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.