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.

Another Big Lie from the Authorities: Innocent People Don't Plead Guilty

Ten years ago, Brian Banks, a high school football star from Los Angeles with a promising future, pleaded "no contest" to raping and kidnapping classmate Wanetta Gibson in a school stairwell. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Banks' attorney advised the youngster to plead "no contest" (which essentially is a guilty plea) with the assurance that he only would get 18 months, as opposed to a possible 41 years if he was found guilty.

Banks and his family did the math and he pleaded, and five years later, he still was in prison. After being released, the girl finally admitted to having lied, but did not want to publicly admit the truth because her mother had sued the Los Angeles School District and got $1.5 million. Having essentially stolen the money in the first place, they did not want to be faced with giving it back.

The various news stories have turned it into something in the human interest category, as though it were a heart-warming account instead of the cold-blooded lie that essentially took a young man's life from him. As I see it, the media is missing the real story, which is this: the entire system of "justice" in California, despite huge holes in the girl's story, was ready to assume that she was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Why? As in the Duke Lacrosse Case, the various players in the system discarded forensic evidence, timelines, and the very Laws of Time and Space to rush to a judgement of GUILTY, but the rush is not simply a psychological event, but also a legal one, and one can trace a lot of the rush to federal law, and specifically the Violence Against Women Act.

In 1974, Congress passed the Mondale Act and the ultimate result was a huge rash of cases in which authorities were REQUIRED to rush to judgment no matter how outlandish the charges of child abuse and molestation. The Mondale Act and Violence Against Women Act were similar pieces of legislation, in that they promised federal help and money (lots of money) to states that were aggressive in pursuing child abuse/molestation charges and charges of rape and sexual assault against women.

Besides the money, Congress also stipulated that states change how they approach due process and how they viewed evidence. Before the VAWA, for example, many states required that with rape charges, there also be corroborating evidence because it was too easy for people to make false accusations. In order to be in compliance with both the VAWA and the Mondale Act, however, states had to just accept the word of a "victim," no matter how outlandish or dishonest the story might have been. In the Wonderland of federal law, the accusation alone is all the proof the authorities need for conviction.

To the feds and all of the activists that were behind these laws, no story would be considered outlandish, because everyone knew that all men were rapists or potential rapists and that all parents actually were secret child molesters (or at least those parents and men who did not have the proper political connections). We know the results, and they are ugly.

To the Progressive mindset that is behind the modern governing philosophy, both child abuse/molestation and rape were "epidemic" until Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in to put an end to the violence. Thus, any criticism of these laws or any attempt to restore due process of law or to demand that the rules of evidence actually require real evidence is seen as an attack on women and children.

Without the Mondale Act, there is no McMartin Case, no Little Rascals, no Tonya Craft, and no Creative Frontiers. There is no rash of false accusations of abuse/molestation in child custody cases, no Joal Henke and his "I just remembered" perjury, and James Combs does not plead guilty to a felony for something he never did.

Without the VAWA, there is no Duke Lacrosse Case because the investigation would have been very, very different. And Brian Banks would not have spent five years in prison, and thousands -- yes, thousands -- of other people would not have been falsely accused.

In the United States today, defendants face mountains of charges, courtesy of how prosecutors operate, so that conviction on any one of them can result in decades in prison. People come to understand that the system is stacked against them and that in this country, neither judges nor prosecutors nor those that govern consider innocence to be a legitimate defense.

Despite what one might see on the various "CSI" shows or see on TV or the movies, police no longer do real investigations. In cases of accused rape, sexual assault, child molestation or child abuse, police ARE REQUIRED BY LAW to "investigate" as though the charges are true, which means the bias always is toward "proving" guilt. One should not be at all surprised that this federally-mandated method of "investigation" bleeds off into other cases such as robbery and murder, which guarantees not only that there will be a spate of wrongful convictions, but also that the system will be utterly biased toward keeping such convictions from being overturned, no matter how obvious it might be that the defendants were railroaded. 

As for Brian Banks, a number of people engaged in criminal behavior, beginning with Wanetta Gibson. However, the police and prosecutors engaged in false accusations and false charges, people lied to a grand jury that indicted, and prosecutors lied in court. Banks' attorney encouraged him to accept an outcome at odds with justice, and Gibson and her mother stole more than a million dollars from taxpayers, as did their attorney, who got at least a half-million dollars from the theft.

Unfortunately, false pleas are not limited to just these kinds of cases. I have a good friend who pleaded guilty to a number of things that both he and the prosecutors knew he did not do, but did so because had he not done so, prosecutors would have brought vague charges against him in the federal court in Washington, D.C., and he being a Jewish Republican, did not want to face a jury of mostly African-American Democrats.

That is the system we now have, and it cannot and will not be fixed. No "reforms" will work because too many people make too much money and the voices of justice and responsibility are drowned out by those who dominate our political and legal institutions.

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.

Is this another Craft/McMartin case?

The headlines are quite familiar to those of us who have been in this country post-Mondale Act: "Molestation investigation shuts down _______ school." (Of course, it always seems to be a private school, as I don't recall the government going after government schools or daycare centers.)

While I think that the writer for the Sacramento Bee in this story at least tries to give another side to the story in writing about the McMartin case, although she does not give full justice to how bad those accusations were and why they were bogus. As I read her article, however, I cannot help but wonder just how bad this investigation really is and I cannot help but wonder if we have another Craft/McMartin situation.

Before explaining my position, however, I cannot help but note that it was also a McClatchy-owned newspaper (like the Bee), the Raleigh News & Observer, that jump-started the false accusations in the Duke Lacrosse Case, as the newspaper published one false story after another. (The N&O even distributed the infamous "wanted" poster of the lacrosse players with a Sunday edition, thereby lending credence to what was found to be an utterly dishonest investigation.) One hopes that McClatchy has learned a lesson about rushing to judgment, but given that most journalists are anxious to jump off the cliff whenever police and prosecutors tell them to do so, I'm not confident that ANY mainstream paper can handle such a story.

Here are some excerpts from the story, and I will explain afterward why my b.s. detectors are on full alert:

Officials shut down a private Citrus Heights elementary school Monday and suspended its license pending a sweeping investigation into allegations that its principal molested children over the past 15 years.

And:

In its complaint, the Social Services Department alleges that Adams, whom students referred to as "Mr. Bob," touched female pupils on their chests and vaginal areas, touched their bodies under their shirts and down their pants, and "secluded" female children under a computer desk and lay with them on a mat in his office.

The complaint also names office administrator Cynthia Higgins, alleging that she failed to report the principal's behavior after receiving complaints. It says a volunteer, Irma Mertens, saw Robert Adams touch a girl's buttocks after inserting his hand under her swimsuit and told Higgins about it.

OK, now I have some questions:

• How does something like this go on for 15 years and NO ONE report it? No one else witnessed the kind of behavior that we see? Sorry, people, but child molesters don't just do this in complete anonymity for 15 years without people getting suspicious, especially in an open setting like a school.
• What are the cirumstances under which Mertens made the claim? For example, Sandra Lamb and Sherri Wilson wanted to "get back" at Tonya Craft, and had the means to do it through Chris Arnt, who had hoped to be able to ride a "big case" to a higher political office. Did Mertens actually see this? Was she on the "outs" with Adams or someone else? The article does not say, but I would be quite interested to know some of the background.
• How is it that parents would rave about the school for years? Would they have been THAT blind? Would not have kids and parents have been talking?
• Did he allegedly go after both boys and girls, for if that is the claim, then we know it HAS to be suspect, as real child molesters go for one or the other. (Yes, I know, the Usual Trolls will claim that Adams is that one-percent exception. Yeah, everyone accused ALWAYS falls into that one-percent category, which is interesting, since one-percent means one out of a hundred, not everyone.)

One has to understand that I have no confidence at all in the police and social services to handle these cases. What happened in the LMJC in Tonya Craft's case happens all over the country. Given the current political climate, it is very, very rare for government police, government prosecutors, and government social workers actually to do their job and conduct honest investigations.

Believe me, the police and prosecutors in Citrus Heights already have made up their minds, and now the social services interviewers are going to try to manipulate the children they interview in order to obtain the results that they want to get. I will GUARANTEE that this will NOT be an investigation carried out by honest brokers. Honest brokers no longer exist in any sizable numbers in the various U.S. government systems of "justice."

People familiar with the Craft case, or, for that matter, Brad Cooper's case, already know the drill. Police and prosecutors begin with a conclusion, and then they manipulate the "evidence" in order to prove that one really can easily drive square pegs into round holes.

Don't forget that it was the State of California that touched off the whole modern Molestation Witch Hunts, first with Ed Jaegels in Bakersfield, California, and then the McMartin Case. Janet Reno in Miami joined in the chase later, and it was off to the races from there.

This would not be possible, except that judges often are in on the fix, as they were in the Craft and Cooper cases. I hope that things are different in this one, but right now, I have the sickening feeling that everyone is going to jump off the same cliff once again.

Apologies for no post

Sorry that I have not posted in a week. This has been a very busy time, both with dealing with the arrival of Sintija (who will be with us for the next four weeks), and working on deadlines for papers and articles.

I just had an academic paper accepted in which I critique the response of the Duke University administration according to an organizational "crisis" model to see how Brodhead and company did. Yeah, they did badly. I know everyone is shocked. More on the paper later.

North Carolina prosecutors get their wish: the permanent disappearance of exculpatory evidence

Four years ago, the State of North Carolina saw something more rare than a wild polar bear in Florida: the actual disbarment of a prosecutor for withholding exculpatory evidence and then lying to a judge about it. While it was morally satisfying to see a lawbreaker like Mike Nifong get at least a tiny bit of comeuppance for his crimes, apparently the other prosecutors in North Carolina got nervous.

Never fear. This week, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill ensuring that prosecutors, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brady decision, can withhold exculpatory evidence indefinitely. (Notice that the information is barely mentioned in the news article, but it definitely has major implications, as I see it. This article has a bit more information.)

Now, prosecutors no doubt will claim that it is not their fault if the police withhold information that is vital for the defense and do so without the knowledge of prosecutors, and if something is put into those terms, I can understand their point. However, my sense is that situations in which exculpatory evidence is withheld rarely, if ever, involve police mishandling of evidence or even police misconduct in absence of the knowledge of prosecutors.

Anyone familiar with how criminal law works knows that police and prosecutors work closely together. The notion that police are going to treat prosecutors the same way they treat defendants and defense lawyers truly is a howler, but that is what prosecutors want us to believe.

So, what is likely to happen as a result of this new law? I have no doubt that prosecutors simply are going to make sure that a lot of exculpatory information somehow remains in police files and doesn't make its way to the courthouse. The police will be able to claim that they "just forgot" and prosecutors will be able to claim that they had no clue this stuff existed.

As outrageous as this law is, I doubt it could have saved Mike Nifong's skin in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case. First, Nifong took over the investigation from the police and was involved in a number of details, including overseeing the "lineup" from which Crystal Mangum picked her alleged assailants. In fact, this very point is why he is able to be sued, given he went outside the normal scope of his duties.

Second, while Nifong in his response to the North Carolina State Bar (after it filed charges against him), first claimed no recollection of being at a meeting with Brian Meehan, whose DNA lab had found the results which ultimately led to Nifong's downfall. His only hope would have been that the police had not turned over the relevant exculpatory information, but given that he and Meehan actually planned strategy at that meeting, his "I don't recall being there" defense was seen for the sham it was.

I have no doubt at all that this new law will lead to more wrongful convictions in North Carolina, a state that already is known for a bad criminal "justice" system. Furthermore, I suspect that most legislators voting for this abomination knew just that, but really didn't care. And prosecutors now have been handed yet another weapon to destroy innocent people.

As I further develop the case narrative and look into the conviction of Bradley Cooper, I can see this mentality at work. The police (as we shall see) destroyed a key piece of exculpatory evidence and then lied about what they did. Was this done with collusion with prosecutors? Who knows. All I know is that the legislature and Gov. Bev Perdue have handed police and prosecutors the opportunity to destroy and hide even more evidence -- and it all will be perfectly legal.

All in a day's work, I suppose.

The framing of Bradley Cooper

I have despised the "justice" (sic) system in North Carolina for a long time, beginning with the railroading of the Little Rascals defendants when prosecutors and police falsely accused a number of people of horrible acts of child molestation, although it was clear from the substance (or lack, thereof) of those charges that the Laws of Time and Space contradicted what the authorities were claiming. Unfortunately, many lives were ruined before the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the convictions.

That was only the beginning. The Duke Lacrosse Case, with all of the lies told by government officials and others in authority, told me that once and for all, North Carolina is a dangerous place to live, as the authorities are not bound by the law or even common decency. The Durham Police, along with Durham County DA Mike Nifong, did everything possible to frame Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans, and while the case fell apart, it was only because some members of the North Carolina State Bar actually did their duties and ultimately disbarred Nifong.

I had no forum by which to protest the lies told by authorities in the Little Rascals case, but by the time Nifong went after the Duke students, there was Lew Rockwell's blog, and he generously let me fire away at the false charges, which I did on a regular basis for a year. When Tonya Craft was falsely charged with child molestation in my old stomping grounds of North Georgia, I had this blog, and utilized it to expose the lies being told under the direction of prosecutors Len "The Man-Racist" Gregor, Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt, and "judge" brian (out)house.

Craft was acquitted and one of the ringleaders of the farce, Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit District Attorney Buzz Franklin, blamed me in part for the state's failure to secure a wrongful conviction. I deeply appreciate the compliment that Buzz gave me, although something tells me he wasn't saying those things as praise.

Over the next several days, I will be spending a number of posts examining the trial and conviction of Bradley Cooper, who allegedly murdered his wife, Nancy, in Wake County, North Carolina. I have looked over a lot of the evidence and have become convinced that Cooper was framed.

Readers should understand that I don't come to this conclusion easily. When Cooper's wife was murdered three years ago, like the police, I immediately suspected that Bradley was the killer, as he seemed to be the obvious choice.

However, as the case went on, and especially during the trial, I came to believe that (1) the state had destroyed or hidden possible exculpatory evidence, and (2) their "smoking" gun, a Google search map of the area where her body was found that allegedly was found on his computer, was the work of the authorities themselves.

In other words, I am accusing North Carolina authorities of deliberately framing someone because they could do it. This is not a hard thing for me to believe, given what I have seen in past incidences in that state.

Yes, it is true that NC Attorney General Roy Cooper did declare the lacrosse players to be "innocent" after his appointees did their own investigation. What else could have he done, given that the "evidence" already had been made public and there was no way that the charges could have had an ounce of truth? Likewise, Cooper could have further investigated the whole mess and found criminal conduct on behalf of authorities, but neither he nor anyone else in government, state or federal, wanted to go there.

Would a North Carolina cop lie on the stand? Absolutely. "Testilying," a term made up by police officers themselves to describe what they do after taking an oath to tell the truth, is common all over the country and North Carolina is no exception. A middle class woman was murdered and the police and prosecutors had the pressure to find a killer.

Given the lawlessness and dishonesty that dominates the police and prosecutorial culture in North Carolina, I doubt that framing Cooper was a difficult decision. And, if there is a conspiracy to lie, destroy or alter evidence, and to railroad an innocent man into prison, what better people to do it than the men and women who wear the blue costume.

When people speak of the infamous "Blue Wall of Silence," they are speaking of the various police departments in the United States. No one lies better than a cop and no one covers up a lie better than a whole police department.

I make this point because one of the problems of holding conspiracies together is that someone spills the beans. Police departments tend to be the exception because cops tend to stick together, and if a cop were to tell the truth, he knows that his life afterward most likely will be very short.

Bradley Cooper was convicted by a jury that saw only weak and contrived circumstantial evidence. A judge who was in league with the prosecutors oversaw the trial, or whatever one calls one of those things in North Carolina. While it was true that the authorities from police to the judge in Craft's trial were trying to rig a conviction, jurors in Catoosa County saw through the lies.

Jurors in Cooper's case, however, did not. But their verdict will not stop me from presenting the case against guilt over the next several days.

Sean Lanigan is lucky: At least the Fairfax County Police didn't murder him

Fairfax County, Virginia, is a Washington, D.C., bedroom community, and most people there owe their employment either to government or to businesses that serve government workers. It also is the home of a brutal and marauding police force that is quick to gun down unarmed people and to make false accusations against good people.

The sad case of Sean Lanigan, a teacher in Fairfax County falsely accused of child molestation and the victim of police and prosecutorial misconduct, is only one of many victims in that county, where the police and prosecutors run amok because they can. But I say that Lanigan is lucky, given the fate of Salvatore Culosi, who was gunned down by a member of a Fairfax County SWAT team.

Culosi, an optometrist who bet on a few football games, had made the mistake of befriending a Fairfax County detective whom he met in a bar. David J. Baucom, the detective, decided to see if he could get Culosi to bet more money, and he finally talked him into betting $2,000 on a game, which meant Culosi could be arrested in Virginia for "running a gambling operation."

Keep in mind that this "crime" was masterminded by the police, and then the authorities sent a SWAT team to arrest Culosi. When police arrived, Culosi walked out unarmed, and then he was gunned down by officer Deval Bullock. (As this article in Reason shows, Bullock's official story was a lie, and all that he received for punishment was three weeks off from work.)

The police were not content in murdering an unarmed man (and if any of us were to shoot down -- even accidentally -- an unarmed person, we would be tried for murder, since we don't wear a blue costume and tin badge). Radley Balko's Reason article explains:

In the months that followed (the shooting), Baucum continued his investigation, badgering Culosi's grieving friends and relatives after pulling their names and numbers from the cell phone he was carrying and a computer taken from his home the night he was killed. Steve Gulley, Culosi's brother-in-law, told The Washington Post the following April that Baucum called him and menacingly asked, "How much are you into Sal for?" Scott Lunceford, a lifelong friend of Culosi's, told the Post Baucum called him and accused him of being a gambler. The calls, Gulley told the paper, smacked of intimidation aimed at discouraging a lawsuit.

In the end, the family of Sal Culosi settled with Fairfax County for $2 million, but no one at the department was prosecuted and only Bullock received a mild punishment.

Following the shooting, Fairfax Chief David Rohrer wrote a report of the incident which turned out to be fabricated. As Balko explains, in response to Rohrer's claim that the shooting was accidental, as Bullock was bumped by a car door and the gun simply went off:

The Culosis were dubious. They believed Bullock mistook the cell phone their son was holding the night he was shot for a gun. They hired their own investigators, who determined, based on the department's own measurements of the crime scene, that when Bullock pulled the trigger he was away from his vehicle and much closer to Culosi than he had claimed. Using the recorded locations of shell casings, police vehicles, and Culosi's body, they produced computer animations showing that the incident could not have happened in the manner described by Chief Rohrer's report.

Writing false reports is a crime called "obstruction of justice," but Rohrer did not have to worry about being charged.

However, in Lanigan's case, Fairfax police threw the possibility of charging people who were contradicting the story the cops wanted to be told with "obstruction of justice." (Again, if one wishes to lie, it helps to be wearing a blue costume and tin badge. After all, government workers are "heroes" in Northern Virginia.) Writes Tom Jackman, who covered this story for the Washington Post:

But when others – staff, parents – tried to tell (Fairfax Det. Nicole) Christian anything she didn’t want to hear, she threatened them with prosecution for obstruction of justice, the staff members and parents said. School district investigator Steve Kerr’s investigative report, written after Lanigan’s acquittal, confirmed those claims, noting that: “Because of the jury’s decision, the detective [Christian] advised that she will not pursue criminal charges against [staff member] or [staff member].”

In other words, in the Orwellian world of Northern Virginia, lies told by government employees in blue costumes are the truth, while the truth told by Mere Mundanes is considered to be a lie.

But, Christian's smarmy tactics did not stop with threats against witnesses with exculpatory evidence. No, it gets MUCH worse:

In addition, the accuser’s close friend and corroborating witness to the incident quickly tried to retract her story, her mother said, but Christian wasn’t hearing it. In a letter to the mother of the witness from assistant superintendent Kevin North after the trial, North confirmed that “you requested a re-interview with your daughter, which the detective declined.”

Police feel that child victims and witnesses can be manipulated or intimidated into changing their story, and the witness’s mother said Christian told her, “if she changes her story, they’re going to wonder why she changed her testimony. She said, ‘I know how to do my job. Don’t tell me how to do my job.’ ”

But when Christian and assistant Fairfax prosecutor Katie Pavluchuk approached the witness and her mother outside Lanigan’s preliminary hearing in March 2010, the girl and her mother refused to speak with them. The girl then joined the accuser in recanting the claim that Lanigan had lain on top of the accuser.

Not long after that hallway encounter, Fairfax County launched a Child Protective Services investigation into the witness’s mother -- the reasons for which have not been made public for alleged inappropriate behavior by her boyfriend. The witness’s mother was eventually cleared of any allegations of misbehavior, but also had to undergo the pressure of being investigated. The girl and her mother have since moved from the area. (Emphasis mine)

In other words, if people want to tell the truth, the Fairfax County police counter with tactics of intimidation, just as they did to Sal Culosi's parents after police gunned down their son. And even after a jury quickly acquitted Lanigan, police and prosecutors STILL are insisting that he was guilty, apparently telling each other that it was an "O.J. verdict."

In other words, the police and their social services allies did what they do best: intimidate through false accusations. (No, I don't think that the social services investigation was a coincidence.)

For all of the accolades that Jackman laid on Christian for her supposed experience, one thing stands out: she clearly fabricates "evidence." First, she is so incompetent that even when she was at the school where the alleged molestation occurred, she never even looked a the room where the alleged incident was supposed to have occurred.

This is important, because (like the tiny bathroom in the Duke Lacrosse Case that could not have fit three young men raping a woman in the way that Crystal Mangum described) the room could not fit the tumbling mats that the lying 12-year-old accuser claimed she was placed. In other words, there was a key piece of evidence that Christian ignored, but then she threatened to charge people who pointed out that issue with "obstruction of justice."

But, it gets worse. Jackman writes:

Police declined to allow Nicole Christian, the lead detective on the case, to be interviewed for this article. Several months after Lanigan was acquitted, Fairfax prosecutors dismissed another of Christian’s child abuse cases in the middle of trial, a rarity, when the detective acknowledged that she had “misstated” some key facts in her sworn testimony. (Emphasis mine)

In police vernancular, a "misstatement" actually is a lie. In other words, Christian was caught fabricating material, but she still remains on the job and no doubt will be instrumental in destroying other innocent lives.

The people of Northern Virginia consider themselves to be "progressive," and if "progressive" means the endorsement of the lying, smothering state, I guess we can say that it is a "progressive" community. Yet, for all of the sophistication these people claim for themselves, in reality there is a brutal underside to this area. Police and prosecutors are free to lie, falsely accuse, and even commit murder, and nothing ever is going to be done about it. People who choose to live there do so at their own peril.

Obama's campus kangaroo courts

When Barack Obama ran for president, he spoke somewhat eloquently (when he had his teleprompter in front of him) about due process and all of the other things that the Bush administration was eviscerating in the name of "security." As one who vociferously criticized Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft (who now is an "ethics" adviser to the murder firm formerly known as Blackwater), I don't believe that justice is or should be partisan and it certainly should not be political.

The Obama administration, however, has "jumped the shark" with a new Department of Education order to colleges and universities that receive federal money to adopt new "standards" when deciding sexual harassment and sexual assault cases against students, faculty, and employees. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

Under the new regulations, announced in an April 4, 2011, letter from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, colleges and universities receiving federal funding must employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard—a 50.01%, "more likely than not" evidentiary burden—when adjudicating student complaints concerning sexual harassment or sexual violence. Institutions that do not comply face federal investigation and the loss of federal funding.

In other words, the government is demanding that more males on college campuses be offered up on the altar of Political Correctness and Feminism. There is no other explanation.

For years, feminists have tried to lower legal standards for criminal convictions in rape and sexual assault cases, and they really don't care that such actions result in wrongful convictions and innocent people being sent to prison. (To most hardcore feminists, there is no such thing as an "innocent" male.)

FIRE's press release continues:

"The Office for Civil Rights' unilateral revision of campus codes across the country is unquestionably unjust. Students accused of serious crimes like rape should not be tried under the same standard of proof used for a parking ticket," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "OCR is proceeding from the fallacy that reducing protections for the accused will somehow increase justice. This is a dangerous and wrongheaded idea that will undermine the accuracy and reliability of the findings of campus courts."

OCR is the federal agency tasked with enforcing federal civil rights laws, including Title IX, in educational programs and institutions that receive federal funding. OCR's April 4 letter decrees that under Title IX, the "prompt and equitable resolution" of student complaints regarding sexual harassment and sexual violence requires that "school[s] must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred)"—a requirement not previously discovered in the 39-year-old law. OCR explicitly rules out the use of higher standards of proof, stating that university judicial systems maintaining the "clear and convincing" standard—which requires accusers to prove that "it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred"—are "not equitable under Title IX." Both standards of proof fall far short of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required in every criminal case in the United States.

My sense is that this is the Obama administration's answer to the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case which fell apart when it became obvious that not only was accuser Crystal Mangum lying, but police and prosecutors -- Durham County D.A. Michael Nifong even was disbarred for his role in the case -- were in on the Big Lie. The outcome was not popular either with civil rights groups and feminists, who believed that the three defendants in the case should have gone to prison for what they WERE, not what they did or did not do.

After the charges were dismissed in 2007, the Marxist and feminist sites were seething, and the North Carolina NAACP continued to claim that the lacrosse players raped Mangum. (Now that Mangum is charged with murder, the Marxists, feminists, and civil rights advocates have been a bit more silent.)

So, we now have the government's answer to the Duke case: turn campus disciplinary hearings into kangaroo courts -- if it is possible to make them even bigger farces than many of them are at the present time. If the law did not put the Duke boys into prison, then maybe a future young man accused of rape (and who is falsely accused) can have his life ruined.

As I see it, many colleges and universities are welcoming this ruling, and not because it has anything to do with justice. Instead, it will further strengthen the atmosphere of Political Correctness that already rules in higher education.

Now, given the prevalence of alcohol and drug consumption in the contemporary college scene, and given the fact that the current generation of young people don't seem to have many sexual inhibitions, I hardly am surprised that there are going to be unwanted, or at least regretted, sexual encounters. However, keep in mind that colleges, through the unabashed handing out of condoms everywhere and through their constant promotion of the Sexual Revolution, also are helping to bring on this collision course.

So, how are we to handle a bad situation? Obama has the answer: create more kangaroo courts. In other words, deal with the decline of civilization by attacking one of the last bastions of civilized society: due process of law.

My latest article on Lew Rockwell's page: More problems with prosecutorial immunity

In my latest article on Lew Rockwell's page, I take issue with court decisions that establish absolute immunity for prosecutors. While I do understand their arguments, nonetheless, because the only accountability mechanisms for prosecutors are in the hands of fellow prosecutors and government lawyers, the situation creates perverse incentives because prosecutors know that no one will hold them to account unless the situation is so publicly bad that the other prosecutors are running for cover. (The Duke Lacrosse Case and the disbarment of prosecutor Michael Nifong is a case in point.)

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.

Prosecutors and their unwritten rule: Don't drop a case no matter how bad it might be

On the 27th of this month, Carola Jacobson's son will have a hearing before a Maricopa County juvenile judge who is going to decide what will happen to the young man. As has been covered extensively in this blog, the charges against the young man (now 15) are bogus, and transparently so.

We have seen how the police interviews of the children were beyond tainted, and that the scenario which police and prosecutors claim was in the realm of physical impossibility, unless one is willing to believe that for a few days in a row, a 14-year-old boy could coerce young children (who lived elsewhere and voluntarily came to the house) into an unfinished attic and make them engage in sex play for several hours.

The main reason that the prosecution's account is not believable is that the Maricopa County authorities want us to believe that young children would do those things for hours in a place where temperatures in June would be upwards of 140 degrees. (Remember, this is Phoenix, Arizona, where daytime temperatures in June average well above 100 degrees.)

In other words, it makes no sense at all. I'm sure that the American Academy of Pediatrics might have something to say about prosecutor Noble Murphy's claim that these things MUST have happened because he says it did.

So, what is a prosecutor to do? One would think that most prosecutors would say that if there is no evidence, or if the evidence is hopelessly tainted, then all charges should be dismissed. Think again.

No prosecutor openly will admit this, for obvious reasons, but the policy of most prosecutorial offices in the United States is explained by the nihilistic phrase, "Bleed 'em and plead 'em."

WHY PROSECUTORS HOLD THE ADVANTAGES

When I was a newspaper reporter in Chattanooga more than 30 years ago, I heard the local district attorney in a speech claim that prosecutors face all sorts of unjust barriers in their never-ending fight against crime and criminals. At the time, I believed him, but no longer.

Prosecutors really hold all the cards; all of them. They can bring whatever charges they want against anyone they target because grand juries have become prosecutorial playthings. Once charges are filed, they can keep them on the books even if they have no evidence because they can use them as bargaining material.

Lest you think that perhaps they might be hindered by that thing called a guilty conscience, think again. In the recent Pottawattamie vs. McGhee case heard (but not decided because it was settled after oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court), the defendants, prosecutors from Pottawattamie County, Iowa, contended (and I present their exact words): "There is no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." (emphasis added)

Not ONE prosecutor in this country made a public statement against that utterly chilling statement. The Obama administration supported it, and every association of prosecutors in the USA publicly agreed. Let me repeat what was said: Prosecutors in the United States claim that they have a right to frame whomever they want, and that no citizen can or should be able to do anything about it.

No, I am sure that prosecutors reading this blog would tell me that is NOT what is what the statement meant, but please don't feed me crap, people. The government will tell you that if a prosecutor engages in outrageous or even criminal framing of a defendant, the government has plenty of options to take against the offender, from bringing criminal charges to hauling the prosecutor before the state bar.

However, government authorities are playing a shell game. Yes, these "remedies" theoretically can be imposed. No, the government won't impose them, no matter how outrageous and outright criminal the conduct of prosecutors.

The one option that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that regular citizens -- including those that are framed -- DON'T have is to be able to sue the prosecutor. (The courts and advocates for prosecutors claim that lawsuits would keep them from "doing their jobs.")

The problem is that the one remedy that an individual citizen might have to rectify a grievous wrong is the lawsuit. All of the other vaunted remedies must be launched by the government itself. In other words, the government is given the power and the authority to discipline...the government.

Lawsuits can be brought by citizens and can be decided by juries consisting of citizens. Government disciplinary actions, on the other hand, are launched by the very people who stand to be harmed if their cohorts are disciplined.

Don't kid yourselves. Yes, prosecutors in North Carolina were happy to see Mike Nifong get thrown to the sharks of disbarment after his execrable conduct in the Duke Lacrosse Case, but they also knew that Nifong's disbarment potentially made all of them just a little more vulnerable to the same treatment, should they get out of line. Thus, they made a big show out of disbarring Nifong, but then made sure that other prosecutors in the state that lied and broke the law would not have to face the same fate. Nifong's disbarment actually protected the other miscreants employed by the State of North Carolina as prosecutors.

If anyone were to question their conduct, they could reply: "What do you mean saying prosecutors get away with bad acts? Mike Nifong got disbarred! What further proof do you need to know that the authorities stand ready to discipline anyone in our profession who does wrong?"

As for criminal charges, they rarely are brought and juries are loathe to convict wayward prosecutors, no matter how outrageous their conduct. Call it a belief in law-and-order, but the record stands, as no American jury ever has convicted a prosecutor of criminal misconduct.

When I spoke to a representative of the Georgia State Bar last year about the conduct of Christopher Arnt and Len Gregor in the Tonya Craft case, she told me that she believed that the prosecutors were "just doing their jobs." She then said to me, "She was acquitted, wasn't she?" as though that made everything just fine.

My response to her was: "Yes, after spending more than a million dollars to debunk charges that transparently were false and never should have been brought in the first place."

In the Duke Lacrosse Case, the three families spent close to five million dollars to defend their sons against charges that from the start were laughingly false. (The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, now has graduated from lying and prostitution to murder. This is the woman that Durham and Duke University held up as a near-saint.)

To put it another way, if prosecutors want to bleed someone to death, they can do it because, well, they can do it. The vast majority of people cannot afford the kind of defense needed to fight false charges, and prosecutors know it. And because they actually believe that they have a "right" to frame innocent people, and that nothing will happen to them if they do, you can bet that the profession attracts the very kind of people that one does not want to see in a courtroom in the first place.

This brings us back full circle to the case involving Carola Jacobson and her son, which I will cover in my next post. Why does "Ignoble" Murphy continue to insist that he wants to prosecutor this case? He claims it is because he "has not lost a case in seven years." In other words, it is nothing but a game to him.

However, the situation -- not that anyone in Maricopa County government would care -- is that Carola Jacobson is very, very ill, and that she had to give up cancer treatments in order to pay her son's legal bills. This situation deserves more attention, as do other cases which I will be covering soon enough.

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.

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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.