) time when the alleged assault against Mangum occurred. Lynch declared in his indictment that the rape had occurred sometime between April and October of 1975, and that the place where it allegedly happened also was unknown.

This was vintage VAWA: no one knew the date, time, or place, but a rape must have occurred because the woman, after having undergone therapy, claimed it was so. There was no corroborating evidence, nothing; only her claim. (The one "witness" said Allen had been at the girl's house, but Allen pointed out that the two were neighborhood friends, and that it was not unusual for him to have been at her place or elsewhere with her. After all, 16-year-olds generally tend to be social creatures.)

Yet, that claim was enough for Lynch to file charges. Unfortunately for him (and his political career) it became clear that even Rhode Island residents thought his antics were a bridge too far, and the AG soon after introducing the case with much fanfare went into retreat and dismissed the accusations. The real problem came because Rhode Island law created high standards of proof for charges involving "recovered memories," in large part because of the publicity garnered from earlier "repressed memory" cases that were strongly criticized by experts in psychology.

Without the VAWA, Lynch would not have dreamed about charging Allen with rape. Despite there being no evidence other than a woman's supposedly "recently liberated" memory, Lynch was free to file charges. Likewise, every male who reads this needs to understand that he, too, can find himself in the same situation. Because there is no statute of limitations on rape, any woman can accuse any man of rape after the fact, even if the two never had any contact, or even if they were in the same locality.

For example, assume that one of my female students was unhappy with her grade. She could get back at me by alleging that I raped her, and once she made her accusation, the following things would happen:

• I would be arrested, handcuffed, marched before a media in a "perp walk," and have my mug shot then publicized in the media;
• I would be suspended from my job and possibly fired;
• The charges would be nationalized and I would be vilified from coast to coast;
• In order to begin to be able to refute the charges, I would have to be able to account for every second of my time during a period perhaps of several months because the law would not require for her to be specific in either the time or the place when the alleged assault occurred;
• The VAWA provisions would kick in if I were to find out that she had made false accusations before, because they would not be admissible as exculpatory evidence;
• I would have tremendous pressure to plead to "something" because of mounting legals bills.

This is not paranoia. This is how the law operates today in this country. As I noted earlier, innocence no longer is a defense in American courts.

While most readers rightly are horrified at the reality of modern American law, there also are those people who believe that "rights of the accused" should not be in existence at all, and are quite happy with the state of affairs. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union at first objected to both the RICO and VAWA statutes because of the way these laws destroyed due process, but after both had been in place for a while, the ACLU dropped its opposition and actually praised the laws.

Why? The ACLU leaders approved of the outcomes. The RICO statutes allowed Rudy Giuliani to go after Michael Milken and others on Wall Street, and the ACLU saw it as a necessary thing in the battle to destroy capitalism. As for the VAWA, when feminism is involved, ultimately that is the side the ACLU will choose to support.

Giving up principles for politics is standard fare these days. For that matter, Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project, declared after no inculpatory DNA was found in the Duke case that DNA did not matter. This from a person whose organization has gained freedom for wrongly-convicted people using...DNA evidence. In other words, many people will give up whatever principles they have in order to achieve certain political outcomes.

The substitution of politics for law ultimately creates South Park Nation where accusations automatically bring convictions, and we have arrived at that sorry point. We are not "in the process of getting there," as some might think. No, we are there, something that most Americans will refuse to realize -- until something happens to them, and by then it will be too late for them.

Alcohol, Lies, and Ambition: Another Texas “Justice” Outrage

“Good fences make good neighbors,” – Robert Frost in “Mending Wall”

 A Texas jury in 2007 believed prosecutors that claimed Hannah Overton deliberately force-fed salt into her foster child (whom she and her husband were going to adopt) four-year-old Andrew Burd until he became so ill that he soon died. Overton received the sentence of life without parole and is in prison.

The lead prosecutor, Sandra Eastwood, had desperately wanted to win and had told her second chair, Anna Jiminez, later would testify under oath that Eastwood had told her, “I will do anything to win this case.” Before the trial, Eastwood, the police, and, of course, the local media, already had demonized Overton and her family. During the trial, the prosecutors, judge, jurors, and the media pointedly ignored the very complex medical evidence that pointed toward the child having a rare disorder, and why not? These are people who hate complexity; simple narratives and villainous witches are much more preferable, especially when the accused might have religious beliefs that “sophisticated” people might discard.

The Overtons are Pentacostals and to Progressives that populate the mainstream media, Pentacostals are even stranger than men from Mars and have no place in a Progressive society. To make matters even worse, Nueces County District Judge Jose Longoria clearly sided with the prosecution and ensured that at best it would be a show trial. Jurors did what Texas jurors usually do: ignore any exculpatory evidence and convict, many times sending the accused to the execution chambers that are so frequently used in the Lone Star State.

Yet, things did not seem to make sense. Hannah Overton had no police record, was highly-regarded in her church, and had never engaged in any acts of violence against her children. Nonetheless, jurors and Longoria believed Eastwood and Jiminez when they claimed Overton somehow snapped under the pressure of having a fifth child and killed her soon-to-be-adopted son.

As often is the case in Texas, there was a story that was not told, and evidence that neither jurors nor the defense had seen, but that prosecutors knew. But Nueces County prosecutors also knew something else: Sandra Eastwood was an alcoholic and drug addict, and was well-known for lying. She was ambitious, and often impaired, and those two characteristics meant that defendants, and especially high-profile defendants like Hannah Overton, would be tried in circumstances not unlike what was known to happen in communist countries like the former U.S.S.R.

 Prosecutors are officers of the court, and they also are required by law and by the rules set by the Texas State Bar not only to act ethically, but also to report unethical or dishonest actions of themselves or their peers to the authorities. Instead, as is usually the case in all prosecutorial offices in this country, both state and federal, the “ministers of justice” of Nueces County were silent, as they protected their own.

 Anna Jiminez knew a lot of things about Eastwood, and later after Jiminez was elected Nueces County District Attorney, she fired Eastwood. As second chair, she knew the case file and she claimed later that she suspected Eastwood was withholding evidence in violation of the Brady ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, and by the Rules of Conduct for prosecutors in the State of Texas. But while Jiminez reported Eastwood to her superiors, according to later testimony, she never reported Eastwood to the Texas State Bar, as was required by the rules of conduct that govern her as a lawyer and as a prosecutor. (Not surprisingly, Eastwood’s superiors did nothing. They enjoyed winning and if a few innocent people went to prison, that was collateral damage. And, anyway, everyone already knew that Hannah Overton was a monster.)

Fortunately for Overton, a number of people were not willing to accept this conviction and began their own investigations. The best journalism was done by Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly, who had this excellent and lengthy article in January of this year, and readers can find the particulars of the case if they so choose. Instead, I will deal with the police and prosecutorial abuse that sent Hannah Overton to prison for a “crime” that never happened.

 Nonetheless, one cannot blame police for being suspicious when the four-year-old child was brought to the emergency room and then later died. Colloff writes:

The death of a child – particularly a sudden, unexplained death in which abuse is suspected – evokes strong emotions, even among seasoned investigators, doctors, forensics experts, and prosecutors. A more thorough investigation would have uncovered ample evidence to suggest that Andrew had an undiagnosed eating disorder, raising the possibility that he had unintentionally consumed too much salt on his own. But law enforcement officials are accustomed to handling child abuse cases, not medical mysteries, and salt poisoning is rare enough that most emergency room doctors will never encounter a case during their careers. Against the backdrop of possible abuse, authorities wasted little time. Larry was charged with injury to a child for failing to get Andrew timely medical attention. The onus for the boy’s death fell on Hannah, who was charged with capital murder.

As they do in so many situations, the local journalists acted as little more than stenographers. Writes Colloff:

Corpus Christi’s introduction to Hannah came the following week, when she and Larry were arrested and led past a bank of TV cameras outside the Nueces County jail. News reports that followed, prominently featuring their grim-faced mug shots, cast the Overton home as a house of horrors. (“More shocking details on abuse suffered by four-year-old before death,” began one breathless report.)

Colloff adds:

The media coverage of the case stirred widespread outrage. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times’s online comments section filled with the vitriol of readers, some of whom called for Hannah to receive the death penalty. (“You can just tell by looking at her how evil she is,” one wrote.) Fueling the public’s antipathy was an affidavit written by a CPS child abuse investigator named Jesse Garcia, who claimed that Hannah had admitted to forcing Andrew to drink two cupfuls of “chili with water” and quoted her as saying that she then “beat the shit out of him.” Garcia never produced any documentation or witnesses to corroborate his claim, and internal police memos show that law enforcement officials doubted the veracity of his story. Hess disavowed Garcia’s account at a court hearing regarding the Overton children, and prosecutors never entered Garcia’s affidavit into evidence or called him to testify at Hannah’s trial. (He was subsequently fired by CPS after having three car accidents on the job in less than six months.) But the damage was done: that Hannah had confessed to force-feeding Andrew and beating him was repeated, uncorrected, on the local news.(Emphasis mine)

Rudy Giuliani said during his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the late 1980s that once he made the accusations, the media would do his work for him. Whether it was the “sophisticated” New York media, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, or the newspapers and television stations near Corpus Cristi, the relationship between prosecutors and the press has been insidious. Journalists rush to judgment, as they did in the case against Michael Milken, the Duke Lacrosse Case, and the case of Hannah Overton. Later, after the truth comes out, media representatives claim that they have “learned our lessons” and promise not to jump to conclusions. And then they repeat the process again and again.

In the area of “justice” and criminal accusations, narratives are a powerful force, and most journalists and government agents like to keep them simple: Michael Milken and Jack Abramoff were greedy Jews who lost their way and broke the law to get rich; the Duke lacrosse players were “privileged” white “jocks” in a violent sport who brutally beat and raped a poor black woman because they believed they were so “privileged” that they could get away with it; George Zimmerman was a white racist who hated blacks and gunned down Trayvon Martin in cold blood. The simple stories were so compelling; evidence that undermined the narratives was ignored or shouted down.

And so it was with Overton. The police and prosecutors had their narrative, and they were not going to let their prey go free, and the media simply did what it always does. But the prosecution also withheld evidence, as was discovered in an evidentiary hearing that ended last month. Yes, while Texas is a place where at least two innocent men have been executed recently, and while prosecutorial misconduct has dominated other wrongful convictions in that state, even the Texas State Court of Criminal Appeals decided that the evidence that jurors said convicted Overton was questionable, and that the court needed to examine what had happened.

 For example, after he was brought into the hospital, Andrew vomited and doctors took samples, but the defense never was told about it nor given any information. Colloff explains:

Forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, an assistant medical examiner in San Francisco who had testified at Hannah’s trial, then took the stand to explain how critical this sample would have been to understanding exactly what had happened to Andrew. Determining the precise makeup of his stomach contents and the time they were collected, she said, would have been pivotal in a case in which the defendant was accused of poisoning the victim. After reviewing all the evidence, Melinek said, she firmly believed that Andrew had ingested a fatal amount of salt on his own. Her opinion was bolstered by the testimony of Edgar Cortes, an emergency medicine pediatrician who had seen Andrew twice before his death. Cortes maintained that he had informed Eastwood prior to trial that the boy had suffered from significant cognitive delays. These delays, Cortes now testified, put Andrew at greater risk for eating inappropriate items and ingesting something lethal. Yet Andrew was portrayed during the trial as a normal four-year-old. As for why the jury never heard his medical opinion, Cortes stated, “I felt like the prosecution had its own theory about what happened.” 

At the evidentiary hearing ordered by the appeals court, Dr. Michael Moritz, one of the world’s leading experts on salt poisoning, told the court that none of the scenarios painted by the prosecution made sense, given all of the cases of salt poisoning he had seen:

Intentional salt poisoning, the doctor went on to explain, is extremely rare. When it does occur, the victims are often bottle-fed babies whose food supply can be easily tampered with. Moritz stated that there was only one documented case in which an older child—a five-year-old—was poisoned with salt, and there were obvious signs of a struggle, including lacerations to his lips and gums. Yet Andrew had no such lacerations. Typically, Moritz added, someone who salt-poisons a child is mentally ill or a drug addict and has a well-documented history of child abuse. “So what we’re seeing in this case does not fit with any cases of intentional salt poisoning in the literature,” Moritz said.

Judge Longoria periodically glanced down at the doctor when he spoke of children poisoning themselves, studying him with skepticism. Moritz described how “voluntary salt intoxication” almost uniformly happened to children who fit a narrow profile: they were between the ages of one and six, they had been in the foster system or were from abusive homes, and they had some form of eating disorder, such as pica. Andrew, who had tried to eat everything from cigarette butts to glow sticks to toothpaste, fit this profile well. 

Moritz had not testified at Hannah’s trial, and his testimony would seem to have been authoritative, but Nueces County prosecutors Doug Norman and Bill Ainsworth claimed that there was nothing new and that the jury’s verdict should stand no matter what. And then Sandra Eastwood took the stand.

 Eastwood admitted to being a recovering alcoholic who abused prescription diet pills during the trial. (Notice that while prosecutors will go after others who do the same, Eastwood got a free ride.) While she claimed to have turned over everything to the defense, it was clear that she was less-than-competent to give any useful information at all:

Under withering questioning from (attorney Garry) Goldstein, Eastwood answered “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” 72 times when asked whether she recognized notes written in her handwriting, emails sent from her own account, and papers signed with her signature. “I have trouble remembering phone numbers,” she said. “I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday. I think that’s normal. I had hundreds of conversations and there were thousands of documents, so I don’t remember specifics.”

 Goldstein became so exasperated with her that he asked if she remembered the trial itself. “You recall the trial, do you not?” he said. “The individual got life in prison.”

“The question is . . . ?” said Eastwood.

“Do you remember the trial?” Goldstein asked, his voice rising. “Yes,” she replied. “It ended in life without parole,” Goldstein scolded. “That means they spend the rest of their life in prison. You remember cases that have those kinds of consequences, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said softly. 

When Anna Jiminez took the stand, she said that she believed that Eastwood “was not truthful,” and that Eastwood had told her there had been no vomit or vomit samples taken. She admitted that she had no proof of Eastwood’s alleged misconduct, but then added that the kind of circumstantial evidence that made her believe Eastwood had lied was the kind of evidence that gets people convicted in criminal court.

With the hearing ended, prosecutors parroted their own views that the hearing had produced nothing to make them change their minds about Hannah Overton’s guilt. However, it is a very rare prosecutor who even admits that any conviction was wrong and Texas prosecutors are, well, Texas prosecutors: even when the evidence against them is overwhelming, they make up fantasy stories or just lie.

I have no idea how this case will end. Judge Longoria, as one might expect, ignored all of the medical evidence given to him and recommended that Overton not receive a new trial. However, he does not have the final say in this situation. In retrospect, there was no way that Longoria ever would admit to having made errors during Overton’s 2007 show trial, and it is a rare judge anywhere that will admit to having been wrong. Nonetheless, I imagine that with the media now questioning the verdict with the same ferocity that they once condemned Overton, even the Texas courts cannot ignore the firestorm. So, while it seems certain that Longoria will claim that “no new evidence” was introduced during the hearing, his superiors will overrule him.

As I see it, however, this case is much more than just another example of prosecutors bringing junk science into the courtroom and trying to make facts fit their narratives. The real story is that nothing is done about it, and that is because the U.S. Supreme Court – and especially the conservative wing – has torn down all of the fences that are needed to give ordinary citizens an opportunity to keep police, prosecutors, and judges honest.

In decision after decision, the SCOTUS has ruled that prosecutors must be given absolute immunity from lawsuits filed by people wrongfully convicted. True, the high court has claimed that official remedies exist such as criminal prosecution for wrongdoing or discipline by various state bars, including disbarment.

While this may sound good, one should remember that the disbarment of Duke lacrosse prosecutor Michael Nifong was extraordinary precisely because such actions by a state bar are extremely rare. Two years ago, I spoke to a member of the Georgia State Bar about extreme misconduct by two prosecutors in the district where I once lived, citing chapter and verse from the Georgia State Bar Rules for Prosecutors, and the woman to whom I spoke blew it off. “They were just doing their jobs,” she replied.

I asked, “Do you mean to tell me that suborning perjury (and the perjury was obvious, and some of the dishonest witnesses even have admitted to lying since the particular trial), lying to jurors during the closing arguments, making outrageous public comments, disrupting the trial with catcalls and loud noises, fabricating evidence and such are ‘their jobs’?” She hung up.

While it may sound highly official that prosecutors, police, and judges have government agencies which can levy charges and punishment upon them when they engage in misconduct, in truth, these agencies really are the proverbial foxes guarding the hen houses. Lawsuits filed by people actually injured by misconduct, however, are the only real mechanism that people outside the employment of government can employ to gain at least some matter of redress. Texas happens to be a big offender, but the problem is universal in this country.

Government agents in the “justice” system protect their own, as those entrusted with overseeing wrongdoing within their ranks operate according to a perverse logic: if the public were to see just how often misconduct and wrongdoing are part of the prosecutorial process, then the public would lose confidence in the honesty of the people engaging in misconduct and wrongdoing, and then might question that system that sends innocent people to prison or even their deaths. Got that?

Thomas DiLorenzo has written more than once that the government now has become the final judge and arbiter of its own actions, which destroys any meaningful systems of accountability. While government repeatedly tears down the fences that restrict the actions of government agents, it increasingly is erecting arbitrary fences around everyone else who is not part of the “club.” In the situation of prosecutorial misconduct, the problem is not “a few bad apples,” as prosecutors, judges, and the media tell us ad nauseum.

No, the barrel itself is rotten, and the few good apples that are left either are corrupted, compromised, or get out before they lose their souls.

Welcome to Hell! (Or, Demopolis, Alabama)

Will Grigg has this week's biggest outrage, a farce of a drug trial in Alabama in which Alabama jurors send an innocent woman to prison. A woman buys three boxes of Sudafed and goes to jail, where she is tortured by Alabama's finest.

While I grew up in the South and went to graduate school at Auburn University, I must say that Alabama is a most shameful place. It was the state that gave us the 16th Street Church bombing in 1963, numerous murders of innocent people (for which there never was even a criminal charge brought, much less a trial), and now it is a full partner in the nation's disgraceful Drug War.

One cannot read this story without hitting a boiling point. My advice to people is just for them to stay out of Alabama (and the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit in Georgia), as the police and prosecutors there are crooks and pathological liars, and the judges are not any better. I once referred to Demopolis as "the very bowels of Hell," and I realize that I must not have been joking.

Those "truthful" cops

Thanks to recordings, we often are treated to a regular spectacle: cops lying about arrests, their activities, and then lying under oath. While I would like to think that such dishonest activities are limited to the LMJC, in reality, lying has become a way of life for those wearing the blue costume.

In Coral Springs, Florida, two officers lied under oath, not knowing that their activities had been recorded and now are in the court record. Not surprisingly, both cops still are on the force and have faced no legal problems or discipline at all. Keep in mind that perjury is a felony, something for which regular people go to prison -- unless they are cops or are witnesses whose perjury was suborned by prosecutors. (See Chris Arnt, Len Gregor, Alan Norton, and Buzz Franklin for instructions on how to legally lie under oath.)

The two officers in this story, Nicole Stasnek and Derek Fernandes, both committed perjury (the article has the depositions of each officer, and depositions are taken under oath) and you can see that the officers are lying. In other words, Stasnek and Fernandes both are felons, a nice word for criminals. They also are cops on duty. I wonder how many other members of the "thin, blue line" also fall into that category.

The LMJC and the Culture of Legal Corruption

When my family moved to Lookout Mountain in 1964, I must admit that parts of the region known as Northwest Georgia were reminiscent of places I have seen in Third World countries. Until moving there, I never had seen tarpaper shacks, children at school with what seemed to be permanently dirty faces, and general, grinding poverty.

Much has changed in that region since then. While there still are poor people, the poverty I saw hardly is widespread anymore, and in many ways, the region can be a pleasant place in which to live. Unfortunately, its legal climate is still stuck in 1964, a time when it was de facto legal in the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit for a white man to murder a black man.

My father brought us down to the LMJC when Covenant College moved from St. Louis to the old Castle in the Clouds, and at Covenant, which is located in Dade County, black students were told in no uncertain terms that they were NOT to be seen walking south of the college's property, and especially along Highway 157. In fact, over the years, a number of black students did receive death threats from the good people residing in the LMJC, but no one was killed. I'm sure that had someone killed one of Covenant's black students, he would not have been charged or prosecuted.

This was a time when the Dade County portion of Sand Mountain had a sign that declared: "N*gger, don't let the sun set on you here." The people there meant every word, and I still would caution any black person from venturing up there without an armed escort. That was the kind of place the LMJC was then, and while I don't see the same overt racism that once characterized the place, the area's "justice" system is racist, as Len Gregor proved during the Tonya Craft trial, when he lied to jurors, telling them that Ms. Craft has slept with a black man.

Now, for the most part, I do consider many of the people living in the LMJC to be honest, or at least decently honest. Unfortunately, they put up with a culture of corruption that exists with police, prosecutors, and, yes, judges.

To be fair, the LMJC hardly stands alone. My friends from Texas tell me horror tales of Williamson County police, courts, and prosecutors, and K.C. Johnson has a great post on his blog about the legal corruption that permeates Durham County, North Carolina. Interestingly, in many ways, the corruption of the LMCJ and Durham County seems to be similar.

What makes this point even more interesting is that demographically and politically, the two places hardly could be more different. The LMJC is overwhelmingly white and politically conservative. The most prominent college in that district, Covenant College, is both theologically and socially conservative. The region abounds with "Bible-believing" churches and I would venture to say that a large portion of the population claims to be "saved."

Durham County, on the other hand, is dominated by the hard left, including a coalition of blacks and activists associated with Duke University. Duke would be the antithesis of Covenant, its student body dominated by "hookup" culture, and the university does everything it can to promote gratuitous sex by handing out condoms everywhere and promoting disgusting things like the "Sex Workers Show" on campus. The university there is not "liberal" by any means; no, it is hard left, and though it is tied to the United Methodist Church, the university itself is virulently hostile to anything that might smack of Christianity.

Yet, when it comes to issues of justice, these communities are mirror images of each other. Durham was made infamous by its attempt to railroad three Duke University lacrosse players into prison for allegedly raping a black stripper, Crystal Mangum. As the case wore on, it became clear that the prosecutor, Michael Nifong, was lying and hiding exculpatory evidence, even while he rode the case to electoral victory, as the black voters of that county demanded a trial (and one person told Newsweek that it did not matter if the players were guilty, as they should be convicted solely because they were white).

The North Carolina State Bar intervened, and ultimately the charges were investigated by special prosecutors employed by North Carolina's attorney general. After a thorough investigation, the AG declared the players to be "innocent" and told the media that Nifong was a "rogue prosecutor." Later in 2007, the State Bar stripped Nifong of his law license, and he was removed as Durham County's AD.

Just five years later, Nifong's successor, Tracey Cline, a black woman who was second chair in the lacrosse case (and who lied about her involvement in it -- lying is part of the legal culture in that county), was removed from her office because of inflammatory statements she made in publicly attacking the senior judge in that county. (The judge also is black.) So, twice in five years, Durham County has seen its top prosecutors removed forcibly from office for misconduct.

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So, why would I compare the LMJC to Durham, despite all of its cultural and racial differences? Like Durham, the prosecutors in the LMJC have a sorry history of withholding evidence and fabricating documents. Unlike Durham, there is no state bar and apparently no judicial or legal apparatus at all in the State of Georgia that effectively deals with prosecutorial misconduct.

However, like Durham, the LMJC has a policy of taking sex cases to trial no matter what the evidence might be. And like Durham, prosecutors in the LMJC always take the side of an accuser in a sex crime, no matter how specious the evidence actually might be, and like Nifong, LMJC prosecutors, once they latch onto a sex case, take a "win at all costs" mentality that throws justice out the window.

It was not just the Craft case. Brad Wade sits in prison and the case that Len Gregor brought against him was so dishonest and so bogus that it is hard to believe he was convicted of child molestation. The reason is one more strike against the LMJC: defense attorneys in that district know that their job is to offer up defendants to the altar of conviction.

Now, when someone is charged with a crime in the LMJC, that person faces a terrible dilemma: hire a local attorney (which prosecutors and judges prefer) and automatically get convicted, or hire someone outside the LMJC who will be roundly attacked by prosecutors, sneered at by judges, yet might be willing to put up a real defense. In the Craft case, prosecutors Chris Arnt and Len Gregor routinely launched verbal attacks against Tonya's defense team, made snide remarks, tried to disrupt defense attorneys while they were questioning witnesses, yet "judge" Brian House not only ignored the misconduct of the prosecutors, but actually teamed up with them in an attempt to rig a conviction.

(While I know there are some attorneys in the LMJC who have integrity, nonetheless the judges and Buzz Franklin and his minions have made it absolutely clear that an aggressive defense is not permitted -- even while prosecutors are permitted to run wild. The one exception is Bobby Lee Cook, who is permitted to win once in a while.)

The jurors in the Craft case did something that neither House nor the prosecutors ever could imagine them doing: demonstrate integrity. The shocked, ashen look on House's face when the verdict was being read spoke volumes to the integrity or the lack thereof of the people in the LMJC who are in positions of authority.

You see, if there is one thing that I believe characterizes the LMJC is the belief of the principals in that district who really seem to believe that they ARE the law, and that they are entitled to do whatever they damn well please. Anyone who followed the Duke Lacrosse Case can attest to the arrogance of prosecutor Mike Nifong and everyone else in the Durham "justice" system. Like Buzz Franklin, Arnt and Gregor, Nifong knew that his authority alone could force a bogus case to trial, and he also believed that a Durham jury would be craven enough to convict the players despite the fact that Nifong had no evidence -- and he knew he had no evidence, which is why he continuously lied to judges throughout the proceedings.

Likewise, House teamed with Arnt, Gregor, and Tim Deal not only to help Deal commit a felony (fabricating a document during the trial in order to fill a huge hole in the evidence), but also meeting secretly with the prosecutors in order to further their strategy. Observers at the hearings before the trial began told me that House was utterly hostile to ANY attorney for Craft that did not come from the LMJC and that he routinely and automatically ruled against the defense no matter how ridiculous the prosecution's position might have been.

The trial itself was a farce, but the difference -- and this was a huge difference -- was that the jurors did not take the bait from House and the prosecutors and act in a hostile manner toward the defense. House, Arnt, and Gregor believed that the jurors automatically would discount EVERYTHING the defense did because neither they nor their expert witnesses were from the LMJC, but that is not what happened. Instead, the jurors acted like people who wanted to do justice, and did not act like House, Arnt, and Gregor.

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All of this raises a question as to why this kind of legal corruption exists in the LMJC. Why are police and prosecutors permitted to literally commit felonies in broad daylight, yet nothing is done? Why the silence from the media and the other gatekeepers, and especially the churches and the largest and most influential "gatekeeper" in the LMJC, Covenant College?

Other than one pastor, no one in a position of influence has spoken out about the massive lawbreaking, lying, and misconduct that has become the very trademark of the LMJC. During the Craft trial, no one from Covenant demonstrated a whit of concern as to what was happening, and at least one administrator there is friends with Holly Kittle, who to me represents everything that is wrong with the LMJC.

(Covenant says that it is "reclaiming the world for Jesus Christ," but the one part of the world that matters -- its own backyard -- apparently is off-limits when it comes to "reclaiming" for Christ. As I see it, the people there believe that legal trouble is for "other people," and if by chance someone from Covenant were to be falsely accused, most likely the administration and faculty there would do what evangelical Christians usually seem to do when one of their own is in crisis: shoot their wounded and move along.)

In the end, we see small, dishonest people gaining enormous amounts of power and authority, and they use it like a club against the innocent. Tonya Craft, Brad Wade, and James Combs can tell you that when it comes to dishonesty, no one does it better than the police, judges and prosecutors of the LMJC. Perhaps in my lifetime, someone, somewhere in a position of authority in Northwest Georgia will do what is right, but I have my doubts.

Will Buzz prosecute REAL child molesters? Probably not.

The LMJC is a study in the worst kind of "justice" there is: the innocent are prosecuted and convicted, while people who obviously are guilty get a free pass. We see yet another example in the following story in which a Catoosa County deputy was fired for having a "relationship" with an underage female:

A Catoosa County deputy has been fired for having relations with a juvenile girl.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the matter, did not return phone calls seeking more information.

District attorney Herbert "Buzz" Franklin said the deputy had a relationship with a juvenile female.

"Subsequent to the completion of the investigation the case ... a decision will be made as to whether or not charges will be filed," the district attorney said. "(GBI) special agent James Harris is the case agent for the investigation."

“Deputy Stephen Crossen was terminated yesterday for violating departmental policy,” sheriff Phil Summers said in a news release Thursday. “Mr. Crossen has been employed by the Sheriff’s Office for approximately 5½ years.

Well, it sounds serious, right? Except read the following line:

“Apparently misinformation has been provided to news sources and I felt it was important to correct this information,” the sheriff said. “Mr. Crossen was not arrested and to my knowledge, an arrest is not imminent."

There you have it, folks. A deputy in the LMJC engages in the very least a technical form of "child molestation" and who knows what else, and there is no arrest, nothing. To be honest, I am even surprised the Sheriff Phil Summers fired him, given that one of his employees, Det. Tim Deal, fabricated a document during a trial, something that everyone, including Summers, knew was happening.

During the Tonya Craft trial, lawbreaking at every official level occurred, and now we see official lawbreaking continuing. Yet, if you are in the "right" group in the LMJC, you can break the law and get away with it. And this is not the first time a deputy in the LMJC has been able to get away with acts that result in prison for those not wearing the proper LMJC costumes.

So, my advice to men who have a fetish for young girls is that they first get hired in the LMJC, and then what previously was against the law suddenly will become legal. That is the law in Northwest Georgia, unfortunately.

The False Confession Industry

When questions arose about whether or the teens that allegedly assaulted and raped a female jogger in Central Park years ago were wrongfully convicted, conservative columnist Ann Coulter remarked that of course the convictions were correct. Why? Police had the teens' confessions, she wrote, which should have eliminated all future questions regarding justice in that case.

Indeed, most people believe that a confession is the Gold Standard of criminal evidence, and that a confession should trump everything else, including forensic evidence (such as DNA matches) and even the Laws of Time and Space. Author David K. Shipler has an intriguing article on the New York Times op-ed page that goes into some detail about false confessions and the smarmy tactics police and prosecutors use to get them.

Beginning with the interrogation of a juvenile police tricked into confessing to a crime he didn't commit (it seems that the boy was in juvenile lockup when the murder of a policeman was committed, although that little fact did not stop police from trying to get him convicted), Shipler notes that jurors don't like to believe that innocent people would falsely confess, and judges don't want to believe it, either. Yet, they do. Writes Shipler:

False confessions have figured in 24 percent of the approximately 289 convictions reversed by DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project. Considering that DNA is available in just a fraction of all crimes, a much larger universe of erroneous convictions surely exists. If nearly a quarter of overturned convictions involves a false confession, police interrogations are creating an epidemic of injustice.

And who confesses? He notes:

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?

Yes, all of the above. Psychological studies of confessions that have proved false show an overrepresentation of children, the mentally ill or mentally retarded, and suspects high on drugs or drunk on liquor. They are susceptible to suggestion, eager to please authority figures, disconnected from reality or unable to defer gratification. Children often think, as Felix did, that they will be jailed if they keep up their denials and will get to go home if they just go along with the interrogator. Mature adults of normal intelligence have also confessed falsely after being manipulated.

One of the most egregious cases of false confession involved the wrongful conviction of Martin Tankleff, who at age 17 was alleged to have brutally murdered his parents. Tankleff was in prison for 17 years until his conviction was overturned a few years ago, and it turned out that police and prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence in order to better secure a conviction.

The Tankleff case hits home because I am good friends with a person who was working with the lawyer who finally was successful in securing Tankleff's release from prison. Legal documents that I read long before they became public were quite chilling.

First, there was another suspect who clearly had motive to kill the Tankleffs and he had a reputation for violence. Second, had personal ties with a police detective who just happened to be involved with the Tankleff case and was in a good position to lead investigators away from the real killer. Third, the nature of the evidence itself demonstrated that Martin was not the likely killer.

Yet, none of that mattered to police and prosecutors. They wanted a conviction, and Martin was a convenient target. Writes Shipler:

A cunning lie generated a false confession from Martin Tankleff, 17, who found his parents one morning in their Long Island home slashed and stabbed, his mother dead, his father barely alive. The boy called 911 and was taken for questioning. Getting nowhere, Detective K. James McCready decided on a trick. He walked to an adjacent room within hearing distance, dialed an extension on the next desk, picked up the phone and faked a conversation with an imaginary officer at the hospital. He went back to the son and told him that his father had come out of his coma and said, “Marty, you did it.” In fact, Seymour Tankleff never regained consciousness and died a month later.

Martin soon confessed to the killing (and he managed to get the details of the murder wrong, but that didn't matter to police and prosecutors), and although he quickly recanted, the confession was allowed during the trial and the jurors dutifully convicted an innocent man.

As is often the case in American life today, where there is government wrongdoing, often there is someone to make money from it. With false confessions it is John E. Reid & Associates. One of the "tricks" that Reid teaches is how to slip in a Miranda warning without the person being interrogated realizing what is happening. In other words, Reid teaches police and other "interrogators" who to manipulate and lie, knowing that these things often bring about false confessions. However, convictions, not truth fills the bottom line for Reid.

While I would agree that most people in prison are guilty, nonetheless the realization that probably thousands of people languishing behind bars are innocent is not something that decent people should tolerate. Once upon a time, we depended upon police and prosecutors to be the agents that would investigate and find out what the truth really was.

Unfortunately, those days are long behind us. Truth no longer matters, and it no longer matters with the people who claim always to be telling the truth, and whose lies have horrible and bloody consequences.

The lawless LMJC

Two years ago this blog went all-out during the Tonya Craft trial and aftermath because it was clear that cops like Tim Deal, prosecutors like Buzz Franklin, Chris Arnt, and Len Gregor, along with "judge" brian outhouse were knowingly trying to railroad an innocent person into prison. The not-guilty verdict and jurors' comments afterward about the outright crookedness of that trial apparently have had no effect on the LMJC crowd except to make them even more determined to get away with lawlessness.

Today, it is Joe Mowish, who has been arrested again on "gambling" charges when, in fact, that Franklin knows that Mowish's activities are legal. This is not a situation of a prosecutor and police misreading the law or misunderstanding it. No, this is a pure power play that is illegal and in a place where the law was respected would lead to disbarment of Buzz Franklin and his staff.

Because the Georgia State Bar does not consider prosecutorial misconduct to be something worth investigating, any actions to deal with the dishonesty and outright lawbreaking of Franklin, outhouse, and Deal are going to have to come from the citizens at large. That means that jurors should be hyper-careful when prosecutors lie, when Deal and others in "law enforcement" testify, and when people like outhouse make outrageous ruling.

There are a number of cases in the LMJC that have come to my attention and I will be looking into them. From what I can see, as long as the people who live in Dade, Chattooga, Walker, and Catoosa counties are happy with the kind of people who are in public office, we also can expect the kind of dishonest and illegal behavior we saw with the Craft case and everything else that these people foist upon the innocent.

The Valerie Carlton Case...Again

In 2010, I wrote a number of posts regarding the false charges against Valerie Carlton in Harford County, Maryland, home of the infamous prosecutor Joseph Casilly, who once tried to have a man put into prison for 15 years because he had the audacity to film a cop sticking a gun in his face.

When faced with the reality that Carlton was not guilty of child molestation, Casilly suddenly dropped the charges (after holding Carlton in jail for 13 months), but kept a misdemeanor charge against her for "assaulting a prison guard." Unfortunately, she recently was arrested in New York, which is trying to extradite her to Maryland to stand trial for this misdemeanor.

The video of the alleged assault is shown in this link, but although the images that I saw were not very clear, it is clear that if anyone is being assaulted in this video, it is Carlton, not the guard. (I must admit that I was brought up in an era that men who physically attacked women -- and especially women smaller than them -- were considered to be utter scum. Today, police beat up women all the time and are called "heroes.")

This is a very, very disturbing case on many levels. First, Casilly piled up 28 felony charges against Carlton, having her held on $10 million bond, and then he suddenly dropped all of them, which tells me that he had no evidence at the beginning and simply lied to a judge and grand jury. Second, while she was in jail, Casilly made sure her child was taken away from her and put into foster care. The child then died while in foster care, and this account explains how Casilly made sure that the officials at the Harford County Detention Center furthered the psychological torture of this woman:

Valerie was informed of her baby's death while she was in jail, but the prosecutor arranged that the Chaplain was not permitted to perform this duty; instead it was done by an employee of the Sheriff's office who brutally announced that the baby was dead, and then had Valerie strapped into a medieval torture de!=vice, called a "restraint chair," so that she choked on her own mucus as she wept and tried to pray for her dead baby. The Sheriff's department claimed, in writing, that Valerie was "talking in tongues" because she was praying in Hebrew. An employee of the Sheriff's Department apparently told this nonsense to the ex-husband's family, who spread the rumor that Valerie was insane because of the way she responded to the death of her baby.

So, as you can see, this case is far from over. Once again, we see a prosecutor who knows he will face no sanctions in Maryland for his misconduct. We also see the system turned in its full fury against someone who is not a criminal.

Like it or not, this is the country in which we live, and from what I can see, Americans are quite happy to accept what is happening -- as long as it happens to someone else and not themselves.

Who is this guy kidding?

In a recent op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, James Kirchick, a contributor to The New Republic, deals with the recent statements of Shane Bauer after being released from an Iranian prison.

Now, I must admit that Bauer made statements following his release (Iran accused Bauer and two other American hikers in that region of being spies) that most Americans would not find agreeable, and Kirchick jumps on them heavily -- and with some justification:

On July 31, 2009, you're traversing a mountain trail in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. You're with one of your best friends and your girlfriend. Suddenly a group of Iranian border guards capture you, and the next thing you know you're in Tehran's infamous Evin prison accused of "illegal entry" and "espionage."

Your girlfriend is kept in solitary confinement and you can see her only for an hour each day. The Iranian government prevents you from contacting your family for almost a year, at which point they decide to let your mother visit you for two days at a Tehran hotel.

While your captors treat you humanely and provide three square meals a day, your Iranian co-prisoners aren't so lucky. Every night you hear their screams. Evin is the world's most notorious torture dungeon, where political dissidents (men and women) are routinely raped, beaten and subjected to all manner of physical and psychological abuse.

Ahmad Batebi, a student activist who spent 17 months in solitary confinement there, reports that guards kicked him in the teeth, dunked his head into a toilet "stopped up with feces," and whipped his back and testicles with a cable. When he tried to sleep, they slashed his arms with a knife and rubbed salt in the wounds.

As you sit in this hellhole, no less than the president of the United States takes up your cause, insisting that you "never worked for the United States government," that you're "simply open-minded and adventurous" and "represent the best of America and of the human spirit."

Following two years of strenuous work on the part of committed American diplomats, you are freed on $500,000 bail, paid by the billionaire Sultan of Oman. And what is the first thing you say upon your release?

"Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran."

But, it is the next paragraph that I do find objectionable and, frankly, untrue: "Mr. Bauer didn't name any of the "political prisoners" allegedly held in America's jails—because there aren't any." He goes on:

The American justice system is far from perfect. But it is transparent, offers the right of appeal, and is routinely challenged by a free press and active civil society. Moreover, it doesn't imprison people for their political beliefs.

I wish that were true. I wish that there were real transparency, and I wish that the appeals courts actually took more time to examine convictions that have occurred in kangaroo courts.

For example, I suspect that Brad Wade and Brad Cooper would laugh at the notion that American courts were "transparent." Because prosecutors are immune from serious punishment for acts of blatant misconduct, hiding exculpatory evidence, lying, and suborning perjury (sorry, but disbarment is not serious compared to innocent people going to prison) we have seen U.S. courts -- state and federal -- turn into charnal houses for the innocent.

A recent article in the New York Times spelled out what has been happening:

After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties.

Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather than simple matters of guilt or innocence. In effect, prosecutors are giving defendants more reasons to avoid having their day in court.

“We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors,” said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that “in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage.”

Furthermore, it is clear that many prosecutions in the USA are done for political purposes or to appeal to a political constituency. A couple of examples include the federal trials of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles and of Limerick Nelson, who was acquitted in state court of stabbing a rabbinical student to death in Brooklyn.

In both cases, the defendants had been acquitted at the state level, and while the verdicts were unpopular, constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy should have been honored. Instead -- with approval of the courts -- the defendants were charged in federal court with different "crimes" for the same acts.

Not surprisingly, jurors got political message in both cases and the defendants were found guilty. The second time around, the system "got it right." It does not matter that in the process of "getting it right," courts and prosecutors destroyed one of the most important legal protections that anyone could have.

At the founding of this country, the law followed the natural rights views of the great English jurist William Blackstone, and the bedrock of criminal law was "mens rea, or Latin for "a guilty mind." Intent was a big portion of the law, and prosecutors were not to pursue criminal charges unless they also could prove that an individual intended to commit a crime, and did not just ignorantly run afoul of some arbitrary rules.

That situation no longer exists, as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out in a stunning article:

For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a "guilty mind."

This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time.

The paper then takes the case of Wade Martin in Alaska:

When the police came to Wade Martin's home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can't. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.

Mr. Martin, 50 years old, readily admitted making the sale. "Then, they told me the buyer wasn't a native," he recalls.

The law requires that animals sold to non-Native Alaskans be converted into handicrafts. He knew the law, Mr. Martin said, and he had thought the buyer was Native Alaskan.

He pleaded guilty in 2008. The government didn't have to prove he knew his conduct was illegal, his lawyer told him. They merely had to show he had made the sale.

The article gives a number of other cases in which conduct by individuals that they never even thought might violate the law led either to prison time or criminal convictions and probation. Why does this happen? It happens because American prosecutors have become all-powerful. Lew Rockwell writes:

Those raised on a steady diet of courtroom television shows believe that they are true to the way justice is meted out. This is completely naive. Trials in federal criminal cases are rare. Nine in ten cases are settled in pleas like the above case. Only 3 percent of the cases go to trial. Among those that go to trial, the defendant wins once in every 212 times.

What this means is that there is no way out for the accused. The prosecutors have all the power. Not even the judge has discretion because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime. This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001. For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein.

It was not "liberals" or "conservatives" who did this. It was both parties acting with massive support of the American public, as tyrants in the public sector licked their chops. This was a result of security-minded madness, and even now hardly anyone cares.

He continues:

Today, every single citizen, no matter how free he or she may feel in daily life, is in reality a sitting duck. You can be made to disappear. There is essentially no way you can escape once the feds sweep you into their net. There is no justice. The total states of the past used to pretend to have trial-based convictions. The total state of the present doesn’t even bother. It just puts a sack over your head and takes you away.

When Rockwell writes that we now are in a police state, he is not using hyperbole. The USA IS a police state. It has by far the highest number of people incarcerated (more than two million) of any country in the world and a fourth of the entire world's prison population.

People are expected not only to know all of the laws that are passed (the courts have ruled that "ignorance of the law is no excuse") and the ONLY people who are not punished for ignorance of the law are police, prosecutors, and judges. I am not kidding.

Thus, we often see prosecutions made for political -- yes, political -- reasons. Why did Michael Nifong pursue rape charges against the three Duke students he knew were innocent of any crimes? Because he wanted to win an election, and he knew that his actions, no matter how outrageous, were popular with a number of political constituencies, including the "Progressive" crowd at the New York Times, which supported him until his case utterly fell apart.

And Rockwell is correct that all of this is a prescription for tyranny, the very kind of tyranny that Kirchick claims does not exist in the USA, only in rogue countries like Iran. How did this come about? It is very simple: Progressives, including people like Herbert Croly, who founded The New Republic, believed that individuals should not have protections against State power because a society could "progress" only if the State could advance the agendas of the intelligentsia without interference from "obsolete" documents like the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, most of the rights that were guaranteed (not granted, as Progressives like to claim) by the Constitution now either have been breached or have disappeared altogether. We literally are at the mercy of police, prosecutors, and judges, who are free to frame whom they like and unless one can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars quickly, people who are targeted pretty much disappear.

None of this excuses what Iran did to the three hikers, nor does it explain or justify everything that Bauer told the media. For that matter, many of the same leftist groups with whom Bauer is associated have been front-and-center in the destruction of rights in this country.

Iran is governed by a rogue and cruel regime and I have no use for people who engage in torture, beatings, and imprisonment of people simply for their political or religious beliefs. However, we really should not kid ourselves that Americans are above acting like the Iranians. From the CIA renditions to Guantanamo to the daily abuses of the law and outright decency that prosecutors commit while they are "just doing their jobs," people in this country who legally operate without boundaries also are capable of cruelty and outright murder.

Lynn Blanchard outlines the police misconduct in the Brad Cooper case

The wrongful conviction of Brad Cooper for the murder of his wife -- and I have no doubt that it was wrongful -- is testament to the corruption of police and prosecutors in North Carolina. When someone trots out the "they disbarred Mike Nifong" line, keep in mind that Nifong not only acted unethically, but he also acted criminally, yet there was no investigation of this erstwhile felon.

It always has been my contention that when it comes to police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct, the authorities will toss out a bone in order to make it look as though they are "doing something" about the lies and corruption. That is what was done in the Duke Lacrosse Case, and now that the State Bar has Nifong's trophy on their wall, the members are free to look the other way when it comes to outright criminal behavior on behalf of prosecutors.

Lynn Blanchard had done a heroic job in pointing out the massive misconduct and outright lying that was part and parcel to the Cooper case. From the police to the judge (who is a former cop and prosecutor, so he knows all of the tricks and is anxious to remain in the club). Her latest post outlines the police misconduct in the case, and I would urge you to read it.

I list two sections below:

Fabricated evidence/shoes: The police and prosecutors put a great deal of focus on shoes in this case. In all three cases the facts were misrepresented. First, Detective Young claimed to have found two right shoes, implying that while hastily cleaning up the crime scene, Brad grabbed two left shoes by mistake and disposed of them. During the trial there was a LOT of discussion about the “missing” two left shoes and honestly, it does sound good if you believe someone is guilty. However, the truth is that the two right shoes were different sizes, different styles, were not even Nancy’s current size and they were not even found in the house! There were a ton of shoes scattered all throughout the Cooper’s home and Young “found” the mismatched shoes on a shelf in the garage. Clearly this was fabricated evidence and the prosecutors had no problem using it at the trial. They made sure they highlighted this in closing.

Then throughout the trial they referred to Brad’s missing shoes, the pair he was wearing in the Harris Teeter video. It was their theory that he disposed of the body right before that trip and that is the significance of the “missing” shoes. The site where the body was found was extremely muddy and if Brad had been there in those shoes, mud would have been in the car, on his shoes and on the floor in the HT video. It was not. Detective Young testified that he never asked Brad for the shoes, it’s not in any of his notes that he ever searched for the shoes and the shoes were not even included in the initial search warrant. They were included in a search warrant right after his arrest, over three months later. Yet, the prosecutors went on and on about Brad’s “missing” shoes. I can’t think of any reason why they neglected to find and examine those shoes in those first days of the investigation. They had the HT video on July 12th.

Finally, there’s Nancy’s missing Sauconys. Brad told Young on 7/13 that Nancy had 3 pairs of running shoes. One pair was never found and that is obviously the pair she wore that morning when she left to go running. Police found the receipt for those shoes at the Athlete’s Foot store. Brad told police that Nancy purchased her running shoes there. They tried to determine if Nancy possibly returned that pair of shoes. Young testified that the store was unable to determine whether or not the shoes had been returned. That was a lie that was revealed in further testimony when he read his signed statement about the store verifying that the shoes had never been returned at that store. Why would the police detective feel compelled to lie on the stand if the investigation was honest? Again, the prosecutors ran with this and stated to the jury that Nancy’s only running shoes were in the home.

“The bed did not appear to have been slept in” - Detective Daniels had this written in his notes on 7/12, referring to Nancy’s bed. But the bed did look slept in. Photos displayed during the trial confirmed this. When asked, officer Hayes testified that it looked as if someone sat in it. When the defense attorney asked Daniels about the bed, he testified that he first wrote the note that the bed didn’t look slept in, sat in the bed, did not document that he sat in it, then took a photo of the bed. It is simply unbelievable. The bedding would later be sent to SBI for bodily fluid and fiber analysis and Daniels didn’t bother to inform SBI that he had contaminated it by sitting on it. Please watch trial summary part 2 for testimony on this.

So, Brad Cooper is in prison while a murderer runs free. THAT is justice in North Carolina. I have come to believe that cops and prosecutors pretty much don't care if they get the "right" person, just as long as they get SOMEONE.

No good deed goes unpunished: the saga of Ken Buck

Last November, Ken Buck, a prosecutor who ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Colorado, was narrowly defeated. As a Tea Party and Republican candidate, he already was the target of the media, and when it was publicized that he refused to prosecute a particular alleged rape case, you can imagine what the media reaction became.

Mother Jones, the hard-left publication, all-but-declared this refusal was "proof" that Buck was a misogynist. Declared the magazine:

On the campaign trail, Buck has called this a nonstory. But between this, his controversial "high heels" attack ad against a female primary challenger, and his view that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of rape and incest, Buck's been beset by charges of sexism in his race with incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet (D). The victim says that's at the heart of Buck's non-prosecution of her alleged attacker. "It reflects his stereotypes," she says. "It shows that he's unable to [fulfill] his professional duties without taking his personal biases and stereotypes into consideration."

Other publication, from Salon to the Huffington Post to The Atlantic also followed suit with similar accusation, and the hard-left blogs had a field day. HERE IS A GUY WHO SUPPORTS RAPE!! As these same media outlets spewed forth their rhetoric in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, so they gave the open-and-shut opinion which one has come to expect.

Libertarian writer James Bovard once told me that in politics, no one cares about the truth, and I will say that political journalism falls into that category. None of the writers whom I contacted on this story really cared whether or not what they were saying was true. In fact, to all of them, it was true by definition. To put it another way, the facts did not matter because political ideology always trumps the truth, as it is politics and the media that determine truth, anyway.

The syllogism went like this:

• Ken Buck is running as a conservative Republican
• All conservative Republicans are misogynists who support rape
• Therefore, Ken Buck did not pursue a "slam dunk" rape case because of political ideology.

There are two things, however, that would negate this syllogism as well as the tone of the "news" coverage. First, one would have to assume, from reading these journalists and law professors, that Buck's office in Weld County never, ever prosecuted rape cases, or was ideologically reluctant to do so. Yet, there is nothing in the record to show that Weld County prosecutors refused to prosecute rape cases.

The second thing is even more telling and more important, and was unknown to the media: a key investigator in this case, someone who is not associated with the Tea Party or conservative politics and who has helped put many rapists behind bars, strongly believed these accusations to be false. This person's input into the case was not irrelevant, and in my personal dealings with the person, I find nothing but credibility and lots of it.

In other words, Buck took advice from someone who understood the situation much better than did any of the media people or law professors who were using this case to push their own partisan political agendas. The difference is that the particular adviser was looking at the facts, while the others did not care, as facts never do seem to matter to political ideologues.

There is another matter I believe that the media conveniently left out: Ken Buck played an important role in seeking justice after the railroading and wrongful conviction of Tim Masters. (Masters was convicted of the murder of Peggy Hettrick after Fort Collins Det. Jim Broderick lied during the investigation and then lied in court. The two prosecutors, Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, later became judges and were voted out of office after Masters' verdict was overturned and he was freed.)

It was Buck who secured the indictment against Broderick, and it is very, very rare that a prosecutor will go after a police officer for lying. Face it, most prosecutors are quite happy to have police lie if the lies can help them secure convictions. My previous post about Lee's Summit, Missouri, is more typical in American "justice." (Unfortunately, Broderick never will come to justice, as a judge has dismissed the charges, claiming that the statute of limitations already had passed.)

Because rape has become a political crime in an overly-politicized society, Ken Buck was punished for not pursuing a case that would have been questionable at best. At the same time, the same media that decided there could be no other reason than misogyny failed to look at anything else in his record to point out that at least he was a prosecutor who believed that those people who often are untouchable also needed to be brought to justice.

As I see it, people like Ken Buck are a rarity in our system, as most prosecutors really don't care if the person on trial actually committed a crime. We also see time and again outfits like Mother Jones and the New York Times feature people who have been wrongly convicted. However, when it comes down to it, these same people really don't care about guilt or innocence at all. They care for nothing but partisan politics and demand that everyone shape their reality according to their worldviews. If innocence fits their political agenda, then it is important, and if false accusations, like those in the Duke case, fit their agenda, then they promote false allegations. And those that fail to bow down will be vilified, and so it was here.

Think cops and prosecutors and judges are honest? I give you Lee's Summit, Missouri!

Whenever there is a story about police and prosecutorial misconduct, invariably the writer will make a statement to the effect of "Most cops and prosecutors are honest, as we are talking only about a few bad apples." I hate to say it folks, but the damned barrel is rotten, and there are few good apples left.

The latest outrage comes from Lee's Summit, Missouri, and I had to find out about this not from the American media, but from Russia's RT network. (Disclaimer: I have been interviewed on RT three times, and consider it a much more reliable source of news than any mainstream news outlet in the USA.)

As you read this story, your blood pressure will go up, and as you read the comments on this account from people who actually knew the police and prosecutorial characters, your blood will boil even more.

The story goes as such. Ted White, who lived in Lee's Summit, had a wife (then on her third marriage) who was having an affair with a cop, Richard McKinley. In order to get her husband out of the way, Tina White claimed that her husband was sexually abusing their children and the lead detective was none other than...McKinley.

The authorities from the police to the prosecutors, Jill A. Kanatzar (whose husband now is a judge) and Jennifer Mettler knew about the affair, but withheld it from the defense. White was convicted and only later did he find out what had happened, but not before being in prison for five years. Here is one account, which is absolutely shocking:

Prior to [the detective's] January 1999 deposition, the prosecutor told Richard that he would need to answer questions about the affair truthfully. The prosecutor said he would cough to signal to Richard when he needed to disclose the affair in response to a question. Richard was asked if he had any personal interest in the case, during a deposition, and he stated he did not. The prosecutor did not signal him to say otherwise. Consequently, White never learned of Richard and Tina's affair before his first criminal trial. (Emphasis mine)

Recently, White won a $16 million judgment from Lee's Summit, although McKinley still is employed as a detective, and never faced any consequences for lying under oath and framing an innocent man. (There was also a huge monetary reward for McKinley, as White's wife was able to grab more than $600,000 in the divorce settlement because her husband was convicted of a crime. McKinley got to cash in and the entire Missouri legal establishment looked the other way.)

As for Kanatzar, she is employed with a high-rolling law firm in Kansas City appropriately named Dollar. Like the ex-wife of the man that Kanatzar helped to frame, she also was able to cash in on wrongdoing. And with her husband being a judge, she knows she never has to worry about facing any legal troubles no matter what she does.

By the way, none of the felons in this case -- and there were several -- even lost a dime, much less had to face any legal consequences. If you want to see a picture of government "justice" in the United States of America, I give you this case. This is not an exception; it is the rule.